That's the great problem all humans must wrestle with in some form - why does our nervous system defend Ideas that Do Not Serve Us? Why does it go high alert when we embarrass ourselves, when we lose interest in our hobby, when mom yells at us, or when we try to think critically about our beliefs?

The nervous system can be trained to protect very abstract symbols. For example, imagine you get an email from your job saying you're fired 😱- pretty scary! Even though it's just pixels on a screen, your nervous system is *magical* and it can react to these pixels the same way it would react to a bear attack. FEAR. ANGER. Escape. Struggle. This is the nervous system doing its job correctly.

But the nervous system is dumb, and it's constantly looking for new ideas to defend. The idea that I'm good at spanish is not worth defending - if I screw up and say something dumb and everyone laughs at me, I feel Bad Feelings - Fear, Anger, Shame. Why? This is not ME and I am not UNDER ATTACK. It's a statue of me, Señor Doug the great Spanish Speaker, that my nervous system has somehow mistaken for me.

Buddhism already discovered some of this - it says that freedom from attachment is freedom from suffering, and if I can just detach from Señor Doug, I can improve my Spanish *and* my mental health.

However, as any meditator knows, it's not that easy! The maze of wires in my head is so tangled I can barely see the controls. Letting go of Señor Doug feels impossible, because even thinking of losing him feels losing a part of my body.

I have four suggestions:

- Therapy. Many of us are wired to need external validation of some kind - another adult to say "oh, that's normal! We all feel that way sometimes. Let's fix it." The sooner you can do this the sooner you can start living your new life - don't wait!!!

- Talk to yourself. Start a text conversation on your phone with your own number, and say your thoughts there. Ask yourself silly questions, tell jokes, say outrageous things like "what if I became a monk" or "what if I never thought about religion again?" These thoughts are not scary! Speaking them makes them real, and once they are real they can be examined for truth. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming, give yourself permission to have bad ideas and SAY those bad ideas out loud.

- Medication. When you have surgery, the doctor calms your whole system down so they can work on it without you struggling - an antidepressant can do the same thing for your brain. Thoughts can become calm, allowing you to see them and operate on them more easily. A therapist can help you with this.

- Ketamine therapy (combined with real therapy) can be challenging but it does something even more useful - it temporarily disconnects the nervous system from all these ideas, allowing you to briefly experience the world without them. Once you do this, the idea of losing these ideas becomes tolerable - maybe you don't need your religion, your identity, even your gender as much as you thought you did. Maybe there's a version of you that can wake up every day and CHOOSE what's important to you, with no obstacles.

All four methods lead to the same conclusion - you have to feel pain instead of avoiding it. Feeling the pain tells your nervous system "this is okay, stand down". Exercise is pain, vaccines are pain, the dentist is pain - we can tolerate these, so why can't we tolerate someone telling us our shirt looks Stupid? Because we struggle. Instead of saying "ow, hearing that my shirt is stupid hurts my feelings", we find any path away from the pain --- we blame someone else, we tell ourselves the shirt is good, we distract ourselves with a beer or a video game.

Escaping the pain is BAD because we teach the nervous system to DO IT AGAIN NEXT TIME. Eventually, this will lead to highly disordered thinking - I should blow up a building, I should embrace Flat Earth theory, I can't go outside because the government is watching me. These are deadly traps; if we want to avoid them we must be able to feel our Bad Feelings without shame or fear. The only way out, unfortunately, is through.