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People often tell me it happened out of nowhere. One week you're fine, and the next your eyes are blinking hard in meetings, your neck keeps pulling to one side, or a small sound escapes your throat that you never used to make. You're thirty-something, forty-something, a grown adult with a job and a life, and suddenly you have tics. The first thing most people feel is fear. The second is confusion: tics are supposed to be a childhood thing, so why is this happening to me now?

I get asked versions of this question every week. I lived with a motor tic for twenty years before I healed it, so I know how unsettling it is when your body starts doing something you didn't choose. Here is the honest answer as I understand it, from my own experience and from working with a lot of adults who felt exactly what you're feeling.

It usually isn't as sudden as it feels

The tic may have appeared suddenly, but what sits underneath it has usually been building for a long time. When adults tell me their...