Your brain is a fascinating organ that operates 24/7 with a master plan you didn’t even know existed.

Neuroscience reveals that our brains function like a massive network of neurons where most psychological processes are not divided into specific dedicated functions, as some might think. In other words, all our neurons are firing at various speeds all the time.

The brain does not operate in an "on/off" mode, but maintains a state of perpetual activity, processing information and executing automated responses. While you think you’re simply "living life", your psyche is running a highly sophisticated strategy formed years ago, probably when you were a kid trying to survive in your family.

This unconscious strategy dictates almost everything that happens to us in life. Your financial situation, your relationships, your happiness level, even whether you wake up in a good mood or feel like throwing everything away. It determines all of that because your strategy will henceforth define the perspective from which you relate to your own reality.

Your Personality: The Sword and Shield with Which You Navigate the World

Let’s start with the basics, because there’s a common confusion people have all the time. Your personality is not synonymous with temperament. Temperament is what you come with from the factory. In fact, the reactive temperament measured at four months of age can predict shyness in childhood, social inhibition in youth, and anxiety in adolescence. This comes in your basic genetic setup.

Your personality, on the other hand, is the specific toolkit you've developed to interact with others. It’s like your sword and shield in the video game of life. Your temperament is the hardware, your personality is the software you installed on top to survive.

The crucial point is that the environment can offer a consistent response to temperamental qualities, encouraging them to remain intact. A shy kid is less likely to accept social invitations, which over time results in others being less likely to offer them, perpetuating the pattern.

The Traumatic Origin of Our Strategies

The part where it all connects is the fact that your personality emerges as a product of trauma; adverse experiences in childhood can create lasting scars, damaging our cells and DNA, and even making us sick as adults.

This damage is not limited to conscious memory but is stored in the body as patterns of automatic response. 

The issue, however, is that even the absence of trauma can create a specific type of vulnerability. If you grew up in a "perfect" environment where you never faced challenges, your personality might develop extreme fragility in the face of adversity.

Attachment patterns also become unconscious strategies for navigating relationships. The search for comfort or security is an innate need: we've evolved to seek attachment with "older and wiser" caregivers to protect ourselves. From the moment we're born, we're programmed to seek attachment with others.

Your Strategy: The Existential Glasses

These patterns form what we call "the strategy": the glasses through which you see the world. It's your personal, non-transferable reality filter.

There is something fascinating called sensory processing sensitivity, an innate survival strategy that involves noticing and adapting to environmental details, especially in social settings. About 20% of the population has it. These people are carefully observing and processing what they absorb, consciously or unconsciously, maximizing what they've learned. This strategy operates 24/7, influencing decisions ranging from taking shortcuts to changing diet or buying something on sale before others notice the reduced price.

Personality traits are also not as fixed as we think. Traits like patience and risk aversion are not innate, but a product of the type of society you're born into. In societies with more resources, children can feel they can afford better strategies like patience and risk-seeking.

The Role of Therapy: Making the Unconscious Conscious

Therapy plays a very important role in everyone's life. Not because we are all crazy, but because it helps make these automatic patterns conscious.

To build solid bonds, we first need to reconcile with our emotional history, heal emotional bits that are trapped, and understand how our attachment patterns are formed. Therapy acts like a mirror where you can see patterns that operate automatically.

The good news is that our minds and bodies can change until practically any age. Neuroplasticity allows the brain to reconnect, regardless of age, although many people experience a "universal stalling" due to somatic dysregulation and bodily traumas.

Habits can also be reprogrammed. True habit formation means the action is context-independent and no longer requires specific triggers to activate it. When behaviors are firmly embedded in our neural circuits, they require little mental effort to initiate the habit each day.

This guide is for you to have all the necessary perspectives to identify your own strategy and intervene, adapt, or enhance it at will.

It's not about eliminating your personality, but about making conscious what's already operating. It's like going from being an NPC executing automatic code to being the real player making conscious decisions.

The goal is to create a safe space to unpack everything we are, with boundaries and containment, but also with empathy and compassion. Also observe the areas where we lack self-expression and address the fear-based memories that hold us back.

Working 24/7 Without Working: Strategic Mastery

The part I love the most is that having your strategy clear is key, because it allows you to be working 24/7, without necessarily working.

When you achieve conscious integration of your automatic strategies, using information about environmental stimuli when facing a decision becomes targeted and purposeful. 

When there’s a goal, a purpose, even the morning coffee you have, or going out to party now and then, is working, because everything you do are conscious decisions, aligned with what you want and seek in life. It's like in sports, where resting is part of the sport itself.

Human beings need to understand these things about ourselves because it’s incredibly important for the development of who we truly are.

Instead of being victims of our patterns and defense mechanisms, we become conscious directors of this neural rainfall that has been touching and flooding our entire lives. 

In modern life, where everything changes rapidly, the ability to consciously recognize and manage the automatic patterns governing our lives becomes crucial to navigate this era gracefully, through a simple question: what is your unconscious strategy and how do you take control over it?

In this integration, we find not only the efficiency of working for yourself 24/7 but the wisdom of doing so in harmony with our deepest nature. This is how, at the end of the day, understanding your unconscious strategy becomes your fundamental tool for survival in the Anthropocene.