We love to outsource things that we’re perfectly capable of doing ourselves. We’re spellbound by numbered infographics and “hacks” that promise ease of use and immediacy. This occurs in large part because we’re innately lazy, in tandem with our advanced society prioritizing ease and comfort over much else. If I told you resource-gathering and certification-collecting is just another form of procrastination, though, would you believe me? Allow me to demonstrate.
“Can anyone share a resource on parent training?”
“Who has a script I can use for helping my client be better at conversation?”
“Has anyone ever worked with someone with depression, and if so, can you send some resources my way about intervention ideas?”
In the time it took these individuals to render the above messages, patiently wait for responses via email, politely respond to those responses, and wait even longer for the response they like best, they could’ve taken action toward their perceived problem. That is, their problem of not knowing how to proceed with parent training, or teaching someone how to navigate conflict, or demonstrating their mastery of small talk. They don’t see their perceived problem as one of their own procrastination, but as an absence of understanding. This ultimately (in their eyes) warrants further education, resources, templates, certifications, and webinars.
The expertization of very basic behavior change, which likely resulted from the pathologization of laziness and lack of effort, has been instrumental in hindering a person’s sense of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a concept in psychology 101: it’s a person’s belief in their capacity to produce specific change and reach specific outcomes. Our decreasing belief in the power of self is how many of today’s mentors, coaches, and therapists make their greatest buck: they convince you that your very straightforward problem, which is mostly the product of poor self-awareness and an unwillingness to address personal barriers, is complicated, deeply entrenched, and psychologically intricate. That it is such a niche conundrum that only people with niche credentials are able to provide you with a direct path to relief and thriving.
“Sign up today to get certified in cycle-syncing for women in their 40’s who are also post-partum moms and former athletes!”
No. You do not need to hire someone to teach you how to exercise on your period. You need to recognize that 1) women menstruate, which is a biological occurrence we’ve known since the beginning of time, 2) there are Olympians who are menstruating and 3) your period probably isn’t limiting you physically so much as you’re mentally allowing it to. It’s your attention to it, because of “certified coaches in cycle-syncing”, that has subtly created the nocebo effect, or the expectation that you’ll feel negative sensations. Stated more simply in the form of a question: prior to seeing advertisements for cycle-syncing, how did you manage to exercise whilst bleeding before social media?
“I’m a parenting expert who specializes in emotional dysregulation in ADHD kids with deep feelings--- purchase my course TODAY for scripts, guidance, and interventions on how to collaborate with your deep-feeler in times of distress!”
No. You do not need a resource or a script as to how to speak to your own child, let alone implement the appropriate form of discipline at your discretion. How did my parents, and their parents, learn to parent in past decades without the expert guidance of a manual written by someone whose oldest child is 6? Children around the world, specifically those in third-world countries, are known for their demonstration of leadership from very young ages. In the book Hunt, Gather, Parentby Michaeleen Doucleff, she describes her experience with children in the Yucatan scaling mountains at age 6 while carrying their 10-month-old baby brother on their back. Young boys not even 12 years old in Africa can be observed sharpening their own spears and hunting their own animals to shlep back to their tribe over 10 miles away--- without adult supervision. Dr. Camilo Ortiz uses ancient cultures, and his no-BS understanding of parenting, to implement what he calls “independence therapy” for anxious kids: he leaves them the hell alone, to their own devices, and trusts that they’ll problem-solve without adult interference. And proving to ourselves that we’re capable of doing so is what builds confidence and diminishes anxiety--- not endlessly talking about it and hiring a SWAT team of therapists to “address” it.
Similar to the obesity epidemic, which has resulted largely from sedentary lifestyles, poor lifestyle choices, and the mass consumption of ultra-processed foods, what I call the “infobesity” epidemic is one of shitty thinking habits and the mass consumption of low-resolution information. Because so many typical reactions to everyday life have been pathologized and medicalized, we’re made to feel that what we need is more “education” or “awareness” to these “new” problems. It’s a never before seen syndrome in children, where they say “no” to literally everything we ask! Let’s call it Pathological Demand Avoidance to really highlight the uniqueness of such a rare issue of childhood! So we glue our fingers and our eyes to our iPhones or our computers instead of actively addressing the problem itself, as we believe the problem is that we “just don’t know enough” and “need to feel more prepared.” The world is changing fast, after all. Ironically, preparation for problem-solving rarely involves any form of education. It involves building proficiency through doing. If you’ve ever been a client in therapy, what I hope is that you realize much of getting “better” has little to do with exchange of education or even information. It’s built on careful identification of all the ways we contribute to our own suffering, and actively producing alternative behaviors that are more adaptive to our functioning.
I’ve seen service-dependent individuals across nearly every industry that either bills by the hour or charges out-of-pocket for exchange of “individualized” service. I was first hit over the head with this realization when I was finishing my practicum for clinical psychology. By use of real and mock clients, my cohort treated people for hundreds upon hundreds of hours--- many of which were duplicate sessions from the last because of how little change was occurring. In reflecting on my own experience with psychiatric treatment, I found myself suddenly skeptical: how was it that I almost died from one of the most serious, untreatable, and lethal psychiatric disorders (i.e., anorexia), but was able to “graduate” from the grips of therapy in less than a year’s time? And here we have patients with relatively far milder, and not in any way critical or dangerous, conditions that are proud to report they’re on year five of their weekly “stress management” sessions? At what point do we evaluate the money we’ve spent, reexamine the minimal progress made, and decide that the service we’re paying for is something we could’ve figured out on YouTube or Reddit?
This is, though, what services want people to feel: confused. They want you to feel like you’re incapable of managing any form of stress or life circumstance by your own instinct and experience, and they do so by divorcing you from common sense. Oh, you think losing weight is as simple as just tracking what you eat for a week and then subtracting some calories from that? HA! Loser! You need to download trainings, webinars, brochures, infographics, and apps should you hope to know what to stuff your face with for your remaining time left on this earth! And even after you do that, there’s specialized courses for Paleolithic gut-healing for people with social anxiety. You can buy my course here.
As I’ve mentioned previously, there are circumstances or pathologies that may require more intensive intervention. A person who wants to lose weight but has struggled to do so for a decade, for example, may need a more comprehensive educational and applied approach to nutrition. But this same person will also only need this degree of mentorship for a short time before they’re able to implement it consistently on their own. That is, if the nutrition coaching is sound and the coach is in it for the service and not for the money.
Ultimately, being highly effective and good at what you do is not profitable and certainly a poor business model. This is rarely discussed, as it would be some form of financial suicide for the businesses and practitioners out there whose primary source of revenue is repeat flyers and people who are treatment dependent. For those individuals, please forgive me: I’m not bringing this to light to drain your finances or even making you doubt your business model. You already know, damn well, that your business functions off of solving people’s problems. Which involves recruiting a hell of a lot of people with a hell of a lot of problems. This isn’t inherently nefarious. It's the continuous poking and prodding at people to make them question their own efficacy that is.
Regarding recipients of service, whether that be psychotherapy or life coaching or professional mentorship, it’s important you conduct your own research to gather as much information on your own prior to outsourcing. This is more of a personal preference than anything else, but there is legitimate science to support how humans learn most efficiently: they learn through repetition, practice, and experience. Bloating our brains with resources and templates and hacks will not be of use, because the problem isn’t a resource, template, or hack deficiency. It’s a deficiency in trusting that you can solve something on your own before giving up and calling in reinforcements.
This is perhaps best exemplified through sport. In professional sport, athletes watch replay footage of their performance in a game. This form of self-evaluation via video analysis is crucial to better understand their weaknesses, and, with the help of their coaches, develop a plan for improving upon them. But what if the athletes stopped only at watching playback footage? What if they were only given lectures on increasing their top end speed instead of training relentless sprint drills to actually build top end speed? Would they trust themselves to perform come gametime, despite only having collected more passive forms of information (i.e., video and lecture)? In more dire circumstances, perhaps using aviation as an example will drive this point home.
Pilots must fly through all weather conditions. They’re expected to maintain smooth sailing despite looming thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, and hail occurring quite literally below their nose. In their training, after they’ve mastered the basics to fluency, they’re required to intentionally turn their plane upside down and to “spiral the plane out”, or send it soaring, nose-down, plummeting toward the ground. In this dizzying practice, the pilot is assured that their skills can withstand high-stakes, high panic, and high distress, with zero resources, templates, or scripts as to how to regain control of the aircraft. With enough applied practice, pilots (we assume) feel fairly comfortable flying and securing safe landings of passengers in all conditions--- not only those on sunny days with clear skies.
If pilots demanded more resources and more templates because they felt “unprepared”, would we trust them to fly? And, now that I mention it… would we trust any professional who feels the need to memorize a generic outline prior to executing a skill? Yes, we must learn the rules to break the rules. And learning the rules often means monotonous, rote memorization of basic facts, equations, number figures, and sequences. But for fuck’s sake, what about the ability to think quickly on your feet, and change the course of your plan when the plan inevitably fails? Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of any human service to consider is the high likelihood that your teacher, your coach, or your therapist is operating their entire practice off of recycled templates and resources. It’s commonplace in therapeutic practice for hundreds of emails to ding back and forth between colleagues asking for “some resources on [insert clinical problem here].” In the time they spent emailing, they could’ve just… I don’t know… developed a resource themselves, using what they paid to go to school to master.
Because the disaster that is university education is too deep to touch in this specific piece, what I will say is this: education in the form of memorizing, lecturing, reading-without-comprehending, and writing-with-templates-and-guides is a bullshit, lazy stand-in for true learning. The unread library effect, which I’ve written about frequently, is the feeling that we’re acquiring knowledge by merely searching for the next best book or the next greatest resource on a particular problem. By searching for and even purchasing a resource, without having read it or thoroughly understood it, we are of the belief that we’ve advanced our expertise. This occurs often without our conscious awareness, as I assume, if we were consciously aware that resource-gathering is just another form of procrastination, we’d take action instead.