In my posts and my thoughts, I tend to focus on unsolved problems, unresolved confusions, goals I’m far from grasping. But when I’m feeling down, I remind myself that I used to have a bunch of problems that I did solve. I’ve successfully changed my habits for the better in many ways.
I used to struggle to get up in the mornings and would often sleep in later than I wanted; now I can get up when I want
I used to be on Twitter more than I endorsed; now I hardly use it
I used to not write blogs; now I do
My mental health and general energy used to be way worse
I used to not do much exercise; now I go to the gym 1-3 times a week
When I think about this, it feels reassuring: both for me (when I consider the ways in which my life is still flawed) and for others who might currently feel overwhelmed. These problems felt frustratingly and obstinately intractable in the past. I’d tried and failed to solve them many times (I reasoned): why did I assume I could change? But I did change, and I did solve my problems. I feel optimistic that I’ll change other ingrained, less-than-ideal habits in the future.
But while it’s reassuring that I solved some of my problems, it’s also disconcerting, because I’m not sure exactly how or why I solved them. This is obvious in a way: if I had a flawless, universally applicable method for solving problems, I would have used it and solved all my problems by now.
But notably and less tautologically, I notice that none of the listed problems were obviously solved by my current go-to strategies for solving problems. I didn’t solve them by simply applying more willpower, grit, elbow grease, grind, hard work. And nor did I solve them with sheer analysis or cognitive effort. The ‘getting up early’ problem was solved because I discovered the Alarmy app, which basically means I have to go downstairs and scan a barcode to switch off my alarm. For the ‘exercise’ problem, I found a structure that works for me (weight training classes) and decided it was worth it to spend semi-serious money on it.
The other solutions were even more opaque. With Twitter, one day I just logged on and the timeline was (a) Israel/Palestine and (b) gender and dating discourse, and I was just like ‘nope’. I started writing long blog-style posts on Facebook during the covid lock-downs and I’m not entirely sure why.
And I would love to know why my mental health improved. It could just be that depression and burnout are naturally time-limited, for most people. It could have been therapy. It could be because I successfully changed some mental habits of thought, became more self-loving, self-accepting. It could have been because of changes to my work life, my living situation, my relationships. It could be all or none of the above.
How do I relate to this realization that problem-solving, for me, seems weirdly opaque? On one hand, it seems good to know that grinding rarely seems to solve my problems; it’s good to be able to rationally challenge negative thoughts like ‘it’s my fault that I have his problem, because I could simply solve it today if only I worked harder’.
On the other hand, it’s also disconcerting: maybe there’s something comforting as well as burdensome about believing (or alieving) that it’s within your own power to solve your problems. This seems related to internal vs external loci of control: do you believe you have control over your life, or do you think your experiences are mostly determined by external forces? Having a strong internal locus of control can be stressful, but it can also be empowering; having a strongly external locus of control can be relaxing, but it can also lead you to despair.
It’s also disconcerting because I’m trying out life coaching, and it seems like one of the key skills there is ‘knowing how people solve problems’.
It’s not as if these problems solved themselves completely randomly. In each case, I had a strong intention and desire to solve the problem. I was focussing energy on it. I was open to and actively looking for solutions. I was working internally on various blocks. Plausibly millions of tiny internal and external motions brought me to the solution, so perhaps it’s reductive to say that I “didn’t solve it” just because I can’t say “ah yes, it was x hour of work or y google doc that did it.”
Perhaps solving fuzzy lifestyle problems is less like doing a chore or completing a task, more like finding or nurturing loving relationships. It’s not like you can sit down with a pen and paper and 8 spare hours and be like “right, I’m going to find the love of my life this very afternoon”. It can feel very random and intractable and unfair. Still, there are things that are likely to boost your chances: you could try to meet new people in a friendly social context, work on your interpersonal skills, do something exciting with your hair, ask cute people for coffee, maybe even try an app. If you’re putting focus and energy on it, I think that’s got to help you.
Or similarly, maintaining a relationship is work, but to me, it doesn’t feel like grind-y work, the sort of work where you pour in time and energy and get some output out; rather, it’s about tiny choices, tiny thoughts, tiny course corrections.
On the other hand, maybe this is, as the kids say, a ‘skill issue’, and future Amber will solve her problems much more directly, in a less stochastic and bumbly way.
I've had similar experiences. My rough assessment of what's happening for me at least is that solving one of these problems is likely to rub off on the other problems.
Like, waking up earlier > more time in the day, more consistent circadian rhythm > better mental health; more productivity.
So it seems like these problems get sort of magically solved, when really I think solving one of them just has massive gains for the other ones that may not be immediately noticeable, but will accrue over time.
And then this is a positive spiral. What you describe sounds very close to how it's been for me recently, getting out of a negative spiral. Solving one thing can cause fairly automatic changes that go some way to sorting other problems. Say you've implemented Strategy Q to solve Problem R. You may have done this without explicitly realising that Q will also *automatically* have good effects for problem S (like the circadian rhythm example). And Q will give you more resources (time; energy) to solve problems T, U and V. And so on.
I also think there's an important question of means and ends, and I wonder if we tend to conflate the two. Like, why do we *want* to get up early? It's not just *for the sake of getting up early*. It's because we feel better when we do so, because we have more time in the day, because we're more productive...
In this sense, the 'waking up too late' is not really the problem *in itself*. It's only an issue because it causes us other problems that we wouldn't have if we got up earlier.
I think there is an important question of like...how did I stumble on Alarmy in the first place? I've also used it, and for me at least, it came from a place of 'I need to throw everything at this problem including money and whatever'. So I think that kind of determined kitchen-sink approach works really well, especially for problems like waking up too late, which I think can have really bad effects on us without us realising *quite how bad* it is.
Good point how we often don't even know what caused things to get better. And I like the pairing with the point that there still *are* plenty of small actions that we can do that increase the odds.