One thing I have been trying to do in my life that goes against what has become our societal norm is to treat the cause, not the symptoms, in all areas of my life.
For example, if I find myself procrastinating by turning to scrolling on my phone instead of focusing on work, putting my phone in another room will make it harder to grab my phone in moments of weakness, but it won’t cure what’s causing the need to procrastinate in the first place.
About 10 years ago, I thought I might be clinically depressed. It was easy for me to get stuck in ruts and have no idea how to pull myself out of them. I ended up talking to a doctor whose response was, “Yep, sounds like you have depression. Let’s start you on a medication for that.”
I didn’t want medication but at that point was curious to try it and see if it would solve my problem. The short story is that the medication did nothing, so the doctor told me to double the dose. After a week on the higher dose, I still didn’t feel any different and knew that more medication was not going to solve my problem.
I knew that I had gotten myself into that mess and that I needed to get myself out. I did not want medication to create a new baseline for me. I wanted to get back to a place where I didn’t get stuck in these ruts, and I knew that meant doing the hard work to undo what got me to where I was.
The hard work was a process of getting things out of the way that prevented me from having the mental bandwidth to seek something deeper than a cure for the present symptom. This meant addressing my alcohol consumption, sleep habits, exercise routine, and diet. It meant creating space in my mind to actually process what was happening rather than just react to it.
Over the course of several years, I have done that work, and now my ruts last hours instead of weeks or even months.
Society today is all about fixing the symptoms without looking at the cause. Whether that be with personal productivity or the current mental health situation.
There has been a massive boom in corporate and personal productivity tools and systems. It’s currently a huge industry. The question asked is “What tools can we implement to make us more productive?” rather than asking why we are not more productive in the first place.
Tools are great, but they only work as long as we remain motivated. I don’t want to be in a place where I need tools to keep me in line. A tool can help temporarily, but if deep down I am not motivated, the tool will not be strong enough as the root problem will continue to grow.
It’s like trying to cover up rust on an old vehicle. You can paint over the rust so you don’t have to look at it, but it will continue to grow underneath, and eventually the rust will have to be cut out. If you don’t want more rust, you will have to change your environment.
This translates to family leadership because we all bring brokenness into our decisions. As parents, there needs to be awareness and repair; otherwise, the outcomes will be passed on to our kids, and that is how generational trauma gets passed down.
We have normalized symptom management by separating personal responsibility from it rather than taking ownership of it. We have entire industries built around symptom management because there’s a lot of money in it. Those solutions are easier than fixing the root problem because many of these problems can’t be fixed with a pill or a medical procedure; they take hard work and remapping of our individual personal processes.
The harder path is identifying the cause and seeking to understand it, learn, and fix it. It requires relearning, undoing, and processing. It’s sometimes painful, especially if we have built up an entire world of tolerances around ourselves to prevent having to deal with it.
At times it feels like the pursuit of identifying and treating the causes is never-ending, and that solving one only leads to the awareness of another. That can become disheartening if your hope is not grounded in something big enough, and that is why I put my hope in Jesus.
What symptoms have you been managing instead of addressing the real cause?