Faust Ruggiero has been counseling people since he finished graduate school in 1980, and he has run a private practice since 1988. Along the way he wrote seven books in his Fix Yourself Empowerment Series, most of them dictated indoors on sunny afternoons while everyone else was at the pool. The idea he keeps returning to is a plain one: the brain is a learning machine. It learns from what we do, and then it treats what we do as normal.
Somewhere right now, a person who went to bed at three in the morning is getting up at seven and explaining, with complete sincerity, that four hours of sleep is all they need. They believe it. Their body has had years to practice that schedule, and it has adjusted well enough to make the claim feel true. What has actually changed is the bar for what counts as rested. Normal and healthy were never the same measurement, and the brain only keeps track of one of them.
The same learning shapes pace. A day that starts with coffee, continues with more coffee and an energy drink, and runs at full speed until it ends teaches the nervous system that speed is the baseline. Ask that person to sit quietly and meditate for twenty minutes and it goes about as well as anyone would expect. The restlessness has a simple explanation. The body has been trained for acceleration, and stillness registers as something close to a malfunction.
Emotion follows the same pattern, and this is where the idea becomes more interesting. Anxiety, anger, and depression tend to work backward. When one of them rises, the mind goes looking for company: the bully from seventh grade, the job that fell through, the thing we said to someone years ago and still wince about. Each memory arrives with its own reasons, and together they build a case that feels entirely rational. Unresolved experience runs underneath ordinary life like a current. Every time a hard moment sends us reaching for it, the reaching itself gets a little more practiced.
So does the idea hold? If the brain normalizes whatever we repeat, it has to normalize calm just as readily as it normalizes agitation. That is the hopeful half, and it is real. The harder half is that the learning runs at roughly the same speed in both directions. Twenty years of short nights and five cups of coffee do not unlearn themselves in a month. Most people who make a real change feel better for a few weeks and then, without much warning, feel the way they did before. They usually conclude the change failed. A more accurate reading is that the old patterns were still running, still being rehearsed every day, and quietly outvoting the new ones.
This is why the first useful work is so often subtraction. Most people who want to feel better go looking for something to add: a supplement, a practice, a program, a book. Far less appealing is the list of things to set down. The extra coffee, the sugar, the late nights, the evening scroll through angry posts. A new practice layered on top of the same accelerants has to compete with them every day, and the accelerants have had years of rehearsal. Subtraction also tends to feel like loss for a while before it feels like anything else.
There is a detail in all of this worth sitting with. A day that needs something to get it started often needs something else to shut it down. The coffee in the morning and the drink in the evening are two halves of one arrangement, pushing the body up and then pulling it back down, over and over, until the swing starts to feel like life itself. What remains when the swing slows is closer to a straight line. For someone accustomed to the highs, that can sound less like peace and more like a loss of color. Is a steady life a smaller one?
The body tends to answer that question more honestly than the mind does. A full night of sleep, a morning that begins without having to be forced, a conversation where attention actually stays in the room: these are what the swings have been crowding out. Peace, understood this way, looks a lot like a body that has finally stopped bracing.
The learning also has no end date. It continues until the last breath, which can sound exhausting until it becomes clear that something is being taught every day regardless. A change started this fall will probably feel different by Christmas. It will likely take until next summer to recognize the person it has produced.
What have your days been teaching your body to call normal? Enjoy the whole podcast.
© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen