I’ve been wondering whether the way we experience reality can become a habit.
Grief, loss and trauma are part of being human. None of us escapes them. What interests me is something quieter: the way reality itself can begin to feel filtered through expectation, where disappointment arrives before possibility, where what’s broken stands out more sharply than what’s beautiful, and where life slowly starts to feel like something happening against us rather than for us.
I know that way of seeing because I lived it.
Growing up in Bulgaria, I was surrounded by intelligent people who questioned everything. Criticism wasn’t considered negativity; it was often regarded as a sign of depth. The people who could expose contradictions, dismantle ideas or explain why something wouldn’t work were admired. Looking back, I don’t think there was anything unusual about that. Every culture develops its own emotional habits. Some instinctively question; others instinctively build. Each illuminates a different part of reality.
The problem isn’t criticism. I still believe scepticism is one of our most valuable intellectual tools. It keeps power in check, exposes bad ideas and protects us from easy answers.
The question I’ve become interested in is what happens when criticism quietly stops being a tool and becomes the lens itself.
Psychology offers an intriguing explanation. We are all born with what psychologists call the negativity bias. Our brains notice danger more quickly than opportunity, criticism more readily than praise, and setbacks more intensely than successes. From an evolutionary perspective, that makes perfect sense. A mind that paid attention to threats was more likely to survive than one distracted by beauty alone.
The brain, however, doesn’t simply record experience. It adapts to it.
Donald Hebb’s famous principle—“neurons that fire together wire together”—captures one of the foundations of modern neuroscience. The thoughts we rehearse most often gradually become our default thoughts. The neural pathways strengthen, familiar interpretations become increasingly automatic, and over time they begin to feel less like habits and more like reality itself.
I wasn’t surprised when I first came across these ideas. If anything, psychology and neuroscience gave me a vocabulary for something I had already experienced.
Looking back, I think I had slowly trained myself to look at life through a particular prism. My attention naturally drifted towards disappointment before possibility, towards flaws before potential, towards what could go wrong before what might go right. I didn’t choose that consciously. Like most habits, it developed so gradually that it simply came to feel normal.
Then my environment changed.
Living in the United States didn’t convince me that America had discovered the secret to happiness. It hadn’t. I still think American confidence can sometimes become naïve, even arrogant, and the belief that anything is possible can overlook the complexities of real life.
What it did offer me, however, was a different emotional atmosphere.
I found myself surrounded by people who often began from possibility rather than limitation. Instead of instinctively explaining why something couldn’t be done, they were just as likely to ask how it might be done. That difference stayed with me, not because one culture was right and the other wrong, but because it reminded me how deeply we absorb the emotional habits of the people around us.
Albert Bandura’s work on social learning helps explain why. Human beings don’t simply exchange ideas; we model one another’s behaviours, expectations and beliefs. We inherit emotional habits far more easily than we realise.
My own shift wasn’t dramatic, although I did make a conscious decision to change. There was no single defining moment. It unfolded quietly over years. Different conversations led to different questions, and different questions gradually shaped a different way of paying attention.
The more I read, the more I realised that neuroscience was describing exactly what I had lived through. Neuroplasticity tells us that the brain remains adaptable throughout our lives. The pathways we’ve strengthened are not fixed forever. Attention itself can be trained.
That idea changed me because it didn’t promise happiness. It offered something more valuable: the freedom to question my own assumptions, to notice possibilities alongside problems, and to recognise that the stories I’d inherited about the world weren’t necessarily the only stories available.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to think that suffering can become a habit.
Not because suffering is pleasurable, but because familiarity exerts an extraordinary pull. A way of seeing the world, repeated often enough, begins to feel like the only truthful way of seeing it. We mistake habit for reality.
These days, I still value criticism. I still question ideas. I still think scepticism matters.
What has changed is the prism through which I look.
The world didn’t suddenly become kinder or easier. The light itself didn’t change. What changed was the angle from which I learned to see it. As the prism slowly turned, it revealed colours that had always been there: possibility alongside disappointment, generosity alongside selfishness, hope alongside suffering.
That’s the most hopeful lesson psychology and neuroscience have to offer.
Our brains never stop changing. The habits that shaped us don’t have to define us. The stories we’ve inherited aren’t necessarily the stories we have to keep telling ourselves.
Perhaps that’s what freedom really is.
Not escaping reality, but refusing to mistake one colour of reality for the whole spectrum.
Learning, slowly and deliberately, to see more of it.
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