“What assistance can we find in the fight against habit? Try the opposite!”
EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 1.27.4
What if the key to breaking bad habits and solving your problems was to… not try? Or to try the opposite of what you’ve been trying so far?
That’s the rather wild idea posited in today’s entry of The Daily Stoic. Author Ryan Holiday tells the story of Viktor Frankl, a psychologist who told his patients to try something called “paradoxical intention”, wherein they would try the opposite of the most obvious technique to cure what ails them. For example, if they had insomnia, he would encourage them to try not to fall asleep.
The idea was to stop thinking so much about the problem or habit you were trying to break; to stop being obsessive about it. I think we can all see the wisdom in this, and most of us have either considered this or tried it ourselves with varying success. After banging our heads against a wall for hours to solve a problem (not literally), we intentionally walk away from it to clear our head and sometimes find the solution later, almost accidentally.
The wisdom here is not: Give up on trying to break bad habits or solve problems.
It’s rather that by overthinking and obsessing about it, we get “stuck in a bad pattern” as Holiday refers to it, and that’s counterproductive and ends up pushing our goal out of reach. Why not try the opposite and see what happens? Not on everything of course. But if you encounter something you can’t do, intentionally try not to do it, and see if that bears any interesting fruit. Worth a shot at least, when all else has failed!
Just don’t think about it so much
Personally I don’t think the point of today’s chapter is to “always try the opposite”, because that would be kind of silly and that almost goes without saying. Life is not a Dr. Seuss children’s book.
The idea here is more that we shouldn’t obsess about things that we’re trying to fix. And that if we do get obsessed and overthink, it doesn’t help us at all. Better to stop focusing on the problem so hard in those cases, and just give your mind a break and focus on something else for a bit, and maybe the answer will come to you in the meantime.
And if taking some time away from the problem doesn’t do it, and you’re feeling spunky, consider trying a totally different and unlikely path in the off chance that it works.
