On the delightful difficulties of thinking with our bodies

Posted on by emilytroscianko
gate over bridge with signpost by the Thames

As summer gives way to autumn, I’ve been aware of my usual longing for more sun for longer, and aware also of the counterweight to that, stronger than it used to be: wanting to cultivate appreciation of old-world beauties rather than resenting them for not being, say, some year-round replica of LA weather at its best. LA doesn’t have that, and Oxford certainly never will—and this summer’s long drought made it obvious why it shouldn’t.

Exploring the River Thames

On the bank holiday weekend at the end of August, I went for a walk along the Thames a few miles upriver from where my boat is moored. Since coming back from my 2024 in California I’ve done quite a few Cotswolds and other local-ish weekend walks, and exploring more of the Thames felt fitting for a few reasons:

  • The Thames is the home of my boat, and I’d like to know better the stretches that aren’t through and near Oxford.
  • Like all waterways, it offers us a way of exploring the country from different angles than roads and railways and even most footpaths allow. I love the canals that wind along below foot level through urban shopping centres, and the watery ways into cities that skirt the sprawl, and the miles upon miles of meticulously built and named and numbered stone bridges and swing bridges and locks that cobweb the British countryside.
  • Even more than other rivers and canals, the Thames (and its upper reaches, known as the Isis) is central to the country’s natural-cultural mythologies. It not only flows under Tower Bridge and past the Houses of Parliament, it’s been immortalized by The Wind in the Willows and Great Expectations and Three Men in a Boat, and has thus poured itself into ideas about what Englishness means—something I’ve been thinking a lot about since deciding not to move to America.
  • Having loved walking the ancient Ridgeway with a friend over several seasons, the Thames is (I realized this only en route) a serious candidate for another multi-leg expedition, this one poised between land and river. The 185 miles of the Thames Path follow the water’s meanders from the Cotswolds to the Thames Barrier, and even the stretch from Oxford to Lechlade (the head of the navigable river) and on to the source is a solid 50-odd miles. Something to keep me busy this autumn and winter, perhaps!
A copy of Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds by Herbert Arthur Evans in sunny grass with buttered hot cross bun.

A lesser-known volume with lovely bits of Thames in it, read with a hot cross bun in a Thames-side field in the spring of 2025.

Having deadlines for thinking

On this particular Sunday, I had a conference talk to give two days later, so I used the outward stretch to iron out my ideas and rehearse the key bits of wording under my breath—a habit learnt from my mother, who taught me early on in my academic life to rebel against the humanities tradition of reading from a script. 

The process of putting together this talk was, as usual, a mixture of enjoyment and stress. But, on the theme of cultivating appreciations, I also found myself reflecting, as I walked, that the slight stress is often part of what makes a thought process work, and happen at all. There’s often something that the thinking is needed for, some deadline for the mental aliveness to yield something up—if not, often we wouldn’t bother. 

(As a meta-aside: I do not want my blogs or newsletters to be the sort of thing I have to write according to an arbitrary schedule even if I have nothing to say—that’s a massive waste of my time and yours. But I put “brainstorm newsletter ideas, start drafting one” on my plan for the week because I had a vague sense that 1) it’s been a while since the last and 2) nice thinking does tend to happen when I sit down to it. And then so much thinking happened that it took several weeks and I decided to turn this into a blog post with a Substack taster!)

Part of me resented not being able to be totally relaxed during that walk and let my mind wander at will. But another part of me recognised that I do have plenty of patches of a typical week where my mind has that freedom, and that it’s therefore all right, even good, to sometimes have to choose qualities other than relaxation to optimize for. After all, the contemporary obsession with relaxation and self-care wouldn’t exist if the baseline weren’t so frantic, so when it isn’t, we get to aspire to other states.

Two kinds of cognitive privilege

There are two intertwined personal privileges here: 

  1. the fact that relaxation needn’t be the constant ideal and
  2. the fact that life does offer up such time-limited invitations to be cognitively alive. 

It’s easy to slightly resent the second of these when you have it, and then to waste it because it’s more work than not having it. I often think of how common it still seems to be at British weddings for women to say nothing, to let themselves instead be talked about by the groom and the best man and the father of the bride. Because of course it’s easier not to give a speech than to give one, and of course it’s easy to forget how hard-won the right to speak has been, and how quickly it withers if unexercised.

Some recent reading had sharpened my ability to cherish instead of resent: A great Aeon article called “The fog of hunger”, on the huge cognitive cost of girls being trained from very young to ignore their appetite. And a devastating New York Times piece on the Taliban’s prohibition on secondary education for girls, and how some girls are going to hidden classrooms or failing their final permitted year on purpose, to try to scrape a bit of an education together before it’s too late. 

The mechanisms of entrapment are not the same:

  • “I see the Taliban in my dreams,” she said. “They’re running after us, beating us and closing the school.”
  • “Attention is finite. Hunger takes some of it. What it takes cannot at the same time be used for anything else.”

But whether it comes from violently external oppression or the quieter internalized kind, the sheer extent of lost female intellectual liberty, down the ages and still today, is sobering to think about.

And so I feel more layers of gratitude: 

  1. to have been born in a time and place where I could have a marvellous education and do more or less what I wanted with it, and also
  2. to have had an eating disorder and got fully over it. 

The combination is a splendid mental-space-opening pairing. In a Psychology Today blog post at the start of this year, I wrote about “the beauty of living in fully uncurious congruence with your appetites”, and as I reread Sarah Berg’s Aeon piece now, I am more grateful than I can say that I am not, in my mid-40s, left asking this sort of question about my own life: “What might women have thought about if the noise had not been there? What arguments finished, what ideas followed all the way to the end, what patience held long enough to matter?” I lost ten years of clear thinking to self-starvation, but I’ve had nearly 20 to savour since then.

Letting thinking be bodily and take time

And coming back to my riverside talk-planning, I think of an essay by my mother called “Losing our hands”. She wasn’t worried about them getting chopped off; she was reflecting, 12 years ago, on how willingly we’re ceding our practical skills, as digital-everything claims to be better, cooler, faster, more interesting. And thus we’re stopping being the kinds of body-minds who know how to learn things with our limbs. 

She doesn’t talk about thinking itself as an example of the body skills being ceded, but I’m often reminded of how corporeal it is—whether or not we encourage it to be, but especially when we do. Thinking is obviously manual in that it occurs, rather than just being recorded, via the hands that scribble or type. And it can be cajoled in more expansive directions by big horizons, buffeted by fresh breezes, made rhythmic by feet, punctuated by pulling on tough brambles.

There’s a nice New Yorker piece on walking and thinking, speculating about the benefits of the “unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state” that’s activated when we walk at our own pace. And we know a little about walking and thinking outdoors from systematic experiments. One found support for the hypothesis that the way our attention is “modestly” grabbed by natural environments makes it better for memory and attentional skills than the way urban settings more “dramatically” capture it (Berman et al., 2008). Another set of experiments by researchers at Stanford (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014) compared cognition whilst 1) sitting at a desk facing a blank wall with 2) walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall, 3) walking outdoors, and 4) being rolled in a wheelchair outdoors, in “a busy, albeit lovely, university campus”. They found that the walking-outside condition “produced the most novel and highest quality analogies” in a divergent-thinking task (generating lots of ideas from a single starting point), whereas for convergent thinking (narrowing down possibilities to find a single correct or optimal solution) performance was mildly impaired by walking. (A recent meta-analysis [Thabane et al., 2026] confirms the main result here, finding “moderate certainty evidence of a large effect of walking on divergent thinking”.) 

As the Stanford researchers say, this sort of work raises lots more questions: for example, what about rolling oneself in a wheelchair, engaging in a different “comfortable task” like knitting, walking alone instead of chatting to a researcher, walking at a pace other than one’s natural stride—and also, I want to add, walking in a lovely and not-busy environment, the kind I naturally seek out for any kind of thinking-whilst-walking? (Though if one has to conduct such research on a university campus, Stanford’s palm-studded one is amongst the most glorious imaginable!)

I’ve also worked with many people for whom walking gets tightly bound into pathologies of pushing and counting and never resting, and in such contexts—and any other where walking is difficult or impossible—it’s important to get creative with ways of heightening body awareness that don’t involve even medium-level exertion. And to get honest about our motivations, too, as moulded by social pressures shouting “the more exercise the better” at every turn. Embodied thinking is just a fig leaf if really it’s all about body control.

My paddling spot on the Thames Path with bag and shoes on a rock.

My late-summer paddling place.

So, anyway, with my talk prep done and my mind roaming freer, I walked by the Isis and had a paddle and sat and ate a chocolate and walked on again, and perhaps my central conclusion was twofold:

  1. that it’s crucial not to pretend that thinking is a disembodied thing (and how strange that we humans have ever managed to kid ourselves that it could be, given that the brain is just one organ, given that the heavy head sits so precariously atop the spine, given that the nerve relays around the “central” and “peripheral” nervous systems are all so massively interconnected, given that no one who has looked carefully has ever found “mind” showing itself separable from “body”);
  2. and also that it’s important not to pretend that ideally, thinking would always be quick and easy (you need a reason to bother, now, but then you need to not insist on being finished as soon as you’ve started).

In my academic coaching work, and in my weekly writing meetups with a colleague, I’m often struck how much it matters to be able to reassure ourselves that the feeling of battling, or of not quite getting it, or of finding it too complicated, is a big part of why we’re doing it. As organisms optimized for mere survival, we seek ease in all things. But as creatures whose evolutionary selection pressures are not only genetic, we also seek out difficulty as a proxy for purpose, and perhaps as a proxy for aliveness, for distinctness amidst the vastness. Allowing the course of our thinking to be slow and serpentine is usually how it gets to feel like anything at all—let alone feel like me.

Feeling like ourselves

Being coached myself a couple of years ago, I loved being asked this question: “When do you feel most yourself?” I worked my way towards an answer: First I said “When out hiking in mountains in the sunshine.” Then I said “And also when writing.” And then I put the two together: “Maybe when writing in my head out hiking sums it up best.” I think I had the brain in a vat idea in mind when I added: “not just an empty jar in a forest”. I’ve never liked walking under tree cover, and I love feeling arms and legs and neck and torso doing clever un-jar-like things under wide skies.

Sitting on a snowy mountaintop writing in a notebook.

Scribbling down the fruits of some thinking-through-walking-and-talking before I forget them, for a different academic talk, in my beloved San Gabriels on my birthday this February.

And there’s a social dimension to this too, sometimes: two not-jars walking and thinking together in conversation. I relish the kind of walking-and-talking companionship where silence is easy, where the topics are responsive to the setting but also have a momentum and shape concocted in the air between the two of us. I hope to walk with such companions sometimes this autumn and winter.

So, well, this post has grown as meandering as the upper reaches of a determined river! But I’ve liked the difficulties of connecting autumn with feminism, feminism with slowing down, slowing down with thinking through our bodies, thinking through our bodies with coming to know ourselves. I’ll close with another line from Berg’s Aeon essay:

“A well-fed woman is harder to dismiss. Harder to exhaust. Harder to convince that her own thinking is not worth following to its end.”

Thank you, chickens and cows and farmers, for my scrambled eggs on buttered bread this morning, and for all the other meals before and after my other times spent sitting and standing and walking whilst drafting and musing on this piece, for making my thinking possible.

And thank you, dear reader, for being a person for whom to write, and therefore to bother thinking!

Critiquing Peter Attia

Posted on by emilytroscianko
anger at female body objectification

This post reproduces an email that, after much nervous deliberation, I sent to Peter Attia in August 2023. I’d enjoyed other episodes of his Drive podcast in the past, and when a colleague shared an eating disorder-related episode of his podcast with me in late 2022, I expected something good.

After listening once, I was angry enough that I thought I should do something with the anger. I listened twice more to the full 2+ hours, with zero pleasure, over the next few months, in order to make good enough notes and then fact-check a draft email to him thoroughly enough to be confident in sending it. I then asked several people I trust for advice—about whether to write to him, or to his guest Holly Baxter, and how to improve what I’d written. I simply couldn’t face listening a fourth time when one of them suggested that it’d be good to include timestamps when referencing specific moments in the interview!

I don’t know quite why I got so nervous. I have no idea whether he or any of his team ever read my message. I only ever got an auto-reply informing me that “Unfortunately, due to the high volume of inquiries that Peter and his team receive, we are not able to read or respond to all questions or inquires [sic]”.

I think four months is enough time to give him to reply. So in case it can be of use to anyone else, I’m sharing my message here. Since I sent it, I’ve been thinking about the episode as an example of how to bypass listeners’ mental immune systems (an idea recently popularized by Andy Norman)—here, for instance, through the combination of Attia’s medical credentials and an appeal to common and deep-rooted body insecurities.

I won’t link to the original episode, because I think it’s a shoddy piece of work that doesn’t deserve more listeners, but you can find it quickly enough if you insist!

Hello Peter,

I hope this finds you well. I’m a recovery coach working with people with eating disorders (EDs) as well as a researcher at the University of Oxford. I also lift weights, and had a brief spell as a competitive powerlifter. I’m writing in response to your podcast interview with Holly Baxter, in case my perspective on it can be of use to you in guiding future decisions about your podcast.

I’ve listened to this episode carefully three times, and from my perspective, it’s a poor fit for a podcast whose remit encompasses cognitive and emotional as well as physical health. Indeed, my sense is that it directly encourages self-objectification and disordered eating.

In this email, if I may, I’ll offer a summary of the main points in the episode that lead me to this conclusion, followed by some references to relevant research.

***

Starting with the details of your conversation with Holly, I’ll divide them roughly into themes.

Holly has an ED:

  • Holly describes herself as not fully recovered from her ED. Based on her experience of partial ED recovery and your own experience of alcohol dependency, you agreed with each other 1) that EDs align with the substance-abuse model of addiction and 2) that therefore full recovery from an ED is impossible. Many people who have fully recovered from an ED (myself included) would take issue with these conclusions, and would observe that the second view is voiced only by individuals who haven’t fully recovered yet.

Holly’s business practices originate in her ED experiences:

  • Holly recounts her experience of an ED and describes herself as having only recently started to work on her mental health, after years of working with nutrition/training clients whilst suffering from an ED herself, with varying degrees of anosognosia and suicidality. That is, her current business model grew out of methods developed under the influence of an ED.

Holly’s business practices encourage attitudes and behaviours that she understands as contributors to her own ED:

  • Holly states that the desire for control of her nutrition was the starting point for her ED, and her business model depends on teaching others how to exert control over their nutrition, including via calorie restriction.
  • Holly states that “trying to control your body, which is trying to control you”, was the hardest thing about being seriously ill. But her business model revolves around helping clients to try to control their bodies’ (shape, size, composition).
  • Holly states that restriction of foods reliably makes one crave them, and that practising self-compassion and self-forgiveness and allowing herself to eat ice cream and gain weight was integral to the recovery progress she has made so far. Yet her business model centres on advising clients to engage in dietary restriction, for example to develop expertise in what a 4oz piece of chicken looks like, because there’s “so much value in dedicating a set amount of time to weighing food”. She criticizes individuals who are unwilling to put the work in to make calorie-counting cognitively automatic: “I really struggle with people who don’t want to invest that time, because it’s a lifelong skill”. As she says, it might take 6 months to get the hang of it, but she’s been doing it over 12 years now, so she can estimate or eyeball anything. “You get really good”, she says, in the same conversation that began with her acknowledging that her ED recovery is incomplete. I hope it will take her less than 12 years to unlearn this skill, but for many individuals in recovery from an ED, the calorie-counting habit and all its associated pathology is hard to eradicate—and their health and happiness depend on their doing so.
  • Holly begins her work with clients by asking them to show her somebody whose physique they like on social media. Yet she concludes your conversation by saying that “the best step I ever took” was to get rid of aesthetics-focused social media.
  • Holly claims not to understand why with female body ideals we “seem to find ourselves back at these extremes”, while making a living from promoting extreme self-objectification in others.
  • Holly describes the damaging limitations that methods like hers impose on individuals’ lives, and both the joys and the difficulties of lifting these restrictions: how gradual (still energy-restricted) reintroduction of slightly more nourishing ways of eating feels itself like a diet; how without the immediate goal of measurable bodily objectification, continuing restriction is really hard; how allowing themselves a couple of glasses of wine or dessert with friends makes a meaningful difference to these women’s lives. 

You choose a conversational structure that espouses ED-compatible (and highly gender-normative) attitudes and behaviours:

  • Fairly early on in your conversation, Holly gives an example of how she helps her clients achieve perspective on their body appearance preoccupations, by asking them “would you have been invited to that wedding if you’d been 10 kg heavier?” The typical response is “yes, of course”. She points out that this is the obvious response because this individual has something admirable about them that people like (e.g. a sense of humour) that has nothing to do with bodyweight or bodyfat percentage. You nonetheless proceed to structure the episode via the conceit of a woman who wants to “look the best she can” for her wedding or for a “girls’ trip coming up”—a woman who at the end of the process is meant to look better in her wedding dress than she would have a year earlier.
  • Holly describes how praise for her “superior physique” fuelled her ED, from which, again, she has stated that she has not fully recovered. In your conversation with her, you repeatedly praise her physique, and you structure the conversation around an in-depth investigation of her methods for achieving aesthetic change in her own body and assisting others in achieving it in theirs.

You fail to highlight the health risks of the way of life that informs her business model:

  • At one point you challenge Holly briefly on the health dangers of engaging in an activity that resulted, for most of her career, in amenorrhea. When she responds with “It depends; lots of people in the bodybuilding space don’t even want kids, so fertility is not an issue” you instantly back off and neglect to point out that having a functioning hormonal cycle is crucial to health in numerous ways that have nothing to do with a desire to procreate. 

Holly admits that her methods do not work:

  • The devastating punchline to this long conversation is that Holly’s methods don’t even work. After all the calorie-counting, all the photo exchanges, all the damaging lessons in how to ignore your body’s appetites and eat according to a preset regime mapped out by someone else, “the change is not as visible as you’d think”. The first attempt at fat loss often doesn’t get you there, and multiple “recovery diets” are often needed. This is ideal for a business model aiming to keep clients paying in hope of elusive future rewards. It is also an excellent way to get individuals trapped in an endless cycle of dissatisfaction, unrealistic targets, and the self-destructive habits fed by both.

In sum, in this episode you showcase a business run by a woman with an active ED who communicates numerous ways in which her business encourages the pathological attitudes and habits that continue to impair her own health. And you offer no meaningful critique of any of it.

***

To offer a research context for these observations, I would refer you to a range of research literature indicating strong associations between EDs or subclinical disordered eating and 1) bodybuilding, 2) calorie counting and related practices, and 3) self-objectification. Here are some examples with illustrative quotes.

Bodybuilding:

Goldfield, G. S., Blouin, A. G., & Woodside, D. B. (2006). Body image, binge eating, and bulimia nervosa in male bodybuilders. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 51(3), 160-168.

“High rates of weight and shape preoccupation, extreme body modification practices, binge eating, and bulimia nervosa (BN) were reported among MBB [male bodybuilders], especially among those who competed. CMBB [competitive male bodybuilders] reported higher rates of binge eating, BN [bulimia nervosa], and AAS [anabolic androgenic steroid] use compared with RMBB [recreational male bodybuilders], but exhibited less eating-related and general psychopathology compared with MBN [men with bulimia nervosa]. Few psychological differences were found between CMBB and RMBB. 

Devrim, A., Bilgic, P., & Hongu, N. (2018). Is there any relationship between body image perception, eating disorders, and muscle dysmorphic disorders in male bodybuilders? American Journal of Men’s Health, 12(5), 1746-1758.

“eating disorder psychopathology is positively related to body dissatisfaction and body dysmorphic disorders in male bodybuilders”

Lapinskienė, I., Mikulevičienė, G., Laubner, G., & Badaras, R. (2018). Consequences of an extreme diet in the professional sport: Refeeding syndrome to a bodybuilder. Clinical Nutrition ESPEN, 23, 253-255.

“Refeeding syndrome, as a life-threatening condition, is well known among severely malnourished or deeply metabolically stressed patients. This case presents an atypical manifestation of the syndrome to a young bodybuilder, whose extreme diet, including 5 months of insufficient nourishment before the sport competition and 6 days of carbohydrates overload afterwards, has led him to a bilateral lower – limb paralysis and drastic homeostatic disturbances. […] This case reflects to high prevalence of eating disorders or non-adequate nutrition among weight-sensitive sport athletes.” 

Chaba, L., D’Arripe-Longueville, F., Scoffier-Mériaux, S., & Lentillon-Kaestner, V. (2019). Investigation of eating and deviant behaviors in bodybuilders according to their competitive engagement. Deviant Behavior, 40(6), 655-671.

“dietary strategies and deviations (e.g., disordered eating, doping use, addictive training) develop with competitive commitment”

Efthymiou, D., Kokokiris, L., Mesiari, C., & Vassilopoulou, E. (2021). Perceived ideal body weight exacerbates bulimia and dieting in bodybuilding athletes. Toxicology Reports, 8, 1777-1782.

“Body image perception and satisfaction in bodybuilders and strength athletes can be impaired by their desire for a lower body weight, leading to disordered eating behaviors.”

“The degree of deviation between the perceived ideal body weight and the actual body weight was associated with increased risk of eating disorder.”

“As the recreational bodybuilding athletes appeared to be more vulnerable to disordered eating behaviors, appropriate educational intervention should be undertaken to provide holistic dietary, psychological and sport coaching, for both professional and non-professional athletes, to promote the original dual concept of healthy body and mind.”

Calorie counting:

Levinson, C. A., Fewell, L., & Brosof, L. C. (2017). My Fitness Pal calorie tracker usage in the eating disorders. Eating Behaviors, 27, 14-16.

“My Fitness Pal is widely used in an eating disorder population and is perceived as contributing to eating disorder symptoms.”

Simpson, C. C., & Mazzeo, S. E. (2017). Calorie counting and fitness tracking technology: Associations with eating disorder symptomatology. Eating Behaviors, 26, 89-92.

“Individuals who reported using calorie trackers manifested higher levels of eating concern and dietary restraint, controlling for BMI. Additionally, fitness tracking was uniquely associated with ED symptomatology after adjusting for gender and bingeing and purging behavior within the past month. Findings highlight associations between use of calorie and fitness trackers and eating disorder symptomatology. Although preliminary, overall results suggest that for some individuals, these devices might do more harm than good.”

Self-objectification:

Mehak, A., Friedman, A., & Cassin, S. E. (2018). Self-objectification, weight bias internalization, and binge eating in young women: Testing a mediational model. Body Image, 24, 111-115.

“Results indicated that women who self-objectified and internalized negative weight-related attitudes reported greater binge eating (rs=.43 and rs=.57, respectively) and these associations were mediated by the combined effects of body shame and appearance anxiety.”

Schaefer, L. M., Burke, N. L., Calogero, R. M., Menzel, J. E., Krawczyk, R., & Thompson, J. K. (2018). Self-objectification, body shame, and disordered eating: Testing a core mediational model of objectification theory among White, Black, and Hispanic women. Body Image, 24, 5-12.

“Existing experimental and correlational research largely supports the proposed associations between self-objectification and its behavioral manifestation self-surveillance, body shame, and disordered eating […]. In particular, there is considerable support for the core mediational model proposed by objectification theory, wherein body shame mediates the association between self-objectification and eating pathology.”

Daniels, E. A., Zurbriggen, E. L., & Ward, L. M. (2020). Becoming an object: A review of self-objectification in girls. Body Image, 33, 278-299.

“Self-objectification is associated with a number of negative effects on psychological well-being in adult women including body shame, heightened risk for disordered eating, reduced self-esteem, and reduced sexual satisfaction. Self-objectification also negatively impacts women’s cognitive performance […].” (references omitted)

Most of these data are only observational, and it remains to be established whether the correlations reflect a direct causal relationship in either direction (bodybuilding/calorie-counting/self-objectification leads to disordered eating, or vice versa) or all result from some other cause—or, more likely, complex feedback dynamics exist amongst these and other factors. Regardless, it seems reasonable to hypothesise that businesses encouraging healthy or vulnerable women into aesthetics-oriented body control and restrictive eating practices are unlikely to have positive effects on any dimension of health.

***

I was unsure whether to write to Holly or to you about this. I’m sure she thinks of herself as sincere in her passion for mental health and her desire to “do education now”. In the meantime, however, she has so little formal knowledge of EDs that she doesn’t even take time to familiarize herself with the diagnostic criteria for a high-profile podcast interview. I hope that one day she’ll drop the pretence that being fully recovered is impossible, get there herself, and transform her business practices into ones that do something other than turn human bodies into aesthetic objects.

But ultimately, you had the power here. She runs a business that contributes to strengthening precisely the sociocultural trends that contribute to her unresolved ED. And you gave her a wide-reaching platform from which to voice her perspectives unchallenged. So I’m writing to you. 

I’ve rarely encountered material presenting itself as professional and health-oriented that promotes pro-ED messaging as strongly as this interview does. You speak from a position of considerable perceived authority in the medical domain, and I imagine that you and Holly together may already have done considerable harm via this episode. I hope that in the future you’ll think carefully about how you configure the conversations you have with your podcast guests when they are promoting questionable practices for financial gain, especially when they are in ill health themselves. I would be glad if this message could offer any practical pointers as to how you might do so.

In the New York Times Morning briefing last weekend, an excerpt of your interview with David Marchese was featured, starting with the quote, “Many people, I think, are underemphasizing strength training.” I think it’s wonderful that you’re encouraging more individuals to consider taking up strength training. I also find it deeply depressing to imagine that a woman who wanted to follow your encouragement by seeking out more content of yours on the topic might land on this podcast episode and think that this is how she should proceed.

Thank you for taking the time to read this long message.

Emily 

And thanks to DALL-E for the image!

10 Steps to a New Year’s Resolution That Will Work

Posted on by emilytroscianko
new years resolution notebook sunshine

New Year’s resolutions are really easy to get wrong, where wrong typically means unviable (e.g. too vague or unrealistic to be able to follow through on) and/or ill-conceived (i.e. even if you did follow through, this would never get you the change you really want).

Both failings can be easily sidestepped by paying attention to how well you can get your feelings of “I ought to do this” (which may be a strong motivator as you toy with the idea of setting a resolution) aligned with the feeling “I want to do this” (which is what will carry you through meaningful change long after that 1 Jan glow of inspiration has faded).

Here are 10 steps to making a New Year’s resolution that has a decent chance of really working out well for you this year, illustrated with a toy example: starting with a hazy sense that maybe you want to get fewer takeouts and cook for yourself more often in 2023.

If you like, take an hour with a pen and paper this New Year’s Day and see where you end up!

1. Choose something you actually care about, not something you think you should. It can be either a) something you want to rid your life of or b) something you want to bring into your life. If you get the want right, the should will fall naturally into place.

What is it you really care about with this replace-takeouts-with-massages idea? Is this mostly about saving money, about developing your culinary skills, about getting healthier, about losing weight, about having evenings that feel different…? 

2. Define success ultra-clearly: What precisely do you want any changes you make to achieve for you? Why? Why? (until you really feel it)

Once you’re done with brainstorming around your territories of desire, now you get specific on your intended outcomes. Maybe you’ll start with: I want to waste less money on home delivery so I can get more massages instead. Or: I want to have a repertoire of 7 meals that taste decent that I can cook for people when they come round. Or: I want to get better skin with fewer breakouts. Or: I want to lose 5 lb. Or: I want to spend time cooking as soon as I get in from work, to help my mind switch off and mark a boundary to stop work and start my evening. Then take what you just wrote and do the repeated why’s on it. 

Some of your wants might survive the why’s: e.g. I want to spend less on takeouts/delivery because I want to get 2 massages a month, because I feel so much better when my muscles are more relaxed and fortnightly is about ideal. 

Some may fall at the “I really care about this” hurdle: e.g. I want to spend less on takeouts/delivery because I feel guilty about how much I spend, because I get the feeling my parents think it’s ridiculous to spend that much, but actually, do I care what they think? Maybe not. I have enough money and I like being able to spend it this way. 

Others may reveal themselves as generally incoherent or indefinable: e.g. you may not be able to say anything much about the precise ways in which this change involves you getting healthier (or why you care).

Others again may turn out to involve a self-deceiving kind of mismatch: between the claimed benefit (e.g. weight loss) and the thing you really want (e.g. to feel confident in your body, which you realize you also didn’t when you weighed less a few years ago). (Weight loss is one of the standard realms in which cultural norms drive self-deception, making us think we aspire to things we actually don’t.)

Or the mismatch may be of the implementation type: between the thing you really want (clearer skin) and the proposed method (dietary changes). Once you do some research on whether dietary fat intake has any effect and conclude it probably doesn’t, you might realize you need to think about direct skincare options instead. 

If any of these obstacles arise, you need to work out whether you’re still on to something important with your desire and this type of method, or whether the whole idea is misguided in some way. A chat with someone sensible may help!

You should end up with something that when you read it back makes you think: oo, yes.

3. Brainstorm methods for achieving that change, emphasising a) ultra-specific and b) appealing.

Here you might come up with ideas like: set up a “Massage” savings pot; stop in at Waitrose after work on Thursday; choose some kind of meat or veggie substitute plus veg plus a dessert for Thursday and Friday nights; keep the receipt and work out roughly how much I saved relative to the usual UberEats; transfer that amount to the savings pot straightaway. At this point you might realize the twice-weekly takeout savings aren’t likely to cover the twice-monthly massages you were hoping for, so then you might have to get creative (maybe one less eating/drinking-out per week as well?) or downgrade your aim (just one massage a month?). You may thus have tricky questions to ask (again!) about how much this matters and whether this is really the right route to it.

4. Choose your method.

Select whatever is the most viable and appealing combination of tactics to get you what you really want (as specified in 2). If there seems a hard tradeoff between viable and appealing, I’d suggest going with appealing, e.g. if Waitrose costs a bit more but is a more enjoyable shopping experience than Tesco, go with Waitrose, to give this new habit a better chance of getting embedded; you’ll probably manage to get viability enhanced (e.g. not buying all the very finest meats) once you’re actually doing it. Doing anything different at all is usually the hard part.

5. Decide how long is a reasonable timeframe for this change to achieve you what you want. Make that your review date and mark it in your calendar, summarizing your desired state by this point as a reminder.

You might conclude that the massage idea will take a month to try out and give a proper chance to improve your life, and set a review date for the weekend just after a full month has elapsed (Sat 4 Feb). Maybe you’ll add it to your calendar in question form, like “Did the takeout/massage cut-paste made me feel more chilled in January?”.

6. Do any planning you need to get ready to make this change.

Not much planning is needed here, just maybe setting a calendar reminder for the four Thursdays just before you leave work, doing a quick bit of online inspiration-seeking for things you might buy in week 1, plus prodding your friend again for their massage therapist recommendation.

7. Make a contingency plan. If you notice it’s mid-Jan and you haven’t been doing what you said you would, how are you going to respond?

Planning for failure here might look like: If I miss a Thursday, get to Waitrose the next day. Or you might prefer just to write off this week and get back on track next Thursday. 

8. Get yourself a new notebook or save a new document to keep notes on the change and what it’s doing for you, to help you savour the benefits, make any adjustments that may be needed, and generally be attentive to this process of change and its consequences.

Dig out that notebook you got for Christmas and write “My 2023 New Year’s Resolution journal” on the first page, then make a few notes when things come up. Maybe you notice on the first rainy Thursday afternoon that you’re feeling a lot like not bothering with this idea. Maybe on Friday afternoon you realize that it’s really nice knowing there’s food in the fridge for dinner. Maybe on a Saturday early evening you feel some resentment at eating something quick before going out rather than getting food in town. And maybe on your way home after the first massage you have the thought that you’d forgotten just how blissed-out this makes you feel. Explore what comes up in writing, whether in the spirit of finding solutions or just accepting and reinforcing what you still intend.

9. When the review date comes, take 20 minutes to answer (in writing) the question “Did I achieve what I wanted?” and explore anything that flows from your initial answer regarding the how, the why, and the what-next.

Reflect, with your journal’s help, on how this month has felt overall, how well the inevitable tradeoffs worked (overall did the benefits outweigh the costs?), and whether you want to keep it up or change something or abandon the whole thing. Perhaps here you’ll realize that even though the foody savings don’t quite pay for the massages, you like both enough to keep them up anyway, and you can cover the additional massage costs from other sources.

10. Decide what happens next, and do it!

Your conclusion might be: This is great and I want to do it for February too, apart from the third weekend because it’s my birthday and I’m eating out / at friends’ places Thursday to Saturday. So I’ll just get one massage, sometime that week, and I’ll try that other massage place I saw. I’ll check in again on the 26th to decide what to do for March.

This might seem a rather involved process, but if it gets you something you really want this year, it should be well worth it.

Alternatively, if even contemplating doing this makes you realize there’s nothing you want that much, fine, enjoy not setting any resolutions this year!

How To Bridge the Insight/Action Gap (Part 2)

Posted on by emilytroscianko
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Reasons why it’s easier to understand than to act, and what to do about them.

In the first part of this post, I introduced the insight/action gap and offered one macro reason why it’s so prevalent: changing things takes effort, and as long as we’re alive, the evolutionary imperative says “it’s all good”. I also suggested that we should think of this gap less as a singular chasm that mysteriously doesn’t get spanned, and more as the output of a million micro-forces that don’t happen to push/pull in quite the right directions.

In this second part, I’ll cover the first two of the major structural reasons why the gap can come about and then hang about, and make suggestions for how to counter them.

1. Interpretation is easy and satisfying.

The reason: Humans are interpretation addicts. Even just within the cognitive sphere, our daily lives are made up of constant interpretive activities attaching to everything from patterns of light and shadow to football scores to the ever so slight arc of your mother’s eyebrow when you tell her about your travel plans. And all this incomprehensibly intricate activity attaches to language more readily than to anything else. 

Language turns continuous, analogue sounds into discrete segments: the letters of the alphabet that we combine and recombine into words, and the words we amalgamate into sentences.* The digital nature of language makes it extremely easy to copy and recombine and do complex things with it that feel satisfying—like write blog posts about it being helpfully digital, or concoct arguments for why moving house probably isn’t worth it. So there’s a bias to making everything semantic; you can think of language as a funnel that drags everything into itself. 

Talk therapies are a great example of the language funnel in action: Let’s take all the complexities of my existence and turn them into words, often narratively structured and retrospective (here’s the story of how this current life situation came about). All stories are satisfying, and stories about ourselves are even more satisfying than all the others, and neat stories that tie up all the loose ends are the most satisfying of all—even when the satisfaction comes laced with masochism. Therapies that privilege the verbal interaction itself aren’t directly designed to help anyone change behaviours. They’re predicated on the belief that the language funnel is the way to get the problem solved: that if we can just do the funnelling really well, then the insight will follow from that, and then the insight will lead to the actions that change the life in the desired ways. But this assumption is often not borne out in reality. In fact, the insight/action gap is being assumed not to exist. Which is fairly stupid.

[*I owe this insight—beautifully obvious once you see it—to my mother, Sue Blackmore. It’s from a chapter draft for a book I hope she’ll complete and publish, with the working title God’s Memes.]

The response: Make a habit of taking the next step whenever you come to a conclusion in words, whether that’s when journaling or in conversation with someone or just following a train of thought. For example, you conclude that self-esteem issues are part of what makes you keep not asking for that promotion. OK, so you don’t stop there. Instead you decide on a single action you can take that may even slightly reduce the effects you’ve identified, e.g. get yourself a self-help book on self-esteem, try out two exercises from it, and see whether they make any difference. 

Think of the verbal conclusion as a hypothesis to be tested, not a truth to sit back into. If the action you try out does nothing, maybe your conclusion was off-base. If it does something unexpected, ditto. The point is not to get invested in your own right-or-wrongness, but to open up avenues for change that will bear some relation to the original hypothesis, and that will be coming about precisely because you dared to treat it as a starting point not a stopping place.

2. Intellectual change is overvalued relative to practical change.

The reason: The language funnel is propped up by the way that as societies we often privilege verbalized intellectual outputs (exam scripts, books, TED talks, even fluent conversational insights into one’s own problems) over practical skills and transformations that may sound trivial when articulated in words (e.g. learning to eat in a way that suits your body and life, having a romantic relationship that feels wonderful). This persists even though the practical things typically have much more direct and/or profound consequences for quality of life. 

In many areas of life, changing practical actions ought to be seen as urgent and important, but often isn’t, in part because the “you need to work out what the root causes are first” line dominates—e.g. what’s really the origin of these relationship problems you’re having? Behaviour change can lead to mindset change just as much as the other way round (I’d argue much more readily), but the societal bias means that the action-to-attitude half of the causal loop is often neglected. This is deeply unfortunate, given there are many factors that make it easier to get any process of change kicked off with a tweak to what you do rather than attempted alteration to how you think. Telling yourself to feel differently about something you’ve been feeling a particular way about for a long time (e.g. feeling less angry towards your partner when they do that thing you can’t stand) is typically harder than doing something relevantly different in your day (e.g. asking them how their day went). And of course, focusing on thinking—even if we  do successfully do it differently—can very easily just pile up more and more thinking that never translates: feeling less anger may or may not translate into your relationship really blossoming again.

The response: A simple tactic to uncover and counteract the default valuation biases we often have as individuals is firstly to rate the perceived significance of an intellectual conclusion (e.g. this habit that’s obviously creating problems for my relationship—maybe something about flirting with other people, say—represents a part of me that isn’t getting expressed any other way) immediately after reaching it and then setting a calendar alert to do so again a month later. Then, second, do something similar with a practical change that relates to this conclusion and that you also try  out (e.g. finding some other way to express this part of you or something that may contribute to laying it to rest—maybe making time for something else you find exciting, with or without your partner): how significant does the change feel a) when you first decide on it, b) just after you’ve first done it, and c) a month after you first did it? When you’ve got both your 1-month ratings you can look back at both sets, make some notes on what patterns you notice, and draw some conclusions about expected versus actual significance.

3. Thoughts cost less than actions.

The reason: As I pointed out in Part 1, actions come with resource costs. Of course, thoughts do too, but they come a lot cheaper. So if you can get away with just doing some thinking, inferencing, pattern-matching, then you get the interpretive satisfaction and perceived significance outlined in points 1 and 2 without the costs of actually doing anything.

The trouble is that cognitive dissonance naturally arises when you reach a convincing conclusion you don’t act on: You’ve now set up a conflicted situation in which your knowledge and actions are at odds with each other, e.g. your belief that rewarding jobs are good things for people to have versus your demonstrably not acting to get yourself one. And cognitive dissonance is unpleasant. So to lessen it to a tolerable level, what you need is not just to do the low-cost thinking, but alsoto give yourself good enough reasons for not changing anything in response. And this is where cognitive dissonance reduction kicks in. 

Dissonance reduction is a highly honed human skill, and it can work wonders, as long as the miracle you want is to reduce discomfort at the cost of preventing problem-solving. This is the tradeoff (and it’s one of the most brutal there is) because, by definition, you’re persuading yourself that the problem isn’t as serious as it might seem, or that the costs of action are too high or its probability of success too low, or whatever, in order to make yourself feel better about inaction. If you convince yourself that it was always inevitable that you would end up in this kind of dull and low-paying job and that now after 20 years it’s clear that you’ll always have jobs like this, for example, or if you tell yourself that having a job you really look forward to getting back to on a Sunday evening sounds idyllic but that no one really loves their work that much, do they, then that extra little bit of cognitive activity saves you the effort of actually trying to solve the problem.

The response: I guess there are three main options here: 1) improve the (perceived) cost/benefit ratio for taking action, 2) worsen it for thinking, or 3) block the cognitive dissonance reduction. So you might 1) devise very small specific problem-solving actions to take (e.g. 30 minutes’ online research of vacancies in your area), or 2) tell someone else your cognitive conclusions so it’s not just you who knows you’re not doing anything about them, or 3) identify a common dissonance reduction tactic you tend to employ (e.g. trivializing or distracting yourself from the costs of the conflict) and invent a way to impede it (e.g. starting some daily journaling where you make a point of giving yourself space to think about what your professional dissatisfaction is actually doing to your life and your family’s).

4. Thoughts can be one-offs; actions usually can’t. 

There’s a particular kind of structural mismatch between insight and the corresponding actions that contributes to making the former easier. With insights, although they may take time and effort to formulate, once you’ve achieved one, it often has a “one shot and you’re done” feel to it. I might conclude, say, that the ways I keep spending my weekends seem to make little sense given my explicit life priorities reflect a profound need I hadn’t previously acknowledged to myself. Maybe wearing myself out with marathon training despite saying I want to start a business reflects a need to give myself excuses for not achieving as much as other people seem to think I could. Once I’ve reached that conclusion and it has a certain minimum satisfaction rating (i.e. it makes enough sense of enough things without making too many implausible assumptions), I’m done; I’ve got my payoff. Conversely, there are very few one-shot actions that get you high satisfaction in one go. Truly conclusive actions are rare, and many pivotal actions (leaving your partner or your job, starting a business or getting married) are merely the starting point for the multiple repetitions with variation and progression that are needed to get you what you want (e.g. a great career or relationship).

The response: Seek out actions that have as many of the benefits as possible of one-shot solutions. One way to do this is to optimize a new action to have immediate payoffs. So you  might make a change—however small—to your weekend routines with or without your family that instantly feels better and more aligned with your priorities or values than the previous norm. A related option is to design the new action to bring about cascades of other changes. For example, stopping watching TV every evening after dinner: 

–> helps you do more varied things with your partner, which 

–> makes you both feel like you’re investing more into the relationship and getting more out of it, which 

–> makes you feel more able to express little things that are on your mind before they turn into enormous problems, which 

–> makes you both more relaxed knowing you’ve got a solid communicative foundation, which 

–> helps sex happen more often and feel better, which

–> improves everything! (and is a great substitute for telly)

5. Insights tend to apply at the wrong level of detail.

The reason: This is one of the biggest of the big. Verbalized intellectual insights tend to operate at a high level of generality, e.g. my employment situation revolves around my lack of self-esteem, or, slightly less vaguely, around my unwillingness to demand more than the merely tolerable for myself, while tiring myself out trying to help others live better. This type of insight might generate something that feels like a plan of action: I need to bolster my self-esteem / start being more assertive / get a new job / starting listening to my body’s needs / eat more / run less. But even the last of these, which sound the most practical, aren’t particularly useful as direct guides to action. I’m struck so often by how often you can think you’re making a plan when actually what you’re doing is sketching out a hazy aspiration. What you really need to make it likely that you’ll take and sustain meaningful action is something more like “I’m going to try out 15-minute Mon/Wed/Fri evening yoga sessions for 2 weeks after getting changed from work and before making dinner; then use questions x, y, and z to assess how well that routine is working for me relative to going for a run in the early morning; then decide whether to keep them going or adjust or try something completely different”.

The response: In any life domain where you’ve identified that stasis is the default (e.g. physical wellbeing, relationship, career), practise developing your insights into guides to action at a useful level of specificity. Usually—because our minds resist specifics at every turn—this means the more the better, including contingency planning (e.g. if I miss a weekday evening I’ll do a weekend morning instead, or I’ll do nothing different and just get back on track on the next scheduled day) as well as “how will I know whether I’ve succeeded?” criteria.

6. High-level fatalism is infectious; “this isn’t too bad really” is endemic.

The reason: Believing certain things about the structure of the universe and your place in it makes effective action more or less likely. If, for example, you believe that there’s a divine plan and your suffering is happening for a reason, you may be less likely to do anything about it. Ditto if you believe everyone else’s suffering matters more than your own, a belief that often comes in “I don’t deserve anything better than this” clothing. Even if you don’t have any obvious high-level beliefs blocking your inclinations to act, the belief prerequisites for action may be missing: Seeking and taking satisfaction in intellectual insights requires you to believe only that the universe makes some sense; taking action, meanwhile, requires you also to believe yourself capable of change and deserving of it (or at least not undeserving, or alternatively indifferent to the entire concept). As an onlooker to another individual’s suffering, one of the greatest frustrations of all is often the “this isn’t bad enough to take seriously” response. It’s the easiest thing in the world to find examples of other people who are worse off than we are, and then to use them to justify our inaction. And maximum bystander frustration may correlate with low-to-medium suffering, since there the downplaying is easy but the solutions probably are too. After a chat with someone the other week, I jotted down “‘I can’t complain’ probably means you should!”, and maybe that sums it up.

The response: Changing high-level beliefs is one of the most effortful cognitive things we can do, because they tend to be inculcated early on by a thousand powerful sociocultural forces, often in the form of religious packaging that’s had thousands of years to evolve (Blackmore, 1999, Ch. 15). It can be done, though, and recognising its necessity to achieving something else personally meaningful (e.g. a professional or relationship change) can be a catalyst to a liberating loss of constricting ideology, even if the path there is often traumatic. If what’s needed is nothing quite as formalized as apostasy, other ways of switching up high-level priors can work too, like a changed physical and social environment or mind-altering substances and practices of one kind or another.

7. The gap makes itself look wider than it is. 

The reason: Alongside deferring action, another things humans are good at is over-generalization, particularly with a negative slant. As I pointed out in my own resignation story in Part 1, quite likely your “years of doing nothing” aren’t actually that, when you observe more carefully and assess more fairly. 

And maybe you have made major attempts in the past either to shake things up or to leave the relationship or both. Maybe those efforts have almost worked. And in between them, maybe you’ve made quite a few smaller forays into altering the details. In this sense, “doing nothing” is normally not literally doing nothing. In reality it was probably simply not enough, not nothing. If you consider any of your “really change something” efforts followed by the lapses back into the status quo that came after—maybe that month or two when you tried a trial separation or had those couples counselling sessions—the near-miss structure can often be particularly clear. Think of all the little or not-so-little things that contributed: things like precisely how much work stress you were also under at the time; or just how well the counsellor’s approach seemed to gel with you versus your partner; or precisely how open you’d been with your partner about what was really bothering you right then; or exactly how much your children seemed to be noticing your arguments; or how often you were able to talk to your close friend about things during that phase; or how long and how enjoyable that work trip was that you took at the critical time; or where you were in your cycle on that critical weekend where everything blew up; or less readily detectable details like how your mood had been affected by the season or your diet… If just enough of these thousand details had been just enough different, that effort would have been the one that worked.

The response: When you pretend you haven’t done anything at all, you prevent yourself from learning from what you have done. Instead, you could do an audit of your work in this domain so far, mapping out rough dates and durations of things you tried and then asking questions like “what went right that time?”, “what single difference could have helped it keep going right?”, “what does that tell me for this time?”. Thus, by acknowledging that the gap has never been as enormous a gulf as you might otherwise have pretended, you make it much easier for yourself to bridge it for real this time.

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Chasm-jumping by Jolyon Troscianko.

8. The magic trick is just that.

The reason: Despite appearances, it’s crucial to remember that there is no mysterious abyss between understanding and doing. There are just many weighted probabilities for or against that first small action today and its repetition today and the day after and its variation next month. Insight is a product and change is a process, and the product needs to be treated as valuable primarily through its capacity to unleash the process.

Ultimately, actions are self-correcting and thoughts aren’t. You can labour under a cognitive misconception for a lifetime quite blissfully ignorant—but if you really take the corresponding actions, the world is much likelier to correct you. A prime example that springs to mind here is weight loss. The conclusion that not having achieved this is the source of one’s problems and that achieving it would solve them is one of the currently most widespread delusions there is. Of course, one sneaky survival trick this stupid meme has is that even if you do act on it, even for many weeks or months, lasting weight loss is usually not achieved, which keeps you thinking until your deathbed that your life would be way better if it were. But the belief now also comes equipped with a convenient plethora of practical and socially validated avenues for trying to act on it, and the mere believing has become so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible: of course everyone wants to weigh less, so let’s not even think of that as a question, let’s all just fixate on what the best gimmick is for making it happen. 

So, bridging the gap is just as important for a false belief as for a true one. But after that, so is pausing, looking around you, and asking how life on this side of the chasm (or the puddle) compares to life on the other. If it’s worse, or not better, we can stride on into the further reaches of the territory where insight and action pose less and less as polar opposites. 

The response: Practise anti-magical thinking and doing whenever you can, by honouring in your everyday life the truths that there are always options, that you always learn by trying something different—and that the insight that comes from action is (when you really pay attention to it) the kind that really counts.

How To Bridge the Insight/Action Gap (Part 1)

Posted on by emilytroscianko
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Part 1: An introduction to knowing and not doing

How is it that you can know exactly what to do and yet you still don’t do it? 

Years can slip by in the state of knowing and not doing. Decades can. Lifetimes can.

Knowing and not doing is a state humans often dwell in. It can take the form of career or relationship stagnation, as well as arising at the everyday micro level of clearing out those drawers or uninstalling Instagram. Humans are great at deferring things—and the amount of insight we have into why we shouldn’t often seems not to make a lot of difference.

Evolved to do nothing

The insight/action gap—a specific variant on the general category of procrastination—might seem like a grand mystery about human nature: How could it be that creatures like us could so often know so much and do so very little? But if you want a grand answer, you probably don’t have to go much beyond the simple evolutionary pressure that says: I’m alive, it’s all good, change nothing. Changing things costs resources, and any use of resources could turn out to be a waste. Changing things often involves increased risk, or just less easily estimable risk. And so the thought/action gap naturally opens up. 

Thinking and doing don’t cost the same. Minds get easily sucked into hyperactive patterns of imagining possible actions, and that hyperactivity tendency exists because it can be helpful for keeping us alive, without costing too much. Thinking “too much” often pays off, especially when the thinking involves mindreading about the possible actions other people (e.g. mates, competitors) might be about to take. Stopping before actual action is a useful default imperative in a context where resources are few and survival is precarious.

Obviously, that’s not us now. Excess resource availability at the individual level arguably now causes more problems than scarcity in post-industrial societies, and mortality isn’t mostly the problem, misery is. Risk is more amorphous now (because we care about more things that aren’t just life versus death), and safety nets may be slightly more prevalent than in our evolutionary past. So it makes sense that this long-evolved prior, “change nothing”, wouldn’t be serving us very well anymore.

So that’s a grand answer for you. What about less grand answers? Beyond the basics of that energy-saving “do nothing” default, I think the micro-answer, or rather the aggregate of them, is really the point here. In general, action or no action comes down to finely weighted probabilities. 

The knife edge of pros and cons

Let’s take the example of a difficult relationship. You have years’ worth of accumulated insight into the problems. Maybe the insights have been multiplied and refined by therapy, individually and/or together. Over many weeks and months and years, you let things stay more or less as they were because you were prioritizing other things, or didn’t know quite where to start, or felt scared to. Just think of the millions of micro-weightings that have contributed, over the years, to helping inaction and no-change win out, even just infinitesimally, over the actions that could have genuinely either meaningfully improved the relationship or liberatingly ended it.

This kind of pattern doesn’t instil itself only in our personal lives; careers can be full of it too. Last summer I resigned from my university job designing and running a writing programme for grad students and postdocs, after three years of work that was radically underpaid and undervalued. I should have resigned sooner; probably I should have realized at the very beginning that the contractual terms were inappropriate. 

I didn’t do nothing all those three years. Around the end of year 2, I applied to have the post regraded to a higher salary band, and was refused with some empty words about how much my work was in fact valued. That was deeply frustrating, but obviously I still spent a year not-resigning. I also spent that year not doing other things that would have been sensible for paving the way to what came after. 

The things that kept me there doing almost nothing to change the situation weren’t total idiocy on my part; the brakes to change were effective precisely because they were partly good reasons for keeping on doing the same thing. How much I was learning from doing the work was a case in point. It was great to get the chance to design a whole writing programme from scratch and to refine it by witnessing how it helped and didn’t help the students and researchers it served. But it would also have been appropriate to do maybe a year’s learning under those contractual conditions, and then take my learning somewhere it would be more meaningfully valued by an employer or institutional client. What made sense initially stopped making sense long before I did anything to reflect that fact.

Another misleadingly good reason that kept me not taking action was the knowledge of being helpful to a large number of other people—the students and postdocs who without this programme would have had as little formal support for building structures and confidence for their academic writing as their predecessors. It was really hard suspecting (rightly, as it turned out) that the post wouldn’t be refilled and that a lot of what I was doing would just not happen if I left—and that therefore a couple of hundred people per year would be worse off, if I decided that my time was worth more than this. A very common structure for inaction is convincing ourselves that other people matter more than we do—even though when we’re getting exploited, that probably means other people are too (e.g. the next person who does this job). This instinct is closely related to the one that says “my problems aren’t bad enough to take seriously” (which I discuss in the eating disorder context here) and “here’s good enough” (explored via the concept of optimizing for what we care about but getting trapped in deceptive “locally optimal solutions” here).

Coming back to the evolutionary bias against risk—the inaction wasn’t really about risk in any tangible sense. The pay was so low that even a tiny amount of extra coaching or other work would easily fill the shortfall, and the CV/prestige points had been earned long ago. But I suppose there was still a vague lurking sense of “but I don’t know what else changing this will change”—a defaulting to “at least I know how life is with this in it”.

Bridging the gap

So, what finally made me do it? Actually, a major spur was listening to my mother and stepfather talking about upping the hourly rate for their personal assistant, cleaner, and gardener, and realizing that all of them were already earning more than I was. Maybe that doesn’t reflect brilliantly on me, but the realization that 10 years of higher education and another 10 of postdoctoral research plus academic training experience had—if I let this situation continue—basically increased my earning capacity by zero was a serious moment of “OK, this can’t carry on”. 

In the end, everything crystallized around the little phrase “opportunity cost”. I had a sharper and sharper awareness of all the things I couldn’t do—things that earned more money than this, and things that were not at all about the money—because of the time and energy I was giving to this. It was less and less ignorable how many hours a week (all tracked on my timesheet) were sunk into this, not for no reward, but for personal (both emotional and material) rewards that felt increasingly out of whack with the degree of value that was being derived by the people I was helping, and by the material recompense it was translated into. This was the institution’s fault, and essentially I spent three years trying to persuade a venerable university that writing support for humanities scholars needs taking seriously. I failed, as most people (though not all) have failed at most things (though not all) they’ve tried to change in this university. It was time to cut loose, well before that third summer—but by then at the very latest.

And so I sent my resignation email to my manager, and there was sadness in that ending. I felt angry that I had to stop doing something that was so useful to so many students just because the pay and prospects were so poor. I felt a little tearful when I ran the final writing event and was unable to tell the participants what would be happening after I’d left. I felt fairly cynical about the prospects of this being a protest resignation that actually does something—though I put a lot of work into that email, and I think it got through a little bit.

There was also great relief, and a sense of power, in doing this thing that had for so long needed doing—but had needed doing urgently only for my own sake. My last day at work happened to be my mother’s 70th birthday, so it was nice to echo her threshold crossing with my own version.

It took me a few more months to really start seizing the opportunities that a tiring, complex, though personally rewarding job had been robbing me of, but in the end I began to. 

Do I wish I’d done all this a year sooner? Maybe. I think I really needed to get certain that this was the only sensible option—and it’s frightening how long it can often take us to conclude we really are sure enough.

It’s not about not-knowing

Anyway, the point is, there are all kinds of factors that keep us accepting things we shouldn’t—and ignorance is often the least of them. In this case, certainly, I can’t blame ignorance. I signed that contract in my right mind (though distorted by many years of being on similarly bad university salaries); I submitted the timesheets and the payment totals every month; I knew (roughly) what the resignation process was. The basic structure of knowing what to do and why and not doing it was in place throughout. 

So, there was no magic to any of this, and no mystery about it at the time, really. There were just all the crucial prosaic everyday details that feed into answering the question: Does this thing that isn’t working very well get dislodged now, or does it survive another month, year, or decade?

In the second half of this post, I’ll offer you eight structural reasons why the insight/action gap comes into being. And, to try to stave off the irony of trying to merely understand the insight/action gap better, for each I’ll also give a suggestion for how to actually bridge it.

You can read on here. Or if you’re pausing here, I invite you to pay gentle attention to when and how you’re getting sucked into thinking and talking versus translating this into acting.