Self-neglect is selfishness turned inward

People who keep postponing the doctor, drop the morning walk and eat dinner in front of their phone usually see themselves as someone who puts themselves last. The brain decides differently: what wins is comfort right now, and the one who pays is you, later.

English edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.

If you keep postponing the check-up, quit the gym in the second week and scroll past midnight even though you wake up at six, you probably think of yourself as someone who puts themselves last. Someone who takes care of everyone and forgets about themselves. In Eduardo Casarotto’s Virtology, that picture may be upside down. Neglecting yourself is often selfishness. Not the selfishness that takes from others, but the kind that turns against the person who carries it.

Yesterday I wrote about the first half of this idea in The inner critic is pride turned inward. This article is about the second half. Both appear together in one sentence Casarotto writes about the relationship each of us has with ourselves:

I have already taken cruel self-criticism apart. Now I want to show why neglect, which looks like the opposite of selfishness, is the same system working with its aim reversed.

What selfishness does

In Virtology, selfishness is not an isolated character flaw. It is a system in the brain, the SNE, the Selfishness Neurofunctional System (the Portuguese acronym is kept in the English editions). It grows from the same survival base as pride, but with a different instruction. Pride says “I need to matter so I am not left out of the group.” Selfishness says “first, I secure myself.” Pride calculates your position. Selfishness calculates your advantage. I explained the two systems side by side in SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis.

The core operation of the SNE is a weighing the brain does all the time, before you notice you did it: is my gain worth more, or theirs? The region that does the weighing is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which works as the brain’s value calculator. That is why things that look very different come from the same root:

Among those forms are reactive aggression, indifference to other people’s needs, control and transgression. And there are two that matter here: escapism and addiction.

What the impulse leaves out

To see how selfishness can turn against the person, the most useful piece is a formula Casarotto uses to describe what he calls the blackout: the moment an impulse overrides everything the person knows.

On one side is what I gain now. On the other side, added together, are the future cost and the other person. In the blackout, the first side weighs so much that the second side disappears.

When we talk about selfishness, we almost always look only at the second term: the other person who did not get their share, the call, the attention. But the formula has two terms. And the first one is the future.

From here on, this is my own reading in the light of Virtology. In self-neglect, the term that disappears is not the other person. It is you a month from now, a year from now, ten years from now. Selfishness keeps the same rule, “first, I secure myself,” but the self it secures is the present one. Tomorrow’s self weighs as little as a stranger would.

Escaping reality, soothing your own pain

Casarotto organizes the primitive instincts we share with animals into four movements and maps each one onto the two systems. Two of them belong to selfishness, and they describe self-neglect with uncomfortable precision:

• Escaping reality, which is escapism. In the brain: hijacked reward and negative reinforcement.
• Soothing your own pain, which is addictive self-consolation. In the brain: the reward circuit and the extended amygdala, the part that holds stress.

“Negative reinforcement” is a confusing term because it sounds like punishment. It is not. It names what happens when a behavior grows stronger because it removes a discomfort. The researcher George Koob described this dark side of compulsion: at some point the person is no longer seeking pleasure, but relief.

In practice, it goes like this. Time for the walk arrives, and so does tiredness. The couch removes the tiredness right away. Time to book the test arrives, and so does fear of the result. Not booking removes the fear right away. Evening arrives, and so does the emptiness of the day. The phone, the food or the series removes the emptiness right away. In every case the relief works. And each time it works, the brain learns that this is the way.

The cost arrives too, only later, spread out and with no date attached. The body that lost strength, the test that became a diagnosis, the sleep that is never made up. The primitive brain was built to solve the present. It is in no hurry about what comes after.

Myopia for the future

There is a neuroscience study that shows this at work, and it comes from outside Virtology.

The neurologist António Damasio and his team created a card game with four decks, the Iowa Gambling Task. Two decks pay a lot but now and then charge a huge penalty, and in the end they lose money. The other two pay little, rarely penalize, and in the end they make money. Nobody tells the players this. They have to find out by playing.

After a few rounds, healthy people start avoiding the dangerous decks before they can explain why. The body warns first: the skin registers a small alarm response when the hand moves toward a bad deck. Damasio called this warning a somatic marker, a body signal that biases the decision before the mind has finished thinking.

People with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex do not produce this warning. They understand the rules, they know they are losing, and they keep choosing the deck that pays a lot now, despite the larger punishment that comes later. Damasio called this myopia for the future. Casarotto reads the finding as the exact substrate of the blackout formula.

The region whose damage produces myopia for the future is the same one the SNE uses to weigh my gain against someone else’s. It is the same value calculator in both decisions.

Two caveats are needed. The bodily mechanics of Damasio’s hypothesis are still debated; some researchers question how the skin responses should be read, and others show that players know more than they appear to. What is solid is the clinical phenomenon: after the damage, decisions become short-sighted. The second caveat matters most: a person who neglects themselves has no brain lesion. What they have is a warning that has not been trained to fire in time. The body signals afterwards, when the calculation has already been made.

It is not a lack of willpower

When people recognize this pattern in themselves, the first explanation that comes up is weakness: “I have no willpower.” For years psychology backed that idea with the theory that self-control is a muscle that gets used up over the day. Virtology notes that this explanation did not hold up: a 2016 replication across twenty-three laboratories and more than two thousand participants did not reproduce the effect. The fatigue of sustaining effort is real. What fell was the idea of a tank of willpower that drains.

That changes the question. If it is not a weak muscle, it is a pattern the brain learned by repeating the relief. And a learned pattern can be replaced by another one, with training.

Casarotto describes how the relationship with oneself appears at each level of maturity. In the more primitive Evolution Bands, it is “neglect or tyranny”: either the person abandons themselves, does not care for or develop themselves, or tyrannizes themselves with self-criticism and relentless demands. And he names what the two share: “indiscipline or self-punishment as ways of not facing oneself.”

In practice, it is common to see the two taking turns in the same person. A whole week of letting go, then the cruel Monday regime, then letting go again, now with guilt. Selfishness turned inward and pride turned inward feed each other. One does the damage, the other cracks the whip, and neither takes care.

Sometimes neglect comes dressed as something else. There is the persona of the “easygoing” person, who claims not to care about these things and not to be neurotic about health. And there is the one that presents itself as devotion: the person who never looks after themselves because they are always looking after everyone else. In that second case it is worth looking closely, because it is not always Selflessness. Casarotto warns that renunciation without Humility “becomes display: the person sacrifices themselves in order to be seen sacrificing themselves.” The neglect, there, may be serving pride rather than the other person.

The body that signals and nobody listens to

The relationship with oneself has two faces, body and mind, and Casarotto points out that each pulls the other: “the neglected body sickens the mind, and the disordered mind abandons the body.” On the body side, neglect has a more precise name: somatic neglect. It shows up in three families:

• Normalized fatigue. Chronic tiredness taken as normal, because it has been there so long it became a way of being.
• Unnoticed tension. Shoulders and jaw clenched all day without any awareness of it.
• ”It’s just a little.” The phrase that shows up in front of a sign of illness and sends the sign away.

What happens in the brain of someone who neglects the body is described like this: the alerting system points its whole antenna outward. Screen, work, conversation, news. What comes from inside is not picked up. If you ask, the person will say, in these words, that they forget they have a body. The practical effect is dangerous, because they only notice the body when the signal is extremely loud: exhaustion after months, pain once the process has set in, the symptom once the condition has become chronic.

The body did not stop signalling. The fatigue that would call for a pause is there. Hunger and fullness are there. The tension that would call for movement or rest is there. What is missing is someone listening.

Selflessness also looks inward

This part, for me, opened a door. And again it is my own reading in the light of Virtology, because Casarotto defines Selflessness through the other person: selfishness is “me first,” Selflessness is “the other first.”

But his description of what Selflessness does goes beyond the other person:

Shortly after, he links renunciation to addiction: someone who lives chasing their own desires gets a peak of pleasure that passes in moments or days, then needs more, or something else. “This is the basis of addiction and compulsion. And to overcome addiction to anything, the most effective path is to develop the virtue of Selflessness.”

If Selflessness is the trained shift of selfishness’s weighing, and if the other side of the formula holds the other person and the future, then the same virtue that removes the automatic weight of my gain over the other person also removes the automatic weight of my relief over my tomorrow. Giving up the couch to walk, giving up the screen to sleep, giving up the relief of not knowing to book the test: that is renunciation in the exact sense he gives the word. Leaving the drive for later.

Casarotto is careful to say what Selflessness is not: “It is not erasing yourself. It is re-weighing.” That keeps this reading from turning into its opposite. Selflessness was never about forgetting yourself to serve others. He describes the strong ego as one that “cares about the collective without losing care for itself.” The person who abandons their own body in the name of others is not practising Selflessness. Very often they are practising neglect with a beautiful justification.

And renunciation without the inscribed virtue does not last. It only postpones the problem. Casarotto’s example is the person who gives up a desire, gets angry, and takes it out later “on drink, in traffic, on the spouse.” Anyone who forces themselves to skip the sweet in the afternoon and raids the fridge at night knows this from the inside.

A virtue never comes alone

In Virtology, no virtue works alone, and the order follows the Pyramid of Virtues.

Humility comes first. Without it, the person does not even see the neglect, because pride shuts down the very channel through which the brain learns from error. And without it, Selflessness turns into an audience act, renunciation staged to be seen.

Selflessness comes paired with Humility. These two are the bases that make all the other work possible, and they are the only ones that act directly on the two primitive systems: Humility reprograms pride, Selflessness reprograms selfishness. Casarotto says both install anticipatory somatic markers, “the cost warning in the face of the proud reaction and the positive marker in the face of future gain,” so that they fire before the blackout, not after. That is exactly the warning that is missing in myopia for the future.

From there, the combination depends on the form the neglect takes.

When it is escape, the phone, the food, the compulsion, the “just one more,” the canonical combination is the one for addiction, compulsion, impulse and immediacy: Humility, Selflessness, Truth, Gentleness, Patience, Responsibility and Acceptance.

When it is the abandoned body, the combination is the one for illness, the body and health: Humility, Acceptance, Eternity, Perseverance, Care for the Body and Good Humor. Care for the Body belongs to the Development level and requires Humility, Acceptance and Individuation first. Without Humility, the body becomes a shop window. Without Acceptance, the body is rejected. Without Individuation, the body is whatever the group approves of.

And for the tone in which you speak to yourself, which is what keeps letting go from turning into tyranny, Casarotto points to Nonjudgment, Patience and Pursuit of Improvement. The relationship with oneself heals, in his words, “when firmness joins Gentleness: neither abandonment nor tyranny.” These also come after the base. Skipping steps produces staged virtue.

A practice for this week

Neglect wins because the future cost arrives with zero weight. The practice is to give it weight before the moment of decision.

A note on step two. The relief almost always feels deserved. “I worked all day, I deserve it.” That may even be true, and real rest is a need, not an escape. The difference shows the next day: rest that restores leaves you better; relief that escapes leaves the damage bigger.

What changes when it changes

The relief does not stop calling. The urge to stay on the couch keeps showing up, the phone is still in your pocket. What changes is that tomorrow gets a voice at the moment of decision. The warning that used to arrive only afterwards, as guilt or as a symptom, starts to arrive before.

The marker Casarotto gives for Care for the Body is easy to observe: you notice the state of your body before it becomes a symptom. Tiredness is noticed before illness. Tension, before pain. For Selflessness, the marker is that the other person starts to have an agenda of their own in the way you talk. In the reading I have proposed here, the equivalent would be your tomorrow’s self gaining an agenda of its own in today’s choices.

Perhaps that is the most concrete gain of understanding neglect as selfishness. As long as it looks like a lack of willpower, you blame yourself and nothing changes. Once you see that it is the same “first, I secure myself,” only with the future on the losing side, you can do something about it.

If neglecting yourself has gone beyond postponing into something heavier, such as being unable to get up, stopping eating or washing, losing interest in everything, or thinking about hurting yourself, this is not a matter of discipline. It may be a sign of depression or another condition that needs medical care. Please reach out to a health professional. Asking for help is, in that case, the first act of caring for yourself.

Continue with The inner critic is pride turned inward, SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis, or the 12-Step guided trail.