The truth about Catharsis

The Daily Drip

Your brain has one job:

Get better at whatever it's doing right now.

It's called plasticity. It just means that as your neurons fire, your brain tries to make that firing more efficient. It does this in a couple ways but that's not important.

The important thing to note is your habits.

What are you doing right now?

Hitting the snooze button?

Your brain is getting better at hitting the snooze button instead of pushing yourself to get out of bed.

What are you doing?

Punching something in anger?

Your brain is getting better at punching something in anger instead of regulating that anger.

This whole idea of Catharsis is a fallacy.

There's no such thing as "getting it out of your system."

What you're doing isn't expelling a feeling or thought--you're reinforcing it.

I'm not saying you have to challenge all your habits and that you have to do them all at once.

I'm just providing you with a little science so you can start taking the small steps to developing the habits you want.