Your Brain is Basically a Control Freak (And Why That's Keeping You Stuck in Midlife)

You're allowed to stop knowing exactly what comes next

I’m going to tell you something about your brain that explains so much about why you feel stuck.

Your brain is obsessed with predictions. Not in a fun way. In an anxious, needs-to-control-everything kind of way.

Its whole job—the thing it cares about more than making you happy or fulfilled or any of that—is keeping you alive.

And it does this by constantly running simulations of what’s about to happen next.

When life matches what it predicted? Your brain relaxes. When it doesn’t? It’s a red alert.

This is why changing anything, even the stuff you know is making you miserable, feels impossibly hard.

The status quo is your brain’s security blanket

There’s this part of your brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. (I know, but stay with me.)

It lights up whenever there’s a mismatch between what you expected and what’s actually happening. Scientists call this “prediction error.”

I call it the reason you feel weird eating dinner at 5pm instead of your normal 6:30pm.

And even if following that map leads you somewhere that makes you want to scream, it’s familiar. Your brain knows every turn. There are no surprises.

And surprises? Those mean danger. That’s what your ancient lizard brain thinks.

The “supposed to” trap

Somewhere along the way, we all absorbed this script about how life was supposed to go.

You were supposed to love your career, or at least find it meaningful. Your marriage was supposed to last. The kids were supposed to give your life purpose.

You were supposed to feel grateful and have it figured out by now.

But then life didn’t follow the script.

Maybe your marriage imploded.

Maybe you woke up one Friday morning and realized you’ve been going through the motions at work for years.

Maybe your body decided to betray you in not-so-nice ways.

Maybe the kids left, and now you’re sitting in an empty house, wondering who the hell you are when you’re not being someone’s mom.

And your brain is losing its mind about all of this. Because none of it matches the prediction it made some forty+years ago.

What if you just... stopped predicting?

You know what I miss? Cereal box prizes. (I know, I’m old, so you may not remember this.)

You’d buy the cereal half for the cereal, half because there was a toy buried somewhere in that box. But you had no idea which toy. Sometimes you got some plastic junk. Sometimes you got something really cool. You couldn’t know until you dug halfway through the Froot Loops and found it.

There was something exciting about not knowing.

We grew up in a world where surprises were built into ordinary things. You didn’t have to do anything special, just open the box and see what showed up. Regular life had these small delights built into it.

Now everything’s optimized and algorithmically served to you based on your browsing history. Even our “surprises” are curated.

Maybe that’s part of why this midlife phase feels so disorienting. We’re looking for that cereal box magic in a world that’s been manufactured to eliminate uncertainty.

But here’s the thing: you can still choose to live that way. To stay curious about what might be waiting for you, even in a world that’s obsessed with knowing everything in advance.

The surprises are still available. They just don’t come pre-packaged anymore. You have to go looking for them.

I know this sounds nuts, but what if you approached this whole phase of your life like that?

Not with this rigid expectation of how it should unfold. Not clutching some script you were handed decades ago. But with actual curiosity about what might show up.

I’m not saying pretend everything’s fine when it’s clearly not.

I’m saying, what if you loosened your death grip on the story of how your life was supposed to look?

You’re not stuck with this brain

Even at our age, even after all these years of reinforcing the same patterns, we now know your brain can learn new things.

Every single time you do something unexpected and don’t die (or actually enjoy it), you’re teaching your brain that uncertainty isn’t always dangerous. You’re building new predictions based on new data.

Start small if you need to. Try that restaurant you’ve been avoiding. Sign up for the thing you’ve been thinking about for three years.

Each time reality shows up, and it’s not a disaster, your brain updates its model.

And eventually—not overnight, but eventually—the surprises stop feeling like threats. They start feeling like those cereal box prizes.

The prize isn’t what you thought it would be

Here’s the thing, though. The prize you actually get might not be the prize you thought you wanted.

Maybe you thought the prize would be saving your marriage. But the actual prize is realizing you’re completely fine on your own. Better than fine.

Maybe you thought it would be finally making it to the top of your career ladder. But the prize turns out to be walking away from the whole damn ladder and doing something that actually matters to you.

Maybe you thought the prize was staying young and relevant. But it’s actually the wild freedom that comes with truly not giving a damn what people think anymore.

Stop telling life what it has to be, and it might surprise you with something better.

What actually happens when you open yourself to surprises

I’ve watched this unfold with so many women. And with myself.

When you stop white-knuckling your way through the life you planned and start paying attention to what’s actually in front of you, weird things happen.

You might discover you actually like being alone. Not in a sad way. In a “holy shit, I can do whatever I want” way. You can eat cereal for dinner. You can stop performing. You can start saying no.

You might find out you’re funnier than you thought. Maybe you’ve been hiding the fact that you’re actually hilarious when you stop censoring yourself.

You might reconnect with some old part of yourself you buried decades ago.

That thing you loved doing before you became a wife, a mother, an employee, and a caretaker.

Maybe it was writing. Maybe it was making art. Maybe it was just sitting quietly with your thoughts. And suddenly there’s permission to want that again.

And here’s the wildest part: you start making decisions faster. Because when you’re not constantly checking them against some outdated blueprint of who you should be, the path gets clearer.

You know what you want. You know what you don’t. And you stop agonizing over whether it’s the “right” choice according to some invisible rule book.

Life gets smaller in some ways. You care about fewer things, fewer people’s opinions, fewer obligations that never mattered to you anyway.

But it also gets bigger. Because there’s actual room now for the stuff that lights you up.

Here’s what I’m saying

The life you’re supposed to have? That’s just a story your brain made up decades ago to feel safe.

The life you could actually have starts when you’re willing to open the box and see what’s really inside.

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What’s the thing you thought you wanted that turned out to be completely different from what you actually needed?

I’m reading every word here. I can’t get to everyone, but thank you for sharing.

I’m building a space for women who are done performing. If this resonated with you, stick around. There’s more where this came from, and we’re just getting started.