Why your big brain can’t make you happier

(How I learned to keep my 'thinking self' in check, love my body, and care for the space around me)

When I was in my early 30s, I was utterly miserable. You would not know this from the picture here but I could not figure out where I should go, who I should be, or what to do with my life. I was also deeply insecure and was battling a raging eating disorder.  

This was perplexing because by then I also had two Master's degrees, a PhD., earned a scholarship to Oxford University, worked at the President’s office, and had a successful international consulting career on my Resume.

So why did I feel so miserable inside and why did all the intellectual achievements not make it better?

Twenty years later, I have a two-part explanation of what went wrong, and more importantly, a 3-part solution that anybody can use.

The reason I was so utterly unhappy twenty years ago boils down to this:

First, back then, I bought completely into what I call the Brain Supremacy.

Second, I truly believed that our bodies are solely the vessels carrying the precious brain, so working out or caring for one’s body was fine and all but rather a vanity in the grander scheme of things. Everyday, I lived in a reality where my body and my brain were completely disassociated entities that had no business overlapping.

Let’s start with the Brain Supremacy fallacy. I was raised to believe that the brain is truly our most important organ and that not only everything is figureoutable but also, and more importantly, that the brain and logic and reason are the keys to living a happy life.

Here’s why this is so insidious. On one hand, no doubt being smart and having a good education has a huge impact on upward social mobility, and thus, economic prosperity. It is also true that education is how we foster curiosity, which is the prerequisite for creativity, and creativity is an undisputable building block of a good life.

But, this obsession with understanding the world rationally and thinking our way through life misses one critical truth: people are not just thinking machines. If we only focus on our brain capacity, we disregard how much we rely on somatic wisdom. We disregard that most of our behavior is not driven by rational calculations but rather a decision-making based on emotions and stemming from centers that have no capacity for language.

I call this deeply flawed narrative that places our brain and rationality at the center of our behavior The Brain Supremacy. It’s almost exclusively a feature of Western society. First, we have the Enlightenment, and particularly Rene Descartes to thank for this division of body and mind as if they were two entirely separate entities. Spoiler alert: they are not. Yet, the idea permeated Western cultural and societal space for the past 200 years. Cogito Ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am) is indeed catchy and it is true. Humans are sentient beings.

But, it is ALSO true that our behavior is driven by decision-making processes that even we can’t explain, let alone analyze rationally. It is ALSO true that emotions are decidedly not some fixed response offerings falling neatly under five categories (anger, disgust, joy, sadness, and fear).  As the incomparably brilliant neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barret demonstrated, our emotions are made through complex processes and we contribute to such processes actively.

And it is ALSO true that our bodies hold wisdom and directly impact how we think and behave. This is a multilayered point but it boils down to this:  our bodies hold an enormous wealth of data and information  - we are only scratching the surface to understand – from how the physical settings in our bodies, including genetic dispositions before we are even born impact our behavior, abilities and the perception of the world, to the information stored in the fibers of our bodies (epigenetics) to the daily regulations of our bodies through hormones that have direct impact on our moods and actions. For more, people should read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk.

I want to reiterate I am 1000% pro-brain.  As Francis Bacon stated in Novum Organum in 1620 “To think is to be human’. The human brain is what led us to a society more just and more safe than any other in human history. The ingenuity of thinkers and inventors and artists and their contribution to human progress is undeniable.

But we’ve been deceived into believing that the brain also is the answer to all our problems. Too many people bought into the idea that everything and anything can be figured out, solved, that if only they focus and think about something long enough, they will find the one ‘correct’ answer. This narrative not only overlooks other ways of ‘thinking’ or arriving at various conclusions and solutions, it also limits us from accessing and appreciating the wisdom that our bodies provide. It prevents us from building on millennia of tradition and wisdom central to many cultures throughout history: that our bodies contain much intelligence beyond the mass in our skull; and that a space where we spend our lives matters a great deal. And if we extend our mind and care to the environment we occupy, we’ll unlock energy and flow that the mind alone can’t.

Here's what I would tell my younger, depressed self: You can get away from what’s weighing you down but it’s not through thinking and ruminating. It is through changing your deeply held beliefs, usually about one’s self-worth or shame.

These are lodged in the subconscious, so even if we could identify them, it is not possible to access these issues with our thinking, conscious brain.

Secondly, I’d tell my younger, suffering self, to think less and do more.

People overrate thinking at the same rate they underrate doing.

I’d make my younger self go outside, walk every day for at least an hour, and spend time in nature. I’d recommend regular workouts because cardio and physical exercise immediately change the cortisol levels in our bloodstream. I’d tell my younger self to change her diet immediately, quit drinking alcohol (a known depressant), and lean into a diet that is synced with her menstrual cycle, so to minimize the mood swings and balance the thyroid.   

And I’d make my younger self rearrange the furniture in her apartment, maybe even look for a new place, maybe in a different neighborhood. Changing the physical environment has a profound impact on our well-being and how we perceive our role in the world. This is because the change in our spatial identity is reflected in the activities we do every day, making us more alert to things we used to do on autopilot. So we suddenly must pay more attention,  we must practice a more examined life.

And when we rearrange furniture, finally frame the posters, buy plants or just reorganize the cupboards, it immediately improves our confidence: we moved, we redecorated, we did something. And if we can do that (redecorating, buying plants, cleaning up regularly), there’s a solid argument that we can do other things. Maybe even harder things.

All this has been reflected in my coaching:

1.      People can escape the beliefs that no longer serve them and tackle them where they reside, in their subconscious. Talking about problems is not the same as dealing with the problems because it doesn’t treat the root cause. Working with the subconscious, on the other hand, is fast and has a much higher chance of actually helping. In other words, for clients with deeply held unhelpful beliefs, hypnosis and other tools that access the subconscious are the most effective.

2.     A huge part of my clients’ success is how they learn to embrace their agency through the coaching process. They have the power to change their story. They have the power to replace their old beliefs and install a new code. If they’ve longed to get recognition from their parents and it never came? Well, they themselves can give them the recognition. And perhaps even realize that they don’t need their parents’ stamp of approval anymore. If they’ve felt like they didn’t matter at five and they still operate on this program subconsciously 30 years later? Thanks to Rapid Transformational Neurocoaching, they can rewire the neuropaths and rearrange their mental Jenga for good.

3.     The field of Coaching and mental health is like any other profession in the sense that there are fantastic professionals who truly change people’s lives and do incredibly important work AND there are also people who figured out that they can present as ‘certified coaches’ with a handful of certifications that took a few weeks to complete and that the business model of psychotherapy and to a certain degree coaching is built on largely intangible deliverables such as feeling happy or content. So there is a huge opportunity to exploit the business model.  This is a problem in and of itself but in the context of helping clients, the one outcome is that therapists and coaches tend to affirm client’s beliefs and habits, rather than build the clients’ resilience and establishment of strong healthy habits. Routines and discipline, particularly around our physical state are the lowest-hanging fruit among all the available tools for well-being.  We see memes about this on social media but when was the last time a mental health professional seriously asked you: Did you go outside this week? Did you work out? Did you drink enough water, or lift weights? And yet we know that physical stress leads to the release of good hormones that make us feel better.  Yet rarely is it the Coach or mental health professional asking the client to establish at least minimal habits to foster and strengthen their fitness or sleep, even if it is an objectively important building block of mental resilience and wellness.

If you are an overthinker and you, too, at some point bought into the Brain Supremacy and yet the brain is failing you in delivering solutions to the gnawing feeling of inadequacy or low self-esteem, or imposter syndrom or weight issues (or whatever else), I highly recommend trying Rapid Transformational Neurocoaching. It changed my life, as well as the lives of many of my happy clients. It can change yours, too.