Weekly ideas about living a good, meaningful and high performing life in a chaotic world from Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Best selling authors of PEAK PERFORMANCE, DO HARD THINGS, and THE PRACTICE OF GROUNDEDNESS.
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Not Every Feeling or Urge is an Emergency
Published about 24 hours ago • 8 min read
Reflect: Self-Complexity
"When we flatten ourselves into a single dimension of identity, we score low on two measures of complexity: social and self. When individuals score low on complexity, they have much wider swings of mood and emotions. Their self-worth is like a ping pong ball, bouncing back and forth, entirely dependent on whether that narrow self gets validated or rewarded or not.
On the other end of the spectrum, higher levels of complexity buffer the effects of stress and any perceived threat to our status. We can withstand threats because our coaching self might be under threat, but our value of being a husband, teacher, or mentor provides us the security we need.
Most of the challenges we face aren't life-or-death battles. Most of us perform better when our backs aren't against the wall, and fear isn't driving the ship."
“What happens if I step out into this street in front of a car? Maybe I should? I certainly could. Nothing is stopping me."
It’s scary, sometimes downright terrifying, when those kinds of thoughts pop into your head. You start to wonder, what in the world is wrong with me? Why would I think about something so disturbing? I must be broken. And yet, it turns out that 94 percent of people have similar intrusive thoughts. In other words, it's normal to have such thoughts—and for most people, they float on by like passing clouds in the sky of consciousness.
But in a subset of folks who have uncontrolled Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, us included, those thoughts go from blips on the radar that we’re able to quickly move on from, to sirens imploring us to do something about them. Their thoughts also bring with them intense feelings of panic, angst, dread, and despair. Sometimes they are accompanied by strong urges to actually bring the thought into action, even though a part of you is terrified and doesn't really want to. They come at all hours of the day and night. When you are feeling good and when you are feeling bad. It's fucking awful.
Many people get OCD wrong. They see the compulsions—the obsessive cleaning, checking, or hand washing—and assume that’s the issue. But the real cause comes much earlier. It’s the intrusive thought and associated feelings that cause an inordinate amount of stress and anxiety. The compulsion is the quick fix solution, to help restore order and ease the anxiety.
(In certain subtypes of OCD, sometimes referred to as Pure-O, there is no visible compulsion. You try to get rid of the thought by thinking your way out of it: I would never do such a thing. Here are all the reasons I would never do such a thing. Let me Google 10082272 times to make sure I'm not the kind of person who would do such a thing. And so on.)
Clinical OCD is an extreme case, which researchers are still trying to untangle the mechanisms of. The best guess so far is that the system in the brain that puts a stop on such thoughts—the forebrain and neurochemicals cortical glutamate and GABA—goes haywire. Researchers liken it to a faulty brake.
We all have this mechanism, this brake in the brain. You’re walking down the street, and you suddenly feel like you might have left the stove on. You either sit with it, convincing yourself it’s unfounded, or even if you did, the stove can be on for a few hours, or you run home and check to see that you didn’t. What we have is a tension in the brain. Part of your brain predicts the stove is on, it could burn your house down and kill the pets, and thus, of course, you have to resolve that thought and accompanying feelings. The other part of your brain says it's no big deal. You’ve got two options to address the tension:
Update the internal model. Sit with the feeling so your brain decides the prediction was wrong. That the stove likely isn’t on—and even if it is, it will be okay—and you can move on with your walk.
Take action in the external world. Go check the stove. Make the world match what your brain was demanding.
For OCD, we have the same options, but the problem is that the danger signal is amplified 100x. The brain generates an alarm that doesn’t match external reality (”the stove is on, your house will burn”), and the person tries to close the gap by acting. They go home and check the stove; the alarm quiets, briefly, before coming back louder. No action or reassuring thought is good enough. The alarm is glaringly loud, and the brake is broken. This is the nightmare that is OCD.
Recent research argued that OCD patients can’t generate the internal feeling of “this is resolved.” The prediction-error machinery keeps firing regardless of how many times the external world has been corrected (i.e., the stove is absolutely turned off). The compulsion is a doomed attempt to find a state the brain will accept as safe.
Claire Gillan’s recent work frames compulsivity as a transdiagnostic trait. The same prediction-error dysfunction shows up across OCD, eating disorders, addiction, and anxiety. Different surface behaviors. Same underlying mechanism: the brain is trying to use external action to manage an internal signal it has lost the ability to update.
The behavioral treatment that works best for OCD is exposure and response prevention. You expose yourself to the intrusive thought and then prevent yourself from doing the response that normally provides temporary relief.
Exposure and response prevention helps because it forces the internal update. You experience a milder and more controlled version of the alarm in a safe environment, and you don’t wash your hands. You don't Google the symptoms. You don't go home and check if the hair straightener is unplugged. You sit there, waiting for the brain to learn that the alarm was wrong. The brain updates. It learns that you can get your hands dirty without dying. You can have a thought related to self-harm without acting on it. You’re teaching your brain to see that the alarm is a false positive. You learn to address the internal model (thought and feeling) without needing to act in the external world (compulsion).
(Medication can help too. There are many tools in the toolkit. If you are struggling with intrusive thoughts, please seek help from a trained mental health professional, be it a licensed therapist or psychiatrist.)
Now that you have a better understanding of OCD, let's explore how the modern world is essentially training us all to get hooked on the same loops, albeit a far less intense and crippling version.
The External Coping Mechanism
Think about the way technology has helped us deal with our internal feelings. Consider:
Boredom standing in line? Check the phone.
Loneliness? Open social media to see our “friends” or chat with an AI bot.
Uncertainty about whether our workout was good enough? Open the watch.
“Did I lock the door”? Pull up the camera feed.
Discomfort of silence on a walk? Put on the podcast.
Anxious about something? Scroll on an app to distract yourself.
Each of these addresses the underlying feeling by acting on the world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, we do need to update our model by acting in the real world. If you’re really hungry, food is great. If you’re lonely, having coffee with a friend is wonderful. But if we constantly outsource our internal feelings to something that provides temporary relief, we’re training our brain to expect that the external action is the only way to make the internal signal stop.
Feeling bored or a bit of distress? Your phone is the solution to the feeling. You never train your internal model to update, to learn that this feeling is just a blip that you can sit with, instead of a command that needs to be addressed right now. In turn, you lose the capacity to sit with any feeling or inner voice long enough for your brain to discover it was a false alarm. Every uncomfortable signal becomes an emergency you need to quell immediately.
We're not claiming everyone now has OCD. The disorder is much greater than just feeling anxious and checking your phone. But, for the everyday person, you're still training the intrusive thought/feeling --> compulsion loop. We’re feeding those intrusive thoughts, giving them more power than they need to have.
When you always update the external, the internal model atrophies. You lose the capacity to sit with a prediction error long enough for the brain to discover it was a false alarm, to put the brake on. Every uncertainty becomes something to fix, not something to wait out. Every uncomfortable signal becomes an emergency.
Turning down the Alarm
The fix is structurally identical to Exposure and Response Therapy. We need to learn to sit with our internal world so our brain discovers that not every alarm needs attending to. Over time, our brain recalibrates.
It’s the essence of dealing with discomfort in sport. When we’re new to running or swimming, the alarm rings early and loud. At the first hint of discomfort, our brain screams, “This hurts! Go back to the couch. You can’t do this!” Over time, we realize that we’re not going to die when we get a little out of breath. You’ve recalibrated your internal model and moved the alarm to go off closer to when there’s actual danger.
We can either make our internal world foreign, or we can adjust the alarm. This is what mindfulness is, mechanistically. It’s the phone-free walk, sitting with the awkward silence, just dealing with boredom as you stand in line. It’s wrestling with the blank page instead of having AI fill it for you. It is, at root, not immediately using something external to alleviate an internal feeling.
It’s accumulating enough small moments where you don’t reach for the fix. Enough reps that your brain learns the default: not every feeling needs a response. You could argue that the essence of mental toughness is being able to sit with the feeling and decide: is this alarm real and worth responding to, or should I let this crazy thought or feeling just float on by?
-- Steve and Brad
(P.s., if this topic interests you, this piece in Harpers, "Shadow of a doubt" explores similar territory and is very, very good.)
Watch: The Definitive Lecture on Excellence
Brad's BigThink lecture was recently published. It's a 52-minute masterclass on excellence—what it actually is, what it isn't, why it's important, and some tools to bring it about in your own life. Watch it here.
There's a good reason you can't concentrate. That's not just a statement; it's also the title of a viral piece that our friend Cal Newport (author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism) recently wrote for The New York Times.
Cal argues that we're at a precarious moment in the history of thinking. The ease and convenience of technology and digital media (think: junk food for your brain) have negatively impacted our cognition, which means we need to start taking our cognitive health as seriously as we take our physical health.
So on today's episode of "excellence, actually," we're talking about what that means for all of us: what this change in thinking portends for the future of society and culture, and, perhaps more importantly, how to design an effective workout program for the brains of adults and children.
We think it's one of the most important episodes we've ever done.
Weekly ideas about living a good, meaningful and high performing life in a chaotic world from Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Best selling authors of PEAK PERFORMANCE, DO HARD THINGS, and THE PRACTICE OF GROUNDEDNESS.
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