Social media can be really great for a lot of reasons, but it’s impossible to peruse instagram, tik tok, and other outlets without seeing a nauseating volume of garbage about changing your mindset to find happiness, practicing discipline and self deprivation to achieve goals, or setting intention to change your fate and the function of the universe. Maybe you’re like me and have had enough life experience to know how full of shit all of it is. But it can be harmful to people who don’t know this yet, and perpetuate many self-destructive and harmful ideas about life and our worth as individuals.

We as humans are always, always afraid. From little things like bugs to bigger themes like running out of money, food, or being rejected by others, fear drives a great deal of our moment to moment actions as well as our long term plans and goals. Are you worried about finding someone to marry? The clock ticking down until your supposed forced retirement from procreation? Or are your fears rooted in what your Dad thinks of your ambition and career choices? Being abandoned by friends and acquaintances if they ever found out about the things you’ve done even though they’re just really stupid things you did as a kid?

All posts and other supposedly inspirational bullshit you see circulating the zeitgeist including many books and self-help content are, in reality, the attempted refutation of the fears which govern and control humanity. Death, loss, rejection, disease, violence, hatred, shame—there are a lot of things we can be afraid of and one of the primary ways by which we as humans confront and deal with fear and those things of which we are afraid is to simply outright deny them. Afraid of death? Believe in a God that can save you from it. Afraid of getting fat? Go to the gym and diet and starve yourself. Afraid of rejection? Dress in expensive clothes and flaunt your success to attract people.

Many people I know who struggle to do the things they feel they need to do will try all sorts of methods for making progress. Someone I once dated was a writer but found it impossible to get any writing done unless they were pressured by a fast approaching deadline. Trying to get out of this habit they would put up inspirational posters or get friends to pressure them to be productive or download productivity apps to keep tabs on them. I even got involved by disconnecting the internet when he had to write, which actually went over well but it also wasn’t my job to babysit him and I couldn’t keep up that kind of monitoring, logistically or for my own sanity. For my own experience I have never been one to delude myself to the nature of my own distractions and weaknesses, and wouldn’t even adopt New Years resolutions because if I have to wait for New Years to do something to improve myself I am just never going to do it.

The reason that setting intention, goals, and other self-improvement strategies hardly ever work or are extremely unproductive even if they do is because the problem for which we adopt these strategies is not at all about mindset or intention. Misunderstanding the nature of emotions, thoughts, and the function of the brain we all invariably confuse our thoughts and feelings as the originator of behavior when in fact it is actually the other way around. One of the ways in which the human brain works is to actually deceive us about how it works, making us think that our thoughts set intention and experience. Hormones and biology actually set intention and thoughts, because as a mortal human animal the quality of our lives is actually dependent on our environment, including things like nutrition and access to it but also to other human beings and the relationships we have to each other. If we as humans were actually in charge of our experience we would not exist as a species at all, because we cannot actually perceive things like hormones, minerals, and vitamins in our environment, and instead must be driven by biological instinct in order to successfully navigate life (or as successfully as we can manage). Instinct is instinct precisely because we are not really aware of it. Obvious instincts such as breathing or getting sleepy when it’s time for bed are even dismissed by those who are naive as just something that we do, as if that is not the very definition of an instinct, and because we are a higher organism with complex thoughts and behaviors we tend to think that other aspects of being human like fear, speaking, our tone of voice, or sexual or eating behaviors are choices we make instead of ones which are entirely driven by our biology as human beings. Crocodiles only eat a couple dozen times a year on average. With all that time on their hands, why don’t they eat more often? Because we don’t consider ourselves animals it’s easy then to see instinct in other animals, but there is not hardly one aspect of human experience which isn’t also driven by the same kinds of nature, the same animalistic functions of genetics and biology over which we have very little control and then we struggle mightily against self-defeating behaviors, trauma, and the mortality of life as if we should be able to control things that we absolutely can not, then wonder why such things are so difficult and why life has so much pain and frustration, refusing to identify our desire for control and the subjugation of fear as the source of that frustration in favor of entertaining control delusions.

There is this misconception that the soul, spirt, and spirituality is ethereal, because we don’t understand it, thinking that part of us is somehow separate from our bodies and thus not subject to the laws of nature. But the soul and spirit are as much a part of reality as our muscles and brain, and because our experience is entirely one which is biological, terrestrial, and environmental it is required when desirous to change things in our lives that we first address the physical and biological factors from which they actually originate. Because depression often results from trauma, conflict, and stress and we experience those things through our sensory functions and, as a consequence, ruminate on them it is easy to feel like our psychology must first change in order to master those personal problems. But the effect of such trauma and conflict is to physically alter the function of the endocrine system, which is how our bodies express and distribute hormones which are the cause of our feelings and thoughts. The brain fools us into thinking that our thoughts are the instigator of feelings, as a way to try to get a human animal to make different choices and do new things in order to solve the problem which causes the feelings and thoughts. But in reality the hormones occur first to the environmental stimuli, and in turn affect our thoughts. The consequence of enduring stress is to lose nutrients like zinc, sulfate, and vitamin D, which are exhausted by stress. High stress hormones also actively affect the composition of the gut microbiome which is a source of many additional nutrients not present in our diet such as the short chain fatty acids or certain B vitamins (or an increase in them). Nutrient deficiencies in our diet will also contribute to stress hormones, for instance when vitamin C or carbohydrate is not present in generous quantities in the diet this in turn lowers our metabolic rate, because vitamin C facilitates oxidative respiration which requires carbohydrate to run, and in response our bodies increase stress hormones to make up the difference but since stress hormones are irritating and aggravating we become exceedingly hangry when we are dieting, failing to see the connection between our choices to starve ourselves and the effect it has on our ability to be effective which no intention can overcome. Insistence to the opposite results in severe metabolic distress and, sadly, very often even death as people insist the mind is more powerful than the body, never realizing the irony of the mind itself being a function of the brain, which is part of the body, and because of its high rate of metabolism even more dependent on access to good nutrition for its function than other organs.

Intention is most harmful because it fundamentally acts to deny compassion to ourselves. Be cognizant of my intentional word choice in that I did not say pity, which is much different than compassion and which many of us mistake for compassion since we have never known it. When we have problems in our lives which prevent us from achieving the things we want it is because we have often gone through experiences which caused these problems which are themselves difficult to deal with—abuse, neglect, deprivation, loss, need, malnourishment, etc. Lacking compassion for experiences we instead try to slog through them, trying to force our mind, to will ourselves out of the consequences of reality, which is actually impossible to do, and it is this very act of willful ignorance and refusal to acknowledge our problems which withholds compassion, because how can we overcome something we refuse even to acknowledge?

Myself and my ex, and many others, experience problems like having self-discipline because of very high stress hormones which originated often from abuse and neglect which are further sustained by self-harm in the form of stressful dietary and physical behaviors. Conflict with other humans, like our parents, friends, siblings, and romantic partners is the greatest stimulant for stress hormones like adrenaline. But carbohydrate deficiency also strongly raises adrenaline, so having traumatic life experiences in addition to under-eating and overexercising causes such extreme elevations in adrenaline and other stress hormones it then becomes impossible to sit still and finish your writing, or your homework, or to pay attention in class or focused on your job. Having much self pity we bemoan our problems but having little self compassion do things like starve ourselves and run our bodies into the ground at the gym. Intention which actually works is to make choices and decisions, not just mindsets, which do things to help ourselves. Forcing yourself to sit and finish a book when you get distracted because of high stress hormones is self abuse. But making a big, delicious meal and keeping your blood sugar up consistently so that your body heals and your stress hormones fall is self-care and the act of showing compassion for yourself. Compassion is not a feeling, it is doing, especially in a way that also acknowledges our faults and shortcomings, not deny them. So if you find yourself struggling to do the things you want to do or feel the need to do, rather than trying to change your mindset, look instead at your actions and how you are treating yourself. Are you abusing yourself and denying yourself those things you need to be healthy? Start first in remedying those and your mind and effectiveness will follow. If this seems like a difficult thing to do, my books walk you through it step by step, Fuck Portion Control addresses physical and nutritional health and The Perfect Child addresses psychological health and resolving experiences of abuse. The empowerment their knowledge will bring can help you get out of those ruts and improve your quality of life, as well as helping you to find out what it is you really want, and not what other people want of you.