Some problems can’t be solved with more thinking
Problems can feel overwhelming depending on our perceived gravity of them, which also depends on past experiences. Most overwhelming problems feel like that because they put us in contact with the feeling (or thought) of death, or social debacles. We tend to have a default inherent reaction to the arising of problems: thinking. Thinking about solutions, ruminating about the past cause of the present conundrum, and wondering about what the future will look like in this scenario.
We suffer more in imagination than in reality, as Seneca would emphasize. Imagination is the cloud of self-directed thoughts transpiring in our minds. Those are a by-product of our personality traits, beliefs, and instilled behaviors we learned in the path of reality. You may not even notice their presence. And you often can’t recognize them because you identify with your thoughts, and you may fear spending time in a room alone because your own thoughts would hunt you. So, you numb the inherent pain of human existence by immersing yourself in external-focused activities that take some of your cognitive attention away from the present moment so that you don’t need to sit with your distorted thinking.
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca, On groundless fears
Your thinking is distorted many times. The degree of distortion varies among individuals because it is—in significant part—a result of your upbringing and the individuals who educated you while growing up (and your personality features). You may have detached yourself from those individuals (your family) at some point at the end of your teenage years. And you replaced that environment with another one: likely a group of peers you happened to meet somewhere. You may have never invested time in staying by yourself for at least 1 month, without numbing your distorted thinking with activities taking you out of the mind.
That’s part of being a human. One potential downside of not inquiring within for a protracted period of time is that when a problem arises you can’t control your reactions. Your mind starts racing with thoughts faster than the French TGV. And you fall into a spiral of distorted thinking that may magnify the problem. As neuroscientist Sam Harris points out in the Waking Up app: some problems simply can’t be solved with more thinking. He makes the example of the man who is hit by a poisoned arrow. A doctor arrives to medicate the man. The man says: “'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker, . . .’” All of that is taking cognitive and physical energy out of the man. Some problems can’t be solved with more thinking. They can be solved with less thinking, or maybe not solved at all.