Field Note #9: I Know It’s Irrational. So Why Do I Still Feel Like Shit About It?

So, I have a rule about books: I don't lend them to people.

This is a perfectly sensible rule, which has been developed through years of rigorous empirical research demonstrating that books lent to other people have a mysterious tendency never to come back to me.

I know this. And yet, every so often, someone tells me something, and I immediately think: Oh! You have to read this.

I go to the shelf. I take out the book. I hand it to them.

Apparently, my desire for someone else to experience something I loved so much and found fascinating is way stronger than all available historical evidence... Then, six months later, I notice the gap on the shelf and think: For fuck's sake. I am never lending anyone a book again. And I do mean it — until the next person really needs to read some other book I've got...

Obviously, this is a very trivial example. And, perhaps, not even a particularly irrational one. I am making a choice between keeping the book safely on my shelf and wanting somebody else to experience something I loved, and the second one just keeps winning. However, I like this example because it illustrates something we do all the time: we assume that once we know something, our behaviour (and especially our feelings) should obediently fall into line with that knowing. Yet, very often they don't.

We know the relationship wasn't right for us, but we still miss the person. We know somebody's criticism was unfair, but it still hurts. We know one mistake doesn't make us incompetent, but we still feel like an absolute idiot for the rest of the day (or week). And we know that the silence probably means nothing, but something in the stomach has already dropped before the rational explanation has even finished putting its coat on.

This is where things get particularly annoying, because once we understand our own patterns, we expect that understanding them will fix them.

I know why I do this.

I know where it came from.

I know it's irrational.

So why the hell do I still feel like shit about it?

Knowing something isn't the same as learning it

I think this is where we sometimes give conscious thought rather more authority than it actually deserves. We imagine the brain as if there is a reasonably competent person sitting somewhere at headquarters and, if we give the headquarters the correct information, it should issue new instructions to the rest of the organisation.

Unfortunately, Mother Nature hasn't designed us so neatly and coherently.

A lot of what we react to has been learned through experience rather than through explanation. So, if criticism repeatedly came with humiliation, then criticism can begin to predict danger. If somebody repeatedly becoming distant preceded rejection, then distance can acquire a meaning of its own for us. If making mistakes repeatedly brought consequences, the body can become very interested in avoiding mistakes — particular ones, or mistakes in general.

None of this requires us to sit down and consciously decide what something means, because the association is simply learned. But later, we can acquire much better information:

Not everyone who goes quiet is leaving me.

One person's opinion doesn't determine my worth.

Making a mistake isn't a catastrophe.

And we can believe all of those things completely. The difficult part is that we have updated the explanation without necessarily updating the prediction itself. This always fascinates me.

The brain doesn't only respond to what is happening now — previous experience can shape what it expects and how it interprets what is happening next. This idea sits at the heart of predictive-processing accounts of the brain. So something in the present can resemble something from the past just enough for an old expectation to fire up.

The feeling arrives first. Then the clever, articulate part of us turns up with all the evidence and says: This is ridiculous. We know better than this!, while the feeling says: Lovely. I'm staying anyway.

The annoyed scientist and the frightened animal

In some ways, insight can make this even worse: before we understand a pattern, we simply feel like shit. After we understand it, we feel like shit and we are annoyed with ourselves for feeling like shit. Therefore, we start conducting an internal investigation.

Why am I still bothered by this?

Haven't I dealt with it?

I know this isn't true.

Why can't I just let it go?

We become simultaneously the frightened animal and the increasingly irritated scientist studying the animal. And because thinking gave us the insight in the first place, we naturally assume that more thinking will eventually produce the missing bit — so we think even harder.

We analyse the conversation again. We analyse ourselves. We analyse the other person. We find the childhood connection. We find another connection to the childhood connection. We identify the pattern, name it, explain it beautifully and, perhaps, even develop a small private PhD in why we are the way we are.

And sometimes, after all that, we still feel exactly the same — like shit.

This doesn't mean insight is useless — far from it. Understanding a pattern can stop us mistaking it for reality. It can give us choices that we didn't have before. However, explanation and change are not necessarily the same process. At some point, another hour of thinking may simply turn into rumination rather than useful reflection — and research on repetitive negative thinking gives us good reason not to assume that thinking harder always means solving better.

The therapeutic properties of chopping potatoes

This is why I am increasingly fascinated by how often something completely mundane can interrupt a state that sophisticated thinking couldn't touch. I actually spoke to someone on LinkedIn the other day about it.

Chopping potatoes. Washing the floor. Cutting the grass. Stripping wallpaper. Sorting a cupboard. Walking somewhere without trying to have an insight while doing it.

There have been times when I have spent an impressive amount of time thinking about something, reached absolutely no useful conclusion, finally got bored and gone to do something ordinary — only to realise twenty minutes later that I don't feel quite the same anymore.

I don't think potatoes possess any mysterious psychological properties.

It's simply interesting that changing what we're doing also changes what the brain is receiving. Our attention moves, the body moves. The sensory environment changes. The loop is no longer being continuously fed with the same material, and the brain gets something different to work with.

Sometimes what feels like a problem requiring a better thought doesn't need another thought at all!

So how does an old response actually change?

This is where emotional learning becomes much more interesting to me than positive thinking.

If a response was learned through experience, it makes sense that new experience matters when changing it. But there is an important complication here: not all new learning simply wipes the old learning away.

You can tell yourself a dog is harmless while your heart is hammering as it runs towards you. You can understand perfectly well that the lift is safe while still wanting to get out of it. You can know somebody else's rejection says very little about your value and still feel the familiar sting when it happens.

The conscious belief and the automatic response are capable of existing at the same time — which means that we may be asking ourselves the wrong question.

We ask:

How do I convince myself that this isn't true?

But if we've already convinced ourselves — sometimes years ago — perhaps there is nothing left to argue about.

Perhaps the more useful question is:

What would allow the expectation underneath the feeling to change?

That is a very different problem.

Research on conditioned fear gives us an interesting clue. In extinction learning, repeated experience that a previously threatening cue no longer predicts the feared outcome can create new learning that competes with the old association rather than simply deleting it. That helps explain phenomena such as renewal — the return of a conditioned response when the context changes — and other forms of return of fear. Of course, laboratory fear conditioning is not the same thing as the complicated emotional patterns of everyday life, so I don't want to pretend that every painful human reaction can be reduced to a conditioning experiment.

There is also another process researchers call memory reconsolidation. Under certain conditions, retrieving a memory appears capable of making it temporarily open to modification before it is stabilised again. One thing researchers have investigated as an important condition for this is prediction error: what actually happens differs from what was expected. But human reconsolidation research has produced inconsistent findings, and researchers are still working out the conditions under which retrieval leads to reconsolidation, extinction or simply retrieval. So when we move from tightly controlled fear-learning experiments to the gloriously messy emotional lives of actual human beings, I don't think we should pretend we've found a neat little delete button for unwanted feelings. We haven't.

However, the possibility is fascinating: sometimes change may require more than intellectually knowing that an old prediction is wrong. New experience — particularly experience that contradicts what was expected — may provide the system with information that explanation alone cannot. And extinction research also offers a useful way of thinking about something I think many people find deeply frustrating: an old reaction returning doesn't necessarily mean you've gone backwards or that everything you understood was pointless. In conditioned-fear studies, responses that had diminished can reappear with a change of context or the passage of time. That doesn't prove every returning emotional reaction in ordinary life works by the same mechanism, but it is a useful reminder that new learning and old learning can coexist.

The fact that an old response can still fire doesn't mean it has to keep running the show.

Knowing better

We place enormous faith in insight, and I understand why. There is something deeply satisfying about finally understanding ourselves. Getting those skeletons out of the closet and finding the origin of a pattern can feel as though we've found the loose thread and surely, if we pull it hard enough, the whole thing will unravel.

Sometimes it does, while sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes we know exactly why we feel something, know that the belief underneath it no longer makes sense, know what we would tell a friend in precisely the same situation — and still feel like shit about it.

Maybe that isn't evidence that we haven't understood ourselves properly — maybe knowing better was simply never designed to make us immediately feel better.

Knowledge can change the explanation, while experience can change the expectation — and the interesting territory is the distance between the two.

Meanwhile, I would like it formally recorded that I am never lending anyone another book.

Ever.

Unless, obviously, they really need to read it.