Issue 76: Terminology Tuesday: Why Learning (Sometimes) Feels Like Winning the Jackpot
The high I get from "getting it" is better than all the gold stars.
In This Issue
Recent Issues
Terminology Tuesday: Why Learning (Sometimes) Feels Like Hitting the Jackpot
Updates: On the Serial Memoir: Fat & Drunk; Poll: Substack LIVE Remapping Summer Series
Food for Thought: We Are Photoshop
Recent Issues
Fact-Check Friday: The ‘Is This Mine?’ of Religious Trauma
In this issue, guest columnist Jenny Skoog writes about growing up in a conservative religious sect and what it actually takes to uninstall a belief system you didn't know was running. Her piece is a firsthand account of religious trauma, the gaps it leaves, and the slow, sometimes embarrassing, often beautiful work of figuring out which of your values are actually yours. If you've ever asked yourself "is this mine, or did someone just hand it to me?"—this one is for you.Terminology Tuesday: Why Reunions Reshape Us
In this issue, we explore why reunion season—whether you're on campus or just caught off guard by an old photo—triggers genuine neural remapping, as the brain reopens and updates memories in the presence of who we've become. The terminology unpacks what's actually happening: memory reconsolidation, prediction error, and identity reframing working together to widen the lens through which we read our own past. The result isn't regression but integration—holding sadness, longing, and gratitude at once, and finding more compassion for our earlier selves than we originally allowed.
Terminology Tuesday: Why Learning (Sometimes) Feels Like Hitting the Jackpot
This weekend I fell into something familiar and oddly electric. I started figuring out new methods and systems for my workflow—nothing flashy, nothing externally validated. Just me, rearranging processes, solving problems, testing ideas. And then somewhere along the way, I disappeared into it. Hours passed. I didn’t notice. I didn’t want to stop. It felt charged. Absorbing. Like I was pulling toward something. Like maybe—maybe—if I got it just right, it would all click and pay off in some future burst of ease, efficiency, or clarity. Like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine. Except it’s not luck. And it turns out, it might not even be what I thought it was.
Learning and Why It Hooks Us
When we talk about learning in therapeutic or self-development spaces, we usually frame it as something that takes a lot of effort. Sometimes draining. But what I experienced this weekend—and what many of us recognize—is something different: learning that generates its own energy. This is reward-based learning, a system in the brain that reinforces behaviors when they produce meaningful progress. The key player is dopamine, but not in the way it gets talked about.
I was today years old when I learned that it’s more than just the “reward center” or “pleasure chemical” of our systems. Coming from a recovery background, that’s how I usually heard it talked about. Or thought I did. But I also often talked about getting a “dopamine hit” by succeeding at work tasks and thought I was being a little subversive with the term. As it turns out, I was not. In fact, for a long time, a concept called reward-based learning has claimed that dopamine is how the brain “decides if something is worth the effort.” Every time we solve a small problem, refine a system, reduce friction, or build a better mousetrap, our brain registers it as movement toward a goal and responds with increased focus, heightened motivation, and a pull to keep going. That’s why we don’t want to stop—not because we’re chasing a reward, but because our brain is actively tracking progress.
But Wait, There’s More
Here’s where it gets more interesting, though. A December 2025 study out of UC Berkeley challenged the idea that reward-based learning is the primary driver of how humans actually learn. Psychologist Anne Collins and her team found that when tasks got more complex—when we were juggling four, five, six things instead of one or two—people started repeating mistakes in ways that a pure reward model couldn’t explain.
We’ve seen this before. Remember when we talked about the window of tolerance? Or when we’re stressed and need to dig deep into distress tolerance? When we’ve got very little bandwidth, the brain retreats to what it already knows. Old habits. Familiar patterns. Maladaptive coping. They’re the well-worn neural paths that don’t require much from working memory because they’ve already been paved. That’s the nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do: conserve resources when the system is overwhelmed. The problem is that defaulting to what we know keeps us from building anything new and can sometimes really hurt us.
Collins found that what’s actually running the show—when we’re operating within that window, when the conditions are right—is a combination of two systems working together: working memory and habit formation. Working memory is the conscious, active process of holding new information in mind while we’re using it. It’s the mental scratchpad where live problem-solving happens. Habit formation is the slow, repetitive process of hardwiring behaviors into the brain through repetition, regardless of whether those behaviors feel rewarding in the moment. We’ve talked about how this is how new neural pathways actually form—not in a flash, but through repetition that eventually stops feeling like effort.
Together, they produce the kind of efficient, almost automatic learning we might mistake for a dopamine rush. That means what I felt this weekend wasn’t just a reward loop or a hit. It was my working memory actively holding the problem—keeping the pieces in play, noticing connections, tracking progress in real time—while habit formation quietly reinforced the pattern of sitting down and engaging with hard things. (We can do hard things!) According to this new theory, the brain wasn’t looking for its reward, but was just finally inside a window wide enough to actually work.
Eh. I get it. And I like it. I’d also argue that it can’t be purely one or the other because I clearly get high when I can see my working memory…well…working. SO LET’S DO IT AGAIN.
Why It Feels Like Gambling (But Isn’t)
Let me name one big tension directly: Successfully learning and applying what we learn does feel like a slot machine sometimes. That’s because both gambling and being rewarded from our learning use a variable reward schedule—we don’t know when the payoff will come, only that it might come next, and that unpredictability intensifies engagement. But the distinction matters. Gambling produces random outcomes with no cumulative gain; the reward is external and dependency-forming. Learning produces skill-based outcomes with compounding knowledge; the reward is internal mastery and capacity-building. And I absolutely love it, when it’s something I want to be doing.
But sometimes it’s not.
Sometimes we have to learn something we didn’t ask for and don’t particularly want. I can easily think of new software forced on us by a system update, a process that changed without our input, a skill we’d have been happy never to need (hello, catheter care). There’s no excitement in that. No pull. No disappearing into it for hours. And yet the brain is running the same machinery. Working memory is still holding the new information. Habit formation is still doing its slow, unglamorous work in the background. The variable reward schedule is still technically in play—we just don’t feel the anticipation because we never wanted the jackpot in the first place. Or so we may have thought.
What I’ve noticed is that the engagement doesn’t come from the topic. It comes from the problem. Even when the subject matter is tedious or unwelcome, the moment I can reframe it as something to figure out—a small puzzle, a friction to reduce (my favorite), a question to answer—the system starts to activate. Not with the same electricity as this weekend. But enough. Enough to move. Enough to build. Because the brain, it turns out, doesn’t much care whether we wanted to learn something. It just responds to the signal that progress is possible. We can resent the lesson and still lay down the pathway. Dialectics. And the infrastructure gets built either way.
When the Stakes Are Real
There’s something else underneath all of this, though—something I want to name honestly. The charge I felt this weekend wasn’t only the clean dopamine of intellectual engagement. There’s an urgency layered into it. Not desperation exactly, but something more than a mild professional curiosity. Something with a clock that’s ticking.
I’m building a business. And I’m doing it in the middle of an era that has handed a version of my situation to an enormous number of people—experienced, capable, credentialed people who got laid off and are now figuring out what comes next in a market that isn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat. My severance ran out a long time ago. I’ve been stretching unemployment insurance by picking up work here and there. I’m on a timeline that isn’t entirely of my choosing. And when I talk about “hitting the jackpot”—even metaphorically—there’s a real undercurrent to that.
Let me be clear. I am incredibly privileged. I am not heading toward ruin. That’s important to say. And, therefore, the absence of actual panic gives me space to do the development I did this past weekend. But I am building toward something that has to actually pay off, because I’d like to keep the life I only recently became accustomed to—where I’m finally off the post-sobriety and post-recession financial recovery bus. Maybe even make it better. Maybe, eventually, stop being someone whose financial stability can be ended by a single conversation with HR. Again. Because I’m fed up with that.
Here’s what I’ve noticed, though: My urgency isn’t derailing the process. In some ways, it’s sharpening it. There’s something clarifying about building something when the stakes are real—when the work isn’t theoretical and the timeline isn’t abstract. The brain doesn’t just register progress is possible here. It registers progress is necessary here. And that, it turns out, is its own kind of fuel. I got a dopamine hit each month from paying my own health insurance—not because the bills are pleasant, but because nobody can take it away from me by ending my employment. That’s not nothing. That’s the brain tagging something as meaningful. And meaning-making, as we’ve established, is exactly the condition this whole system runs on.
What the Brain Is Actually Building
This is where we bring it back to the core of Remapping Myself. What’s happening during these moments isn’t just engagement—it’s neuroplasticity in action. Working memory does the live processing; habit formation does the slow structural work, quietly reinforcing the pathways we use most until they become faster, more efficient, more automatic. Every time we test a new workflow, organize information differently, or solve a problem in a novel way, we’re strengthening specific neural pathways—the routes our brain uses to process, store, and act on information.
Losing track of time wasn’t incidental, either. It’s a hallmark of flow—the state that occurs when a challenge is meaningful but solvable, our skill level is engaged but stretched, feedback is immediate, and distractions are minimal. In flow, working memory stops feeling effortful because the habit system has taken enough of the load that we’re not white-knuckling every step. We stop overthinking. We stop checking ourselves. We simply continue. Flow isn’t just productive. It’s permission to operate without friction. And every once in a while, inside that state, something clicks—a structure simplifies, a system suddenly makes sense, what felt messy becomes coherent. That’s working memory completing a loop it’s been running for hours. The insight was built; we just didn’t feel the construction. JACKPOT.
How to Capture This More Often
This state isn’t accidental, and it isn’t reserved for a particular kind of brain or a particular kind of work. We can recreate it. Gah. I wish I were still leading a team so I could talk about this with them—not in a “let me tell you something interesting I read” way, but in a “let’s actually build our work around this” way. Because some of it is already baked into good business practice, while some of it could be added.
Break work into problems small enough to actually solve. Vague, sprawling tasks don’t trigger the progress signal; discrete, completable ones do. Build in visible markers of movement, because the brain needs evidence that something is happening—a list that gets shorter, a document that gets longer, a system that visibly improves. I know plenty of project management tools that can do this and it’s fun to pick which type of colorful chart to use as show-and-tell for progress.
This weekend, I was learning new software, and every time I saved something and it looked the way it should, BAM. That’s not just satisfaction. That’s the progress signal firing, reinforcing the behavior, making it more likely I’d keep going. Multiply that across a team, and you’re not just improving productivity—you’re changing how people feel about their work.
Stay just at the edge of current skill level, too—not so far beyond it that anxiety floods the system, but far enough to be genuinely stretched. That edge is where flow lives. I fell off it a few times this weekend and NOPED back on. When I hit something I couldn’t figure out, I stopped trying to will myself through it and just said: I’ll come back to it. As it happened, I thought of the solution in the shower. Because of course I did.
That’s the whole thing, really. We don’t have to force it. We can design for it—or even just expect it—and then get out of our own way. The jackpot isn’t at the end. It’s the work itself, when the conditions are right. Once we’ve felt that, it sticks.
Exercise: Activating the Signal
Pick one task you’ve been avoiding—something that feels too big, too vague, or too loaded to start. Now break it into the smallest possible solvable unit. Not “work on the project.” Something more like “write one paragraph” or “reorganize one folder” or “draft three questions I’m trying to answer.” Set a timer for twenty-five minutes. Remove one distraction you can actually control right now—close a tab, silence a notification, move to a different chair. Then start on that one small unit and notice what happens in your body about ten minutes in.
That shift you feel—the slight forward lean (in my case, more hunching like a shrimp), the narrowing of focus, the quiet that settles in—that’s the progress signal activating. That’s your brain saying: We’re moving. We don’t have to manufacture motivation before we begin. We just have to begin small enough so that the brain can find its footing. The momentum builds from there.
Updates
On the Serial Memoir: Fat & Drunk
Next week, we begin.
I’ve been circling this project long enough. The serialized memoir launches next week, and I want you there from the start.
It’s a memoir about transmission—not just the intergenerational kind, but the cultural, biological, neurological, and psychological kind. About how the things that shaped us didn’t start with our parents. They started further back, moved through bodies and families and systems and centuries, and arrived in us feeling like personality. Like just who we are.
It’s called Fat & Drunk because those are the two identities that have taken up the most space in my interior life, just behind being a white woman. Those words have been used about me as shorthand. As verdict. As a way to make a complicated person easier to dismiss. But they were never really separate. The same machinery ran both—the same scarcity, the same nervous system reaching for whatever it could find to feel okay. Some people have other methods, my people had these.
Putting those words in the title is how I take them back.
The serialized memoir will live behind the paywall because I’m building something here that I’d like to actually sustain, and a paid subscription is the most direct way to support that. After a long editorial career, I’m building this from scratch, and I’m not being coy about the fact that your subscription is what makes this work possible.
Putting it behind a paywall is also because this material is specific and real and I want it in the hands of people who showed up for it on purpose.
Between now and Tuesday, I’m offering a discounted rate. If you’ve been thinking about it, this is the window.
Subscribe here at discounted price.
Poll: Scheduling Substack Live Remapping Summer Series
Last issue, I asked folks to answer a poll and I got three very good responses. Thank you! I’m going to keep it in this week and see what I get.
I’m going to start a Substack Live summer series for Remapping Myself where I talk to guests about who they are, what they do, and what they’ve done in terms of remapping neural pathways—both their own and how they help others to do the same. Substack awards LIVE videos with better play in the algorithms, but I have questions. If you’d be so kind and answer them, I’d really appreciate it. THANKS!
Food for Thought
We Are Photoshop
I was trying to open Photoshop, the digital image editing software, last night when my computer stopped me with a notice that I recognized but couldn’t remember how to fix. I haven’t worked in creative software in so long that I’d lost the thread. So I looked it up.
And laughed out loud.
When Photoshop is actively working—processing layers, rendering, holding a file too large for regular memory—it borrows space from the hard drive to think in. That’s the scratch disk. Not the archive, not long-term storage. Just temporary workspace. Room to process. When it’s full, Photoshop can’t do anything. Not because the computer is broken. Because there’s no room left to work.
So I started digging into my Mac. What I found was a lot. Duplicate files. Apps I hadn’t opened in years. Caches from processes that finished their jobs and never let go. Downloads I’d forgotten existed. Stuff that was once useful—or once felt like it might be—that just stayed. Quietly taking up space. I cleared out almost half of what was on my machine, and some of it required actual care. Uninstalling an app correctly isn’t just dragging it to the trash. There are associated files scattered through the system that don’t leave on their own. We have to go find them. Do it in the right order. Know what belongs to what.
And then I sat back and thought about working memory. Photoshop is us! We are Photoshop! Soylent Green is people!
It’s been said over and over: Human brains are computers.
This is the connection that got me—not the reward loop, not the dopamine hit, but the structural thing. Working memory is our mental scratch disk. It’s the live, active space where we hold information while we’re actually using it, where problems get processed and connections get made. It has limited capacity, just like a hard drive. And when it’s full—when it’s crammed with old narratives we haven’t resolved, beliefs we inherited and never examined, emotional processes that started and stalled and left their data sitting there—we can’t take anything new in. We try to open something: a new idea, a new version of ourselves, a new way of working. And the system stops us because there’s no room to process it yet.
The neuroplasticity piece is in how we clear it. Not carelessly—we don’t just drag things to the trash. Some of what we’re carrying got installed in layers, with associated files tucked into corners we didn’t know existed. Old patterns have dependencies. Beliefs have support folders. We have to go looking, and we have to do it in the right order, or we leave behind fragments that keep taking up space without serving any purpose. This is the slow, structural work of remapping—not a rush, not a reward, but a careful audit of what’s actually being stored and what the working mind could use that space for instead.
Clearing my Mac didn’t make it a different computer. It made it the same computer, running the way it was always supposed to. The capacity was there the whole time. It was just occupied. We don’t always need to build something new. Sometimes we just need to make room—carefully, in the right order, knowing what belongs to what. And then watch the thing breathe again.
Now, to think of a good metaphor for the Uninstall software…
