Since I mentioned the book Range a couple of days ago:

(about how generalists can triumph over specialists):

There’s a chapter in the book about interventional cardiologists.

These are the men and women who specialise in treating chest pain by using stents (i.e. small metal tubes) to prise open blood vessels. So when a patient arrives in hospital with chest pain and a scan reveals a narrowed artery, they’ll pop a stent into the artery to open it back up and stop a heart attack.

The only problem?

Clinical trials have shown that for patients with stable chest pain, stents don’t actually prevent heart attacks at all.

The book goes on to say:

A 2015 study showed that patients with heart failure or cardiac arrest were less likely to die if they were admitted to hospital during a national cardiology conference when thousands of the top cardiologists were away.

Despite the evidence, cardiologists who specialise in using that tool reported they simply cannot believe that stenting doesn’t work, even when their compensation was tied to not performing the procedure.

It doesn’t take a brain scientist (or a stent-wielding cardiologist?) to figure out that treating a symptom isn't the way to cure an underlying problem. My entire medical knowledge comes from watching Casualty every Saturday night back in the carefree days of the 1990s. But even I can see that opening an artery will do diddly squat to address whatever caused it to narrow (and keep narrowing) in the first place. 

And what this study shows is that the “see a problem, fix the symptom” mentality is live & well and hasn’t really gone anywhere since the days of smearing mammoth dung into cracks in cave walls.

It’s not just hospitals where silencing a symptom gets muddled up with actually solving a problem.

Take an overactive mind at work as another example. 

I’ve wrestled with thoughts like "how will I get through all this work?", "how can I stop thinking about work when I’m not at work?" and "should I quit my job?" more times than I’ve had hot dinners.

The normal remedy for this sort of mental merry-go-round is setting strict work hours, being ruthless with boundaries, distracting oneself with hobbies, downloading the latest meditation app, sweating the thoughts out in the gym or drowning the thoughts down the pub with a few pints of Timothy Taylor’s finest ale.

I tried all these.

Some of them worked for a week, a month or even a few months.

But their usefulness always ran out at some point. And none of them stopped me lying awake in bed at 3.30am, mind racing, wondering why I couldn’t get to sleep and dreading my 6am alarm.

At the time, these seemed like the obvious solutions. In fact, they were the only solutions I could see. 

But I guess that’s where I tripped myself up. 

These “pills” were the obvious, visible answers but were really just ways to silence my symptoms rather than zone in on the source of the issue.

That source?

Turns out my mental merry-go-round wasn’t coming from my job. 

It was coming from my mind.

It seems to me that if you spend some time getting clear on how the mind works, where thoughts come from, the purpose of thinking and the nature of thought (i.e. focus on the source, not the symptoms), you can’t help but find more peace and quiet between your ears.

It’s almost guaranteed.

And because this shift is rooted in understanding rather than tactics, it doesn’t wear off after a few weeks. Instead, it sticks around. And the more you get eyes for what's going on, the more settled your mind becomes.

The shift from popping pills to deep, genuine and insightful understanding is what actually changed things for me. 

It's also the direction I take when I work with my clients.

If you’d like to get started:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

To fulfilment,

Tom