The Role of Insights and Reframes In Behavior Change

When I look back at two of my success stories, stopping smoking and losing weight, the lessons that stand out are: first, a blinding new insight can bring immediate change. And second, an accidental discovery of a new term or frame work of viewing can spark another immediate change.

In both cases, the experience heightened my interest in finding the new understanding that brings about a mastery of resistance.  But mutative insights, insights that bring a change in action, are very rare. I can only recall one in my lifetime. I keep looking for what Yalom (in his book, Existential Psychotherapy) calls the mutative insight, but so far it remains very allusive.

More common is a new term or way of viewing a current challenge that brings action change. In my weight loss story, I was losing steadily when I hit a plateau that lasted weeks and perhaps months. After losing 25 pounds the usual way…i.e. less intake and more exercise, I became stuck.

One day, while reading a newspaper story about our recent Republican president G. Bush, I cam across the term’feckless’, meaning ineffective, in describing our recent president. I was not familiar with the term but once I looked it up and compared myself with the president  in an unflattering way as a ‘feckless’ weight loser, I immediately bore down and got off my plateau.

In the past several days, I came across a book review in the NY times that mentioned the term ‘Kafkarna’ to describe an absurdity impossible to explain rationally. This is the Czechoslovakian term for Kafkesque and immediately resonated with me.  For I have long felt about my personal agenda pertaining to goal achievements of various sorts, that while that agenda had many benefits, and was definitely approved by my Better Self, I was not ‘doing it’.

The term that Aristotle in describing this phenomena was Akrasia, or that condition of character where one knows what should be done but is unable to do it. In essence, it is lack of willpower for when intentions come calling but their fulfillment falls short.

For years I feel I have suffered from this particular malaise and now I am faced with the hope that reframing this condition as Kafkarna will some how release me from the inertia of lazyness and the immobility of fear. For, after all, the solution is to act and stop dithering. I will report back soon.