Treat your brain like a baby

gisbi@homepage ~<br>← blog Treat your brain like a baby<br>2026-06-08<br>◉ 11 ♥ 0 [share]<br>As an autistic person, I've been struggling my entire life to decode, process or understand my feelings and behaviors.

For most of my teenage years I just let myself be carried by the stream of emotions, without any rhyme or reason. It didn't pose any particular issues back then.

However, that all changed going into adulthood.

Be it relationships, studying or work, almost everything now came with increased expectations, responsibilities and consequences. Except that my brain didn't evolve on par with the flow of life.

So then, how did am I trying to fix it?

Splitting yourself in two

At some point, I started realizing that by consciously unpacking my thoughts into two separate containers, everything started making more sense.

My brain is nothing more than a child , always looking for the path of least resistance.

Having that hard conversation? Easier to avoid it.<br>Eating too much? It feels good, so I'm gonna do it.<br>Working out? Feels awful, skip it.

Fixing these issues may sound the same as developing discipline during adulthood, and in a way it is, but it's the separation of concerns that matters.

Many people struggle with guilt and shame, myself included, which often hinders progress because they get too caught up in them to actually fix the root of the problem. But when you start realizing that most of them come from your brain's self preservation techniques, and not you inherently being a bad or lazy person, it all shifts.

Changing perspectives

After months and years of adopting this thought process, everything shifts.

That hard conversation becomes just a signal of fear. You understand that by handling temporary discomfort, you may avoid bigger issues down the line.

You start working out consistently, and the days that feel hard you do not perceive yourself as lazy, but your brain, so you push on.

You teach yourself how to handle hard things just like you'd teach a child how to handle things. Your brain always looks for easy, but very rarely easy equals better .

This way, you start rewiring your reward mechanisms. Doing hard things starts feeling good, the discomfort starts being just part of a process where you know dopamine lies at the end of it.

What I love about this method is that gets rid of most of the guilt, which in turn helps you to tackle the problem at hand without the shame and self-blame.

In short: be kind to yourself :)

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