Pushing 50 and Still Fucking Up: Why Do I Do Things That Make Me Feel Terrible?

Our writer turns to a neuropsychologist to figure out why she continues to make bad choices.

It’s a weeknight and I’m watching the sun sink below the trees outside my kitchen window, kicking myself for not taking a walk while it was still daylight. Not only have I been indoors all day, I’m in sweatpants and haven’t showered. My stomach gurgles. Have I eaten a meal today, or just scavenged the cupboard for snacks? Have I been drinking water? I can’t remember. I’ve been working, scrolling on my phone to distract myself from work, making lists of things I need to do and then failing to do them. I’ve spoken to no one.

I give up on the day and curl up under a blanket on the sofa with a bag of chocolate chips, a joint, and the remote. I feel bad, but what can I do? Tomorrow will be my day. I’ll wake up early, do some yoga with Adriene, take a shower, start fresh. Tonight, it’s all about Donald Glover in tight white shorts on-screen in front of me and cats purring on the couch beside me. When I startle awake, it’s 3 a.m. I peel my sweaty face off the couch cushion. So much for getting up early tomorrow. I mean, today.

After my kids left for college I was in free fall, trying to find a way forward in my new reality: Single woman closing in on 50, living alone except for three cats. A month or so in, I thought I’d found my footing. I was getting up early, meditating, traveling, writing poetry, organizing my apartment, feeling like a better version of myself than I’d ever been before. 

Sometime in the deep of winter, however, that changed. I was knocked off course by a bout with strep throat, then a mysterious lingering fever, then a case of H. pylori that my gastroenterologist diagnosed when I went in for a pre-colonoscopy appointment, and which explained some unpleasant symptoms I won’t describe here. I found myself falling back into patterns I thought I’d left behind, wondering if I was depressed or perimenopausal or both.

Here’s what I know: I feel best when I rise with the sun, go outside, move my body, shower, put on real clothes, eat healthy food, spend time with friends, and go to bed early. These are simple things. So why did I stop doing them? Do I want to feel terrible?

Staying up late, not drinking enough water, and eating sugar until my teeth feel fuzzy are some of my easier-to-correct bad behaviors—at least, in theory. If it were truly easy, I suppose I’d have broken myself of them already. Move up the Richter scale of my poor choices and you’ll find sneaking cigarettes (disgusting, but I cannot break myself of occasionally indulging), spending money I don’t have on things I don’t need, and pursuing dead-end romances with inappropriate partners. Why?

Luckily, my job gives me access to some super smart people—a perk I take advantage of whenever possible. I spoke with neuropsychologist Julia DiGangi, PhD, author of Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power and asked her this very question. Why, in my late 40s, am I still doing things I know will make me feel bad?

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DiGangi tells me that three “energetic engines” drive us through life: a thinking engine, a feeling engine, and a behaving engine. The key to harnessing our emotional power, she says, is bringing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors into alignment so those engines are firing in the same direction. “All we are is energy. When we want to do certain things, but we behave in the exact opposite direction, we weaken ourselves energetically.” 

What, exactly, is emotional power? “Emotional power is the measure of who we become when life gets hard,” she says. Denying our raw emotions leaves us feeling lost, powerless—abandoned by ourselves.

I think about how often I deny my feelings—not speaking up, not trusting myself, letting my mistakes torpedo my belief in myself—and my recent penchant for numbing out on weed, making myself sick on junk food, and staying in my sweatpants all day starts to make sense. “We are more terrified of our transformation than we are of the misery of staying the same,” DiGangi says. “Misery is not necessarily an impetus for change.”

In other words, just because what I’m doing makes me feel terrible (if not in the moment, then afterward), that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing it. DiGangi says our brains are like “pattern detection machines” that constantly try to fit new experiences into familiar frameworks. If we think we’re not supposed to feel good, because that’s never been our experience of life, or we believe things never work out for us, we’ll find ways to make those things true—consciously or unconsciously.

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I consider the patterns that might be carved into my brain. What deep grooves do my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors fall into?

I think of my mom saying, “Your dad left.” Three little words, like a sad trombone appending a “womp, womp” to any sentence. “You were so little and cute when your dad left.” “I was devastated when your dad left.” “We were the perfect family, and then your dad left.”

My parents got divorced when I was two. My dad has been dead for 15 years. She still says it. “Your dad left.” A lifetime of hearing those words turned me into a heat-seeking missile for people who will hurt and disappoint me, no matter how little and cute I make myself. I leave them before they can leave me, and still feel abandoned.

I think of the elementary school librarian pulling me aside to show me where the books about divorce were shelved, when all I wanted was to find the Nancy Drew section. “If you want to check any of these out, you can tell me privately. You don’t have to check them out in front of your friends,” she said.

So number one, there were different books for me than for everyone else, and number two, there was something shameful about reading them. Cue the paranoia and sense of isolation I’ve battled my whole life.

I hear my mom saying, “Some people have a lot of money,” scrunching up her face with distaste and spitting out “money” like it was a dirty word. Is it surprising that I grew up terrified of money and spent it as fast as possible when I got it? I lived paycheck to paycheck and sank myself into debt when I made minimum wage cleaning houses and when I pulled in six figures at a fancy media job.

Sure, my recent funk might be an actual depressive episode—but even when I’m not depressed, breaking free of these deeply ingrained beliefs and bad habits is a struggle. I know I’m not the only one. We all have our own demons. I mean, patterns.

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If we’re going to change these patterns, DiGangi says we have to want it enough that we’re willing to endure some discomfort. “Your brain is guiding you through your life like GPS. When you take a sharp left turn and start to care for your body in a different way, or reject common conventions around beauty, or people speaking to you in certain ways, your brain is going to freak out,” she told me. “It’s going to try really hard to get you back on the old path.”

Even when we change our circumstances—moving to a new city, ending a relationship, starting a new career—we often find ourselves falling back into the same self-defeating habits and miserable mindsets we thought we were leaving behind. DiGangi says that’s because our brain’s GPS isn’t necessarily driving toward a familiar situation; rather, it’s driving toward familiar emotional energy. As Buckaroo Banzai said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

All this talk of energy reminds me of the psychic tarot reader I went to see in Ojai, California who told me that once I shift my energy, the things I want will come quickly. “It takes two seconds to change your vibration,” she said. “So change it.” (But how?) Now a neuropsychologist is telling me pretty much the same thing—that I’m capable of turning things around for myself. I’m a sucker for anything woo-woo, but I didn’t expect it from a scientist.

“If people want to say this is metaphysical, let them,” DiGangi says. “This is a basic issue of biology. We don’t understand how to work with our bodies, and then we feel like shit. When you understand how to work powerfully with the energy in your body, it transforms everything,” DiGangi tells me. (And again, how? Am I just too dumb to get it?)

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DiGangi says one way to reroute the GPS in your brain is to do what I’m doing now: writing. “The parts of your brain that are traumatized and experience stress are nonlinear,” she explains. “They don’t understand organization and structure. They also don’t understand language. When you write, even if it’s just freewriting in your journal, you’re telling a story. And when you tell a story, you’re organizing your experience, giving structure to it, making it linear.” Writing, she says, forces the emotional parts of your brain to talk to the logical parts of your brain. “What’s actually happening is you’re reorganizing your brain.” 

Emotional power, she says, isn’t about getting up at the crack of dawn, exercising, giving up sugar, getting my finances in order, or no longer being attracted to emotionally unavailable partners—even though I feel amazing and unstoppable when I manage to do those things (and I do manage it, occasionally, although never all of them at the same time).

“Emotional power is really just about being your most honest, authentic, full self,” DiGangi says. “If you start to do that, you’re going to start being in different relationships. You’re going to start hanging out in different rooms. You’re going to rid your life of people who speak to you in a way you don’t like to be spoken to.”

That sounds great, but what does “being your most authentic, full self” really mean? I pride myself on being authentic—I write honestly about my life, post ridiculous pictures of myself without makeup, tell the truth as fully as I can. Are there things I’m still hiding? Of course. Things I want to say and don’t, feelings I deny even in the pages of my private journal, ambitions that feel too outlandish to confess.

If I keep nudging myself out of my comfort zone and double down on telling those scary truths, will I feel strong enough to go for a walk every day when it’s still daylight, eat lunch, drink water, and go to bed early? Will my bank account and love life be transformed? The sad trombone in my brain is ready with a “womp, womp”—but there’s another voice in there telling me to keep on trying. Maybe it really does take two seconds (or eight steps, as DiGangi outlines in her book). I’m heading back to California soon. I’ll have to visit my Ojai psychic again and see what she has to say.

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