PART 1: The torturous position of knowing and not doing.
How is it that you can know exactly what to do and yet still not do it – is a question I asked myself every single night when I was stuck in the horrible world of quasi recovery. If this sounds familiar, and you find currently yourself suspended in this state of knowing and not doing, I hope this blog series will elucidate the insight/action gap isn’t a result of personal weakness, but a fundamental human tendency that you can do something about.
Although this blog is about eating disorder recovery, it cannot be ignored that the gulf between clear rational insight and the inability to translate it into change is not only something experienced by people with a mental illness. It is indeed true that occasions of logically knowing the best course of action and still not taking it is a behaviour common across all walks of life, however, eating disorders do seem particularly good at getting this split state to last an excruciatingly long time. This seems, in part, because their true cost/benefit structure can take a long time to become clear. And then, by the time it is clear that it does not, and will never, serve the intended ‘purpose’, you’ve often embedded yourself so deeply within its complex matrix that the way out may seem unimaginably hard.
The insight/action gap — a form of procrastination —might seem impossible to understand for such intellectual creatures such as humans, but in truth, doesn’t actually stretch that far beyond the simple evolutionary pressure. The prevalence of a split state and the resulting inaction can be partially accounted for by the simple evolutionary imperative, “If you’re alive, change nothing." Change requires effort. Change requires resources. Change requires navigation of something unfamiliar. In short, it’s our brain’s agreement with the mantra: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Why are our brains so change-resistant?
For most of you reading this, it’s you’ll know all of this already. As is the basis of the blog post, you do know all of the answers – you just aren’t acting on your wealth of knowledge. Irrespective of this, and just to establish a base for taking sed action, here is a little insight into why our brains hate change.
Unfamiliarity is something we are biologically hardwired to be resistant of. When we do enter situations of uncertainty, our brains delve into imagining possible outcomes. At some point in history, this would actually have been highly valuable in keeping us alive.
Mindreading or anticipating possible outcomes or behaviours of others (i.e. competitors) provided us with perceived security in our ability to survive any eventuality. And so, when we experienced new, we were alert and preparing for threats. Obviously, threats of the past no longer exist and therefore this prior long-evolved “change nothing” response doesn’t serve us very well anymore. Where the behaviours we used to repeat are ones that ensured our survival, there is actually very little in our post-industrial environment that we currently need to do to avoid harm.
Anyway, all of this is to say, our brains are basically a really large road map. Our daily habits and behaviours are major roadways. Asking your brain to change in habit, circumstance, sensation or feeling is like asking it to go down a bumpy dirt track instead of one of those smooth, well-driven roads. It is going to initially feel very uncomfortable to travel down and the brain isn’t going to be keen. Not only is it unfamiliar, but the outcome is less ‘known’ than the ones it has travelled down before. Even if logically it makes sense to change behaviour the neural pathway that has been well used will seem to be the more appealing option to go down. This is kind of what’s meant by the path of least resistance.
Meanwhile, you have years’ worth of accumulated insight. Maybe the insights have been multiplied and refined by therapy, blogs, books or even past recovery attempts. So, what happens when these two things clash? The brain’s propensity to repeat old patterns which have a known consequence of not providing an immediate threat to survival versus an intellectual understanding that those behaviours are keeping you stuck in an eating disorder.
Well, often, it’s passivity and inaction. Which means, no change. And, in a recovery context, that means the maintenance of a disordered cycle which only further ingrains. Just think of the millions of micro-weightings that have contributed to making passivity and inaction seem like the best course of action. Every time you’ve considered the pro-recovery change and not gone ahead with it. Or every time you’ve considered stopping the behaviour you logically know is harmful, but done it anyway. Here, you are constructing a neural network that is seeing what is being avoided, and seeing what is being continued with, strengthening the ‘voice’ of direction of your inner satnav for next time.
And that concludes the first section of this blog on insight vs action. I wanted to keep this one relatively short because it seems extremely ironic to spend any more time helping you just understand the reasoning behind the insight/action gap any better, as I am acutely aware that you likely know all you have just read, and this knowledge ultimately doesn’t help you take action to bridge the gap.
Read on, here.
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