WHY ASKING WHY LEADS YOU TO SUFFER

Why? Why do I feel this way? Why do I think this way? Common questions for therapy. But did you realize that asking Why is sometimes not helpful?

Of course, some amount of asking the question Why is appropriate. But let's focus on how if we ask this too often of ourselves, it can have a drastically negative impact on our mood and behaviors. It can keep us in a spiral of suffering.

For those of us who are naturally inquisitive, we just like to learn new things, we are introspective, we have been in therapy or coaching, we might find that we question Why often.

And to ask why can be helpful. For example, if I get a sore throat and a fever and runny nose, it would be helpful to ask why because I could then find out if i have Covid or the Flu and need to stay home, if I need an antibiotic in order to heal, etc. These are valuable answers to the Why.

But what if you have an illness or a pain and it’s not so easy to figure out why? What if your pain is more emotional or behavioral? How can asking why make that worse?

First lets start with our physical ailments with a patient example. Take my patient Sally, not her real name. Sally was entering menopause and started to notice all sorts of changes in her body: night sweats, mood swings, low energy…but the most worrisome to her was the significant changes in her sleep. She had always been a decent sleeper, but out of nowhere she started to have difficulty staying asleep at night.

She would wake up at 1 am and lay in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling and wondering why she couldn’t sleep. She had heard that menopause could cause sleep issues but this seemed out of the ordinary. She worried that something else was wrong with her. She made an appt with her PCP who advised her to seek out a sleep specialist. She saw the sleep specialist who recommended a sleep study. This unfortunately, kicked off a series of months and months of going from different specialist to different specialist to find out the root cause of her insomnia. The more doctors she saw, the more differing advice and medications she was prescribed. When those medications didn’t work or gave her side effects, she started to feel hopeless that this would ever resolve and go back to how it had been before it all started.

Sally focused daily on her insomnia which only worsened her insomnia. By the time Sally came to me, she was depressed, crying often and avoiding friends and isolating herself, again, all because she was asking the question “why can’t I sleep the way I used to?”

So again, I am not implying that Sally made a mistake by ever asking the question why. It is normal and understandable to ask why. But notice how when the answer was not readily available, she ended up going down a rabbit hole. And in the medical community especially, this is very easy to do. It is very common for 3 different doctors to have 3 different opinions and treatment recommendations. It can be very confusing for a patient.

What did Sally and I do together that helped her to reduce her suffering? I encouraged Sally to stop asking herself why and just focus on how she could better cope with her insomnia.

Sleep is a funny thing, so many variables impact our sleep, but we know for certain, anxiety and rumination only worsen sleep. The first step was to try to reduce those aspects. We talked about the importance of noticing when she asked herself why she couldn't sleep and shifting that to accepting that she couldn't sleep.

Remember, acceptance is not the same as agreement or pretending to like something, it is just noticing our reality and letting go of the need to fight it or change it. When Sally shifted her mindset to “I may never fully know why this is happening, but it is happening, how can I manage it” she started to feel more empowered.

She stopped going to different specialists and started to put her attention on relaxation techniques. We practiced breathing exercises, mindfulness exercises, progressive muscle relaxation. We talked about the importance of increasing her activity and socializing during the day.

She found over time that as she re-engaged in her life, her mood improved. When any anticipatory anxiety about falling asleep came up before bed, she was kind with herself and compassionate. She would take a hot bath, have some herbal tea, read a book and help her mind and body relax. In time, Sally continued to have mild sleep disruptions but they were not bothersome to her anymore.

Think about all of the ways we can feel physically shitty but we don’t really have an answer for it. I struggle a lot with fatigue. Why do I struggle with fatigue? Maybe it's my age, maybe it’s that I don’t exercise as much as I should, maybe I eat too many carbs, maybe its perimenopause, maybe its anxiety or depression or work stress.

I have definitely asked some whys to make sure my bloodwork is ok and there is nothing that my doctors can find so far that explains it completely. But I know, if I continued to search for the root cause of my fatigue, I could see 100 doctors and get a 100 prescriptions, and frankly, I just don’t want to do that.

I try now to just accept the fact that my energy is not as good as it used to be. I don0't like it but I can accept it. I do what I can health wise to manage my fatigue by being as healthy as I can, but I also try to know and accept my limits. When my friends give me shit that I don’t want to go downtown for dinner on a Wednesday night because that will mean Ill get home after 10 and be exhausted by next work day, I don’t feel guilty about it, I just accept this is who I am now and that’s ok.

If you find that you are struggling with some sort of physical issue, a pain, a sleep problem, an energy problem, anything that you have not yet been able to identify a root cause, consider if asking yourself if asking why is serving you anymore. Is asking why only leading you to suffer, go around in circles, and make the issue worse? Could learning how to just accept and manage the symptom benefit you and if so, how?

Another area that we often ask ourselves why is related to our mental health. Why do I feel depressed? Why am I anxious? Why do I end up in abusive relationships? I hear these questions for hours a day, every day. And a certain amount of why is ok. It can be helpful to understand the nature of your family dynamics growing up, what did you learn from your role models, how did you make sense of your experiences as a child and how is that impacting how you see the world today. In fact, many would say, that is what therapy is for. But I would argue that this is only a tiny slice of effective therapy. I can explore for years the question why as it relates to what I learned in my childhood, however, at the end of the day, there are probably 100 different reasons why I struggle with abandonment issues for example, And even if by some miracle I could identify all 100 of those reasons, it really would not bring me much closer to my goal of not fearing abandonment.

What would actually be more effective, is for me to shift my attention away from the question why, and focus more on what am I going to do about it. How does this issue present itself in my life today, and what can I do to start working on that?

In order to shift our attention away from the why, we have to first practice Radical Acceptance of whatever the issue is. Radical Acceptance as a reminder is the complete and total allowance of reality, the willingness to give up the need to make our reality different than it is. I don’t have to like it, but I can accept it. And this is the path to ease our suffering.

Remember, there is a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is a natural part of human existence, it is unavoidable and it comes with being human. In fact, pain is what helps us to learn and grow. Suffering is optional. Suffering is when we experience pain and we insist that we shouldn’t be in pain and that we must get rid of it. By letting go of the need to find an answer to the question of why, we are moving towards Radical Acceptance which will allow us to be more effective in dealing with whatever that pain is.

I hope that hearing about these ideas can bring you just a little bit of peace into your life. And as always, if you find it hard to make these shifts on your own, please consider seeing a good therapist who can help support and guide you.