Earlier today, I was remembering my best friend from college: the smartest person I ever knew. He’s dead, now, but he’d be cool with me talking about his intellect if he were still around.
It’s danged hard for some people to turn off their brains.
And if their intellect is their superpower, like it was for him, it’s close to inconceivable. It took my friend decades to seek help, to tacitly admit that his own massive intellect was not enough.
This is a problem, in situations where health, sanity, and success depend upon backing the hell off the thinking train.
As a physician, I suspect this is the case most of the time.
At a minimum, uncoupling the mind is a valuable tool
Imagine there is value in non-standard ways of thinking. This should not be a difficult exercise.
In the West, it’s universally recognized that, yes, good things can come from… not thinking things to death.
Visual imagining. Right brain problem-solving.
Crowdsourcing and teamwork.
Inner work on subconscious behaviors.
Meditation.
Breathwork and just being.
If all you know is pushing harder, thinking more and longer about a thing, focusing on language, intention, and meaning, and creating increasingly complex mental models of what you think is going on, you are missing out.
There is a skill set that can open up the other half of the universe, based on taking a step back. You soak up the whole and all the little loose ends, act more like an artist than a trial attorney, and trust in the process.
If you acknowledge the work of Steve Jobs, the Space Program, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, and pretty much every East Asian culture department, psychotherapist, and indie filmmaker in the 20th century, we can move on.
The smartest people have the hardest time with this
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If you’ve gotten kudos from momma, bonuses from your boss, and brag-worthy trophies from organizations with instant name recognition, that’s a lifetime’s worth of positive reinforcement for being clever.
But if you’re reading this material, you’re experienced enough to know that you can’t clever your way out of every tight spot in life.
Crying babies aren’t impressed with your debate skills, and neither is your pancreas.
Many people just don’t give a damn about your arguments, even if you’re right.
You can’t analyze your way out of an emotional impasse.
And in my experience, the more a person creates detailed simulations about how the world works and others think, the harder it is to let go of the idea that thinking solves everything. That all problems can be fixed by just one more argument, one more self-talk, or one more late night spent thinking it all through.
News flash: the echo chamber amplifies the negative
You know what happens when you put a microphone up to the speaker it’s connected to, right?
There’s a deafening, ear-splitting howl.
Any sound the mic picks up is amplified through the speaker, which the mic picks up, and pushes through the speaker, over and over making an extremely loud noise that overwhelms the gear.
Thinking to excess and having internal conversations with yourself is like that.
Many folks unconsciously downplay their role in a situation, which after a few cycles starts smelling like “I’m right and everybody else is wrong.”
Some folks are too hard on themselves, blaming themselves for everything, which leads to excessive guilt.
And most of us in the digital age are too willing to gorge on info bites crafted by influencers, corporations, and the media, which leads to fear, reactivity, and self-righteous indignation.
If the more you think about world events in the kitchen, the more you get to waving the meat cleaver around — angrily — maybe it’s time to put the knife down and step s-l-o-w-l-y away from the cutting board, yeah?
And this is hard, if your only tool is your intellect
Everyone has a brain. And everyone uses it every day, to get dressed, plan for meals, and talk to friends and family.
But if the only tool in your toolkit is snappy clever thinking, I’m sorry to break it to you, but your brain isn’t up to understanding your own mind, much less your fellow humans or the world at large. The brain is remarkable, but its processing power is finite, and there just ain’t enough there to model the chaotic nature of the universe. And words? Absolutely useful, but words. Are not. Reality.
But if that’s all you’ve been leaning on, no wonder you keep trying.
Your mind is orthogonal to everything else
You can’t think yourself thin. Thinking alone doesn’t burn enough calories.
You can’t talk facts to comfort someone in mourning. Nor can you think yourself past poor sleep, not having relationships, eating junk food, or spending too much time in front of a computer.
But you can talk yourself out of going to therapy. I have seen that too many times to count.
Thinking is distinctly different from Doing, of course. And unclenching your brain and stepping back from a problem — Not Thinking (or at least Taking A Break) — is a different thing from both.
There. THREE tools for your tool chest, if you only had one there to begin with.
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