Out of My Head

A few months back I exported almost fifteen years of journal entries and fed them all to AI. Every entry I could find, going back to college. Thousands of them. I asked it to read everything and tell me what it saw.

It was fascinating to see what came out of the large language model. I came out of it with all kinds of small insights and a few bigger ones, and I’ve been chewing on them for weeks. Some of them I might write about separately. But there’s one in particular that has changed how I’m spending my time and money this quarter, and that’s the one I want to talk about.

For about a decade I’ve had a weight problem I can’t seem to shake. The pattern is almost too predictable to write about. Every quarter I set a goal, miss the goal, get frustrated, get re-motivated, and try again with a new approach. I’ve hired nutritionists, tried different diets, done meal plans, done macro tracking, done structured programs. I workout like an addict: 6 days a week, 1-2 hours per day. None of it has worked for any meaningful stretch of time. I’d lose a little, gain it back, and reset the clock. Same loop, year after year, for the last ten years.

I always assumed the problem was tactical. I just hadn’t found the right plan yet, the right coach, the right protocol. So I kept buying new ones.

Then the AI read fifteen years of my journal and told me something I had never quite seen. It said I’m a constant “problem-then-fixer.” I feel something, and within a few seconds my brain has converted it into an action item or a project. I don’t really sit with anything. Not happiness, not discomfort, not even rest. Everything that lands in me gets immediately turned into a thing to manage. The next thing on my task list.

Even the good stuff. Especially the good stuff. That was a little hard to read, because when I went back and looked at my journal entries about my weight, the pattern was right there too. Every time I’d gain a few pounds, the very next thing I’d write was a plan. New approach. New protocol. New goal. I wasn’t ever stopping to ask why my body was doing what it was doing. I was just trying to fix it. And the fixing kept failing because the thing underneath wasn’t actually something a meal plan could solve.

I’ve been in my own head my whole life. Always chasing, always scanning, always wanting the next thing, never quite settling into what I already have. I’ve written about pieces of this from different angles before, but it landed differently this time because the AI tied it directly to a problem I’d been treating as completely separate. The weight stuff and the can’t-sit-still stuff were the same stuff.

I went looking for what to do about it and ran into something called somatic therapy.

I’d heard the term but didn’t really know what it meant. It’s a form of therapy that takes the body seriously as a source of information, built on the idea that the mind and body aren’t separate and that a lot of what we carry around (stress, old fears, low-grade chronic anxiety) actually lives in the body more than in the thinking brain. So instead of only talking about what’s going on in your head, a somatic therapist helps you pay attention to what’s going on in your body. Where there’s tension. Where there’s tightness. What sensations show up when you talk about a particular thing. The body usually has something to say if you slow down enough to listen.

Talk therapy works on the cognitive layer. Somatic therapy works on the layer underneath. For a guy who has spent fifteen years getting better and better at thinking about his patterns without actually shifting them, that distinction mattered.

So I hired a therapist a few weeks ago and we’ve started doing this somatic work together. It’s been awesome. We’re not digging through old trauma. We’re not picking apart my childhood. The work is smaller and stranger than that. He’ll ask what I’m noticing in my body. I’ll say something like “tight chest” or “my jaw is clenched” and he’ll sit with it with me, ask what it’s like, ask what it might be trying to tell me. Not in a mystical way. In a curious, what-is-this-actually way.

It’s a strange thing for me. I’m not used to my body being something I listen to. I’m used to my body being something I manage. A thing I run, fuel, train, and occasionally apologize to. Treating it as a source of information instead of another project on the list is genuinely new.

I don’t have results to report yet. I haven’t dropped weight. I haven’t cracked the code. The point of the work isn’t really to crack a code anyway. It’s to get out of my head long enough to actually be in my life. To let a moment land before I rush to the next one. To feel something for ten more seconds before I turn it into a plan.

I’ll keep sharing what I learn.

#HappyLearning