Why do people come to me? Some are in a state of emotional distress, anxiety, and depression. Others have fallen into substance abuse issues. Others have been sent in by a spouse. Perhaps they feel stalled in a job, career, or relationship. More often now, people are coming because they want to find out what is holding them back from having a more rewarding and fulfilling life. Professionally, or in a relationship, or problems with sexual potency. They feel stuck. then, there are the super strivers. Somehow, the C-suite, the professional sports career, making partner at a law firm has left them as unfulfilled as they were when they started out.
Invariably, people in distress search for answers. They want a reason. They are looking to social media or even AI for reasons and more – for quick fixes. Many have already been placed on a medication or been with therapists in the past that have been searching for answers with them.
But the one thing everyone has in common is that they look for reasons for their distress in their own conscious minds. Prolonged sleeplessness becomes attributed to “overthinking”. Anxiety and fear of a transition – marriage, retirement, career changes, etc. invariably come with a whole host of rational explanations.
Yet no matter how often or how intensely the search for reasons continues, it ultimately proves futile. Many are even frustrated by their own thinking and start to complain about “overthinking all the time”.
No one is immune from this. But, let’s look at what’s really going on.
My patients are neither unintelligent nor unwilling. They are just relying on the part of their mind they believe will explain themselves – but it isn’t actually built for that job at all.
What do I mean?
Psychology’s most durable finding, from Freud through Kahneman, is an uncomfortable one: The reasons we give for our own behavior are frequently constructed after the fact, and not the cause of it. Nisbett and Wilson showed this decades ago — people will confidently explain a choice that was actually driven by something they never registered at all.
In fact, clinical psychologists are now able to delineate separate processing systems in the brain. What Daniel Kahnneman called thinking fast and thinking slow, the research for which he won a Nobel prize. The fast processing system in our brains is capable of processing bits of information at a rate somewhere between two and 4 billion bits of information per second. This consists of sensory information, information from our bodies, past memories that are being triggered, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, intuitions, and the list goes on. It is too fast for us to process consciously in our awareness. This processing system is what we have come to call today the unconscious. The unconscious carries every single memory, interaction, and sensation from the beginning of our lives. It also lacks a timeline. What was the case when we were two or five or 10 or 19 and was so seal then, no longer applies when we are in our 30s 40s and 50s.Our conscious processing system, our slow brain, has been found to be able to process only about five bits of information maximum per second. It is also rooted in the present. We are trying to find and attach a rational reason to why we are feeling what we are feeling or stuck in the moments. We are stuck in using a moment in present time to try to capture what was wired years and even decades ago.
Hmmm – five bits in our slow brain versus two billion bits in our fast brain.
The real causes as to why we we feel so restless on a Sunday afternoon that we need to begin to drink, or that we can’t relax on vacation, or that the moment we start to grasp for something more, we sabotage ourselves are not available in the present moment at all. They may have been relevant in past situations, but are harmful to us in the present.
So what are we left with is the story we tell ourselves after the fact. Our brains need answers so we more or less invent them.
I see the clinical consequence of this constantly. Patients who keep failing in the same pattern are, almost without exception, patients who trust their own explanation for that pattern too much. The story feels true because it’s theirs. That doesn’t make it accurate.
I want to push on this a little further than the research usually gets pushed, because I think it explains why so much of what’s marketed as psychological help doesn’t hold up.
We’re asking the wrong questions of ourself. When something is troubling us, the instinct is to go hunting for the reason — a clean, nameable cause that can be reasoned with and then resolved. I understand the instinct. But the material that actually drives distress — unconscious thought, encoded emotion, sensation the body has been carrying since long before the mind could make sense of it — was never filed away as a reason to begin with. Back when things happened, it was probably a survival skill. Those experiences don’t answer to that kind of search.
It’s asking the wrong instrument to do the job.
I think about this with the athletes I’ve worked with and written about. An athlete whose identity has been built entirely around performance will often hand you a perfectly coherent explanation for a slump, an injury, a breakdown — the story makes sense, it’s well-rehearsed, and it’s almost never the whole thing. What’s actually driving it is usually further back: an identity that foreclosed too early, a family history of what performance was supposed to prove. That doesn’t show up under self-interrogation. It shows up in relationship, over time, when someone else is paying attention to what you can’t yet see.
This is where we begin. My patients and I working together to identify emotions, bodily sensations, mental imagery, and other experiences. Rather than thinking for an answer, the practice of beginning to learn how to connect, reflect, and access begins.
My son, a cardiac surgeon recently told us a humorous story at dinner. He trained at the Cleveland clinic under one of the top three aortic surgeons in the world. He was the chief resident at the time. They were alone in the middle of the night, trying to save a woman’s life while her aorta was exploding and shredding. A well-meaning nurse turned off the music which had been ubiquitous in the OR. The surgeon, while working furiously, announced “turn that music back on. the last thing I need to do right now is to think”. He was in the zone connected to his fast brain and saving a life.
This is where we can begin to learn how to be with ourselves and our own lives.