The Secret Architecture of Your Mind: 12 Nuggets for Understanding Why You Feel Stuck or Detached

Have you ever felt like you are living life on “automatic pilot,” or that you’re viewing the world as if you are separate from it, like you’re behind a pane of glass? If it is distressing, this feeling of detachment is called depersonalization. 

And while it can feel overwhelming and mysterious, the underlying cause of depersonalization is a surprisingly simple mechanism: Brain flexibility. 

See, because your mental system is naturally flexible, the rules it uses to construct your reality can lapse into and get stuck in a specialty mode of functioning that only works in a particular context. And when that happens, everything can stop feeling real, including you.

Drawing on research into how the mind predicts and controls perception, below you will find 12 hidden reasons for why you feel present and in control, or completely disconnected from yourself and the world.

Understanding these ideas is the key to regaining a sense of self and breaking free from this unique form of overthinking.

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Part 1: The Predictive Self and Survival

Your brain’s ultimate goal is simple: self-preservation. This mission determines your deepest mental mechanisms:

1. The Core Rule of Survival: Your brain constantly tries to keep your world predictable by minimizing “surprise.” Not regular surprise, but the kind related to the brain, which is simply anything it didn’t predict would be there, known as prediction errors. 

• Moral: Since survival is the ultimate goal, your mind often prefers predictable discomfort over the chaotic uncertainty of genuine change. This tendency explains why deep personal growth often feels so challenging or threatening.

2. The Self is a Hypothesis: Your continuous sense of being “you” is not a fixed identity but a dynamic mental model, or a “hypothesis,” that your brain constantly updates.

• Moral: You are not a fixed person but an ongoing, fluid story your brain constructs to explain the causes of your sensations and actions. Basically, in a way, self isn’t “real”—But, obviously,  you don’t want to experience that in your daily life.

3.  Action is Proof, Not Just Movement: You take actions not just to change the world, but to gather sensory data that confirms your brain’s predictions about what should happen next. 

• Moral: Movement is a form of self-confirmation; when you act, you are essentially seeking proof that your internal map of the world is correct, suppressing “prediction errors” that would suggest otherwise.

4.  Consciousness is Planning: Experiences like complex planning depend on your brain running deep mental simulations of multiple possible futures. In other words, to manage life, you need a mental system that projects into the future.

• Moral: Consciousness is largely defined by time. The level of awareness you experience is tied to how far into the future your brain can successfully project scenarios and explore alternative actions. When this breaks down related to who you are as a body, you can feel unreal. You’re stuck in “the now,” which feels like nothing.

Part 2: Attention, Inattention, and Mental Action

To survive, your brain needs powerful tools to filter the overwhelming flood of sensory information constantly bombarding it from both outside and inside your body.

5. Attention is Your Confidence Dial: Attention is how your brain decides how much confidence (called “precision”) to place in a piece of incoming sensory information.

• Moral: By choosing where to focus, you shape what information your brain deems “trustworthy” and how much it influences your beliefs about reality.

6. The Necessity of Ignoring Yourself:  To interact effectively with the world, your mind must automatically dampen (attenuate) most of the predictable sensory evidence coming from your own body.

• Moral: To act successfully, you need the superpower of selective inattention. Ignoring these highly predictable self-generated signals is crucial for movement, allows you to focus on external goals, and lets you feel “real.”

7.  The Tickle Test: You cannot tickle yourself because your brain anticipates the sensation and automatically suppresses the sensory feedback.

• Moral:  If your brain isn’t suppressing information about your movements, you will not feel in control of your body, and you are likely to begin to feel depersonalized, as if you are an object that you notice, rather than just “being” yourself.

8.  Thinking is Doing: Actively deciding where to place your attention or how much confidence to give information coming into the brain is a specific kind of internal activity.

• Moral: Deploying attention is a form of “mental action.” Your brain uses the same core planning and control rules for choosing an internal thought (like allocating confidence) as it does for executing a physical movement. This is what is going wonky in depersonalization.

Part 3: Why Reality Feels Unreal

When the filtering mechanisms described above break down, your sense of self and reality can begin to fracture.

9. The Illusion of Immediate Reality: When your internal mental processes run smoothly and efficiently, your perception feels immediate and “real.” This is called “phenomenal transparency.”

• Moral: This means that reality feels real precisely because the mental construction of who you are is happening in the background and is invisible. Transparency grants you the feeling of immediate presence in the world instead of separation from it.

10. Overthinking Creates Detachment: If your brain “over-attends” to self-related data (a symptom known as hyper-reflexivity), this transparency cracks, leading to feelings of detachment or unreality. For instance, being overly self-conscious about movement while running up or down a flight of stairs is not helpful.

• Moral: That means that too much self-focus breaks reality. If your mind begins to focus on *how* it is working (becoming “opaque”), you shift from simply ‘being’ to merely ‘observing’ yourself, leading to a sense of detachment. Not to mention getting up or down the stairs.

11. Illusions Are Best Guesses: Bodily illusions, like one known as the rubber hand illusion, occur because your brain is trying to make the most optimal interpretation of conflicting sensory inputs. In the illusion, I see a rubber hand, but I feel sensations when it is touched because my mind is ignoring the fact that I do not have a rubber hand.

• Moral: This is because your perception of your body is highly flexible and based on continuous negotiation. When your senses disagree (e.g., sight versus body position), your brain finds the “best guess” to maintain a coherent sense of your physical self in that moment. i.e. It “believes” the rubber hand is yours.

12. The Adaptive Balance of Belief: Healthy experience relies on maintaining an optimal and flexible balance between trusting what you predict and trusting what you actually sense.

• Moral: Mental well-being requires flexibility. Your brain must constantly fine-tune whether it trusts its internal expectations more than the external evidence it receives in the moment. When this adaptive balance fails—leading to abnormal attention to internal signals—you can start to feel things like chronic pain, anxiety, and feelings of detachment.

Regaining Presence

If you feel disconnected or stuck in your head, it may be because high levels of chaos in or around you have caused your brain to over-allocate resources to constantly checking in on your “self,” fearing for your survival. This heightened self-awareness is likely the reason you now have a feeling of detachment.

To heal this “fractured self” and restore the feeling of realness, you have to repair the imbalance by shifting focus away from internal analysis and back toward full-bodied engagement with the world.

By actively engaging your physical body in the sensory environment—through movement and manual work—you force the brain to rely on action information and allow the transparent, effortless sense of being a real self to return.

If that sounds too simple, it’s because it is simple. The trick is in sticking to that active engagement with the world for a prolonged period of time, because right now, if you’ve been stuck in a depersonalized state for a while, you are going to have to retrain that automatic habit. And automatic brain habits don’t let go easily.