As my daughter Harlow was losing her sh*t because I opened a banana the “wrong” way around, I could see my hand reaching for the chocolate as if someone had taken control of my limbs. And as I was shoving it in my mouth, a thought came up: why are you doing this, you don’t want that, put it down, what is wrong with you.
Now years ago, those couple of seconds would have meant me finishing the entire tablet. Maybe even opening the freezer to search for ice cream too. But this time I stopped (after I ate the chocolate). This time it didn’t feel like a failure, like my day was ruined. It just felt like a blip. A snaccident. A way to cope with a feeling that was brief and inconsequential.
I stopped believing the thoughts that were judging my actions. Not because I understood myself better. Not because I tried harder. Because I was no longer inside the reaction — I was watching it. And that gap, however small, changed everything.
Which brings me to the question almost every self-aware, high-achieving woman eventually asks:
I know why I do this. So why am I still doing it?
The answer is actually pretty simple, this is about.
The gap between knowing something and actually living it.
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Your brain is running a script
Think about your day today.
Tying your shoes, making dinner, driving or walking home.
You’re not consciously thinking about any of that. You don’t have to actively think about how to tie your shoes, which hand to use to pour salt in, or which turn to take next. You’re doing it on autopilot.
And it goes the same with most of our conversations, our reactions, and even our decisions.
This iis what I call the “Script”. The Script is basically the collection of everything you’ve learned to be true. Your values, your beliefs, your rules about the world. You created it from a very young age when you were trying to make sense of things, and every experience since has served to reinforce it.
So if you walk into a room you’ve never been in, see a table you’ve never seen before, and know immediately that it’s a table, that’s the script working. You didn’t have to run an experiment or check whether a plank with four legs was a table. The script gave you that in an instant.
What the script does is give you the power of assumption. And assuming is faster than thinking.
Most of the time, that’s incredibly useful. But sometimes the assumption is wrong. Think about what happens when your manager goes quiet, doesn’t reply to your message, or sends a shorter email than usual. The script scans the situation and fills in the gap with the most familiar story it knows. Which might be: something is wrong. And it’s probably me.
Or think about someone who receives feedback at work, and something in them shuts down regardless of whether the feedback was fair. The script fills the gap and might go: “I’m not appreciated” or “I can’t do anything right”…very dramatic script! But also very quick to work, it swoops in before the conscious mind had a chance to weigh in.
The power of assumption that helps us recognise a table is the same power that tells us an unanswered text means rejection. It cannot tell the difference. It just pattern-matches to what it already knows.
“The same mechanism that helps you function on autopilot is the one that hijacks you under pressure. It’s not a flaw, It’s the same system, doing the same job.”
Knowing It isn’t the same as living It
Here is where it gets interesting.
When we understand something intellectually, it lives in the conscious brain, the logical part, the “thinking part” of our mind.
When we know something emotionally, instinctively, it lives in the unconscious. The deeper, older, faster part.
Think about what happens when you approach a traffic light. Your foot moves to the brake before you’ve consciously decided anything. You didn’t think: red means stop, stopping requires pressure on the pedal, you just slowed down. Because you’ve encountered enough traffic lights in your life, that your body knows what to do. That knowledge isn’t in your head anymore. It is in your body.
Now think about someone who knows, logically, that they are good at their job. The track record is there, other people see it, but the moment they have to do a presentation, heart rate goes up, doubt creeps in. Because knowing something in your head and the body actually trusting it are two completely different things.
One is information, the other is integration.
The awareness gap (definition): The awareness gap is the distance between understanding a pattern intellectually and the nervous system actually living differently. Insight lives in the conscious mind. The pattern runs from somewhere much older and faster than that.
The patterns we’re talking about, the ones that keep running despite you knowing them very well, are not a logic problem. They live at the level of the traffic light, which means they can’t be reached by thinking alone.
And that’s why the question my clients ask – I know why I do this, so why am I still doing it? – is actually the wrong question.
Because knowing was never going to be enough.
“The more self-aware you are, the more confusing it gets, because you can see exactly what’s happening and still can’t stop it. That’s not a gap in understanding. That’s a gap in where the understanding lands.”
Why judging yourself keeps It going
When the pattern runs, most of us do the one thing that guarantees it keeps running : We judge ourselves for it.
“Why am I still doing this?”
“I should know better.”
“What is wrong with me?”
And it makes sense, when you can see the pattern happening and still can’t stop it, it feels like you should be able to. But here is what’s actually happening when we judge ourselves.
The judgment creates more stress. More stress makes the unconscious believe we’re in danger, which activates the script for protection. And the script produces more of the behaviour we don’t want.
So instead of breaking the loop, we are feeding it.
The Judgment Loop (Definition): The judgment loop is when self-criticism in response to a pattern creates enough internal stress to trigger the very script that produced the pattern in the first place. The attempt to stop it becomes the fuel.
But I hear you… HOW do we stop judging ourselves for these behaviours we so desperately want to shift?
“Judging yourself for the pattern doesn’t interrupt it. It gives it exactly the conditions it needs to keep going.”
You’re an actor following a very old script
Let me offer you a completely different way of looking at this.
Think about an actor who plays a villain in a film. Really commits to it. Does terrible things on screen. (I always think of Christoph Waltz playing Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds.)
If you saw that actor in real life, you wouldn’t walk up to them and shout at them for everything their character did. Because you understand: that wasn’t really them. They were following a script.
In the moments that hijack you, you are that actor.
You are playing a role from a script that was written a long time ago. And here is the thing… it made sense when it was written. The behaviour that hijacks you now was the right response to something that happened then. It helped you make sense of the world, find your place, stay safe.
If staying small meant avoiding conflict, the script makes you go quiet now. If achieving kept you loved, it makes you push beyond your limits. It feels like self-sabotage. But it’s actually doing exactly the job it was designed to do.
The problem is not that it’s protecting you. The problem is that it learned what danger looks like when you were young. And it hasn’t had a chance to update since.
The moment we stop punishing ourselves for following a very old script, something shifts. The script doesn’t disappear, but…we’re no longer inside it looking out. We’re outside it, looking at it.
And that is where choice lives.
“The behaviour that hijacks you isn’t who you are. It’s a role you’ve been playing from a script written when you were small, one that made complete sense then, and just hasn’t been updated since.”
Try This
The next time the pattern runs, instead of asking why am I like this, complete these two sentences:
Step 1
“This situation makes me feel like I am…”
Name the belief underneath the reaction. The moment you can name it, you are no longer inside it.
Step 2
“If I didn’t feel this way, I would…”
This brings you back into the thinking part of your brain. The part that can actually choose.
When you can ask yourself what you would do if the feeling wasn’t running the show, you’ve already taken the first step out of autopilot.
FAQ
Why do I keep repeating patterns even though I understand them?
Because understanding and the nervous system living differently are two separate things. The pattern doesn’t live in the conscious, thinking brain, it lives somewhere older and faster. Insight is real. It just doesn’t automatically reach the level where the pattern runs.
Why does self-awareness sometimes make it more frustrating, not less?
Because when you can see the pattern happening and still can’t stop it, the gap feels like failure. That frustration adds pressure, which actually gives the script more reason to activate. You end up feeding the thing you’re trying to stop.
Why doesn’t mindset work or journalling fix this?
Those tools work in the conscious brain. The patterns we’re talking about don’t live there. They run from a part of the mind that doesn’t respond to logic and doesn’t care how many times you’ve journalled about it. The entry point has to be different.
Is this some kind of trauma response?
Not necessarily in the clinical sense. It is the brain doing its job, pattern-matching to what it learned early on about how to stay safe. The response made complete sense when it was formed. It’s just running on very old information now.
What does it actually mean to step outside the pattern?
It doesn’t mean the pattern stops. It means a small gap appears between the trigger and your response. That gap is where choice lives. And it starts not with effort, but with seeing what’s happening without immediately prosecuting yourself for it.
