If You Want to Transform Your Life, Beware of this Psychological Trap

Pulling yourself out of the vortex that keeps most people stuck in unconscious, soul-sucking patterns.

When you want to release “bad” habits and transform your life for the better, most people initially rely on contract logic to make initial changes.

Contract logic is essentially the reasoning, “If I do X, I’ll get Y.” Some examples might include “If I quit caffeine, I’ll have sustained energy levels.”

Or “If I write and publish consistently, I’ll create an audience of raving fans.”

The tension is that motivation wanes when these rewards don’t arrive.

Worse, when you first make a change, you often face an intensification of the problem that led you to initiate the habit you’d like to change in the first place.

To stay with the habits and structures that will help you transform your life, you need a sturdier foundation.

The Allure (and Breakdown) of Contract Logic

In the brilliant book, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison depicts her journey of falling in love with alcohol, seeing it derail her physical and psychological health, and finally, the process of leaving it behind. She writes:

“Contract logic justifies all kinds of labor and makes all kinds of promises, but anyone who lives by contract logic gets betrayed by it…It involves its own tyrannical authorial impulse.”

As she initially quits, she thinks: If I stop drinking, I’ll become more creatively prolific. My relationships will improve. And so on.

Contract logic falls apart because it rests on internal polarization. It’s a way of waging war against that part of you that finds redemption in the paradigm you’re trying to leave behind.

War never works because those parts remain with you: they’re enmeshed with the part of you that wants transformation, as well as the part that wants to stay the same.

Since they’ve been conditioned and reinforced for decades prior, they don’t simply dissolve on command.

It’s also worth saying that contract logic comes from an intelligent place. There’s certainly an order of operation to transformation.

Depending on the type of habit you’re wanting to change, you could be at an all-time low in your life.

In these instances, contract logic is the promise that moves you in the direction of resolution.

Why Contract Logic Fails the Moment You Need It Most

The reason that contract logic isn’t necessarily a sophisticated tool for long-term change is that when you quit a habit, you’ll tend to face an uproar of exactly the symptoms that caused you to begin the habit in the first place.

A classic example is quitting caffeine. I stopped drinking coffee and tea at the beginning of January, and for about a month, I had:

• Low motivation
• Higher sleep drive
• Extreme hunger
• Sluggishness

If I relied on contract logic (If I give up caffeine, I’ll have sustained energy levels!), I would have wanted to return to the fear juice immediately.

The symptoms that arise when you give up caffeine are exactly the reasons you’d be driven to consume caffeine in the first place.

This is the case with nearly any kind of transformation. If you want to become a prolific artist, for example, you’ll quickly be met with all the reasons why you haven’t yet been prolific: It’s tough to feel consistently motivated. It can be tedious to arrive at ideas when you’re hungry, bored, or scattered.

You’ll only arrive at the promising alternative to your current way of life after you’ve faced and overcome the very pain that drove you toward your existing paradigm to begin with.

The Mindset that Leads You Out of the Harrowing Parts of Any Transformation

How do you know that something should be happening? Because it is. — Byron Katie

What’s missing from contract logic is a holistic health principle known as the healing crisis.

Holistic practitioners see the body as having innate self-healing mechanisms. For example, when you fall and get cut, the bleeding is part of how the body corrects the problem.

From a holistic perspective, all symptoms are indications of the body engaging in self-correction.

And even more significantly, when you experience a symptom, it’s a sign that resolution is already underway.

Quitting caffeine is a simple example of a healing crisis. The high sleep drive, low motivation, and sluggishness represent the body’s return to homeostasis.

Because caffeine can interfere with normal aspects of liver detoxification, many people also will get sick shortly after quitting caffeine. If you don’t see this as part of your return to balance, you’ll think it’s a problem and run back to caffeine.

But when you recognize it as a healing crisis, you can rest assured that when you let the symptoms run their course, you’ll ultimately feel better than you did while using caffeine.

This is a level of nuance that doesn’t shine through contract logic. Contract logic skips over the healing crisis, promising that you’ll immediately get to the other side without a struggle.

Healing crises aren’t limited to health-related changes. If you want to become a prolific artist, for instance, you could see the healing crisis as that initial frustration you feel when first attempting to create every day, regardless of boredom and uncertainty.

The concept of the healing crisis can also be understood via the cliche, the way out is through. It’s only by embracing the pangs of boredom and uncertainty that being prolific will come naturally.

The inevitability is this: The more you try to avoid or paper over the healing crisis, the longer it takes to get what you want.

So don’t avoid it. Embrace the struggle, and know that it’s exactly what you need to rest comfortably into the experience you’re longing to have.