AwareMess

When insights outpace action.

AwareMess

Picture this scene: You are in a rut. You are in a long-term relationship, feeling unsatisfied in your work, and have been experiencing a persistent lack of energy for years. You go to a wellness retreat, or have a psychedelic experience, or start seeing a highly recommended therapist - and suddenly - you become aware that your low energy is likely due to the emotional toll of being in a relationship where communication has broken down and in a career that isn’t aligned with your values, interests, or skill sets.

For a moment, it feels amazing! The dopamine hit from this novel and profound insight rushes through your system, infusing you with hope and motivating you to imagine what could be possible now that you “know better”.

However, the trick with “knowing better” is that it has to be paired with doing better in order to see positive changes. Insight alone does not lead to transformation. It is the actions taken to apply the insight afterwards that make the real difference.

Insight + Action = Transformation

More specifically, seeking insight on its own can be detrimental to the healing process. Think of the person who has worked with an array of therapists and has dozens of psychedelic medicine ceremonies under their belt, but who continues to remain stuck in their patterns. Surely they have had many insights along the way. So why the rut?

This is what happens when insights have nowhere to go. When awareness increases, but nothing in your life changes to support it. You can have a great coaching session, therapy discussion, or psychedelic treatment that was full of dopamine laced “a-ha” moments - but the overall effect of any new awareness depends on the quality of the systems one has in place for acting on it. This is a big reason why people can have vastly different outcomes despite receiving similar treatments, and why someone may feel great during a therapy session but return to baseline before the next visit.

Insight - Action = AwareMess

AwareMess (n): a state in which increased self-awareness leads to increased dysfunction due to a lack of consistent, aligned action.

“Ignorance Is Bliss” - not because you’re necessarily happier when you don’t know why you’re suffering, but because you aren’t also burdened with the awareness of all the ways you can change your situation, but haven’t. If you truly don’t see how your upbringing resulted in your attachment style, that certain foods are detrimental to your gut microbiome, or that the way you express yourself is not appropriate for a certain context - you don’t have to do anything about it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s better not to know what’s causing your distress…but it is easier to do nothing when you’re unaware that there’s something to be done. Your suffering remains, but you can still hold onto the belief that “life is happening to me” so why bother trying.

But once you are aware of what can be done, doing nothing becomes a conscious choice.

Since you can’t un-know something once you know it, awareness doesn’t disappear, it just accumulates. And so the awareMess on the other side of ignorance is akin to its own kind of personal hell: you can no longer deny that you are responsible for at least some of your own suffering, but there are so many areas that need to be addressed that you collapse under the pressure, and return to not trying at all.

We’ve all been there - or seen it in others.

The initial excitement of “knowing” fades, replaced by an inner critic that grows louder with time:

You never follow through.

Look at everything that’s still wrong.

What’s the point of fixing this if everything else is still a mess?

Eventually, these thoughts chip away at what’s left of the motivation needed to act.

Neither extreme state - ignorance or awareMess - actually helps you take action.

In one, you don’t know what the problem is.

In the other, you’re overwhelmed by all the problems at once.

This is why having small insights, worked with over time, is the ideal pace for sustainable transformation. You need some level of awareness to know what to change, but the change has to be accessible enough for you to be able to achieve it. The more wins you have, the more motivated you are to keep acting on insights.

When does awareness cause more dysfunction?

When your insights outpace your habits.

So what to do when you find yourself stuck in a state of awareMess?

First, stop chasing more insight. Transformation won’t come from seeing more. It will come from doing more.

Then, start with one insight - preferably something small, almost unimpressive.

Something you can act on today without needing to overhaul your life. Build a structure that supports it. Follow through. Create evidence that you can trust yourself to act on bigger insights.

You don’t need another breakthrough.

You just need consistent follow through.

Because insight without action doesn’t change your life - it just leaves you trapped in your awareMess.

Where in your life are your insights outpacing your habits?