The Gap Between Insight and Action: Causes and Responses

In the first part of this post, I introduced the insight/action gap and offered one macro reason why it’s so prevalent: changing things takes effort, and as long as we’re alive, the evolutionary imperative says “it’s all good.” I also suggested that we should think of it less as a singular chasm that mysteriously doesn’t get spanned, and more as the output of a million micro-forces that don’t happen to push/pull in quite the right directions.

In this second part, I’ll cover the first two of the major structural reasons why the gap can come about and then hang about, and make suggestions for how to counter them.

1. Interpretation is easy and satisfying.

The reason:

Humans are interpretation addicts. Even just within the cognitive sphere, our daily lives are made up of constant interpretive activities attaching to everything from patterns of light and shadow to football scores to the ever-so-slight arc of your mother’s eyebrow when you tell her about your travel plans. And all this incomprehensibly intricate activity attaches to language more readily than to anything else.

Language turns continuous, analogue sounds into discrete segments: the letters of the alphabet that we combine and recombine into words, and the words we amalgamate into sentences.* The digital nature of language makes it extremely easy to copy and recombine and do complex things with it that feel satisfying—like write posts about it being helpfully digital, or concoct arguments for why recovery probably isn’t worth it. So there’s a bias to making everything semantic; you can think of language as a funnel that drags everything into itself.

Talk therapies are a great example of the language funnel in action: Let’s take all the complexities of my existence and turn them into words, often narratively structured and retrospective (here’s the story of how this current life situation came about). All stories are satisfying, and stories about ourselves are even more satisfying than all the others, and neat stories that tie up all the loose ends about ourselves are the most satisfying of all—even when the satisfaction comes laced with masochism. Therapies that privilege the verbal interaction itself aren’t directly designed to help anyone change behaviours. They’re predicated on the belief that the language funnel is the way to get the problem solved: that if we can just do the funneling really well, then the insight will follow from that, and then the insight will lead to the actions that change the life in the desired ways. But this assumption is often not borne out in reality. In fact, the insight/action gap is being assumed not to exist. Which is fairly stupid.

The response:

Make a habit of taking the next step whenever you come to a conclusion in words, whether that’s when journaling or in conversation with someone or just following a train of thought. For example, you conclude that self-esteem issues are part of what makes you keep making good plans for structuring your days differently and having your meals at reasonable times (or at all). OK, so don’t stop there. Instead you decide on a single action you can take that may even slightly reduce the effects you’ve identified, e.g., get yourself a self-help book on self-esteem, try out two exercises from it, and see whether they make any difference.

Think of the verbal conclusion as a hypothesis to be tested, not a truth to sit back into. If the action you try out does nothing, maybe your conclusion was off-base. If it does something unexpected, ditto. The point is not to get invested in your own right-or-wrongness, but to open up avenues for change that will bear some relation to the original hypothesis, and that will be coming about precisely because you dared to treat it as a starting point, not a stopping place.

2. Intellectual change is overvalued relative to practical change.

The reason:

The language funnel is propped up by the way that as societies we often privilege verbalized intellectual outputs (exam scripts, books, TED talks, even fluent conversational insights into one’s own problems) over practical skills and transformations that may sound trivial when articulated in words (e.g., learning to eat in a way that suits your body and life), even though they typically represent much more direct and/or profound consequences for quality of life. The overvaluation is more misplaced the more a given situation (let’s say, a given target of therapeutic intervention) is bound up with physical problems that require behavioural remedies, as is clearly the case with eating disorders.

In eating disorder recovery, changing practical actions ought to be seen as urgent and important, but often isn’t because the “you need to sort out your emotional problems first” line often dominates. Mindset change and behaviour change are always in feedback with each other, and the societal bias means that the action-to-attitude half of the loop is often neglected. This is deeply unfortunate, given there are many factors that make it easier to get a recovery process kicked off with a change in what you do rather than an attempted change in how you think—because, again, focusing on thinking can very easily just pile up more and more thinking that never translates.

(The need to plunge into action is why many people find coaching a more relevant method for eating disorder recovery than therapy—especially when the disorder has existed for a long time, lots of therapy has already been done, and the only remaining questions are: Am I going to do this for real now, and if so, how? The more behavioural end of cognitive behavioural therapy can be helpful too, but in general over recent decades, CBT has been moving away from the B—for the two reasons I’ve explored here, and others (Troscianko & Leon, 2020).)

Cognition Essential Reads

Left-Handedness and Cognition: New Insights

Men and the Hidden Costs of Overthinking

The response:

A simple tactic to uncover and counteract the default valuation biases we often have as individuals is first to rate the perceived significance of an intellectual conclusion (e.g., that habit represents a part of me that isn’t getting expressed any other way) immediately after reaching it and then setting a calendar alert to do so again a month later. Then, second, do something similar with a practical change that relates to this conclusion (as in point 1 above): how significant does the change feel a) when you first decide on it, b) just after you’ve first done it, and c) a month after you first did it? When you’ve got both of your one-month ratings you can look back at both sets, make some notes on what patterns you notice, and draw some conclusions about expected versus actual significance.

So, here we’ve covered two of the structural distinctions between insight and action that can easily make the latter not happen. In the next installment, we’ll continue this exploration—and in the meantime, I invite you to pay attention to when and how you’re getting sucked into thinking and talking versus translating this into acting, in your daily life within or beyond the recovery context. Read on here.