Ep #169: Why You Know Better But Don’t Do Better

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, Episode #169. If you’ve ever said to yourself, “I know exactly what I need to do, I just need to do it,” this episode is for you. Today, we’re talking about insight paralysis, the gap between knowing and doing.

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, where you’ll learn how to build both a strong body and a strong mind by eating, moving, and thinking. I’m your host Physician, Personal Trainer, Certified Health Coach and Certified Life Coach, Carrie Holland. 

Hey, how are you? What’s new? What’s good? So, what’s good here? Today, we’re diving into something I see over and over again with my clients. So, my clients are smart, they’re accomplished, and they are insightful women. These are physicians, lawyers, executives, business owners, moms keeping their homes and families running. So, they are no strangers to hard work or achievement. And when it comes to their habits, they are also not clueless. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Most of them can tell me exactly what’s tripping them up.

They’ll say things to me like, “I know I’m eating at night because I’m stressed and not hungry.” Or, “I know I keep skipping my workouts because I let my email and my to-do list take over my mornings.” Or, “I know I stay up too late scrolling on my phone, even though I’m exhausted.” So, they can name their patterns in detail. They can explain why they do what they do. Some of them can even trace their habits back to their childhood, their work culture, their relationships with their parents, or even perfectionism. So, the insight is absolutely there.

But there’s more to the story. And here’s the frustrating part. Despite all the awareness that so many of my clients have, nothing changes. They keep repeating the same habits week after week. And in our sessions, we’ll talk about the same overeating, the same missed workouts, the same late nights over and over again. And sometimes they even laugh a little because they see it so clearly, but all the same, they’re still stuck.

And that is insight paralysis. And if you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I know exactly what I need to do, I just need to do it,” you know exactly what I’m talking about. So, I want to help you understand what insight paralysis is, and more importantly, what you can do about it. So, you can get out of your own way. All right? Let’s go.

So first, let’s get really clear on this. Let’s define what insight paralysis is. So we’re all on the same page from the get-go. Insight paralysis, very simply, is when your awareness is high, but your action is low. So in plain language, it is the gap between knowing and doing. It’s when you can clearly see the problem. You can describe it in detail. You can analyze it in six different ways, and yet your actions repeatedly do not line up with what you know.

So in insight paralysis, you often know the right answers. You’ve read the books, or you’ve tracked the macros, or you have highlighted the self-help quotes. You may have notebooks and notebooks full of notes, but despite all of that, despite knowing exactly what you’re doing to sabotage yourself, nothing changes. You may keep having the same conversations with yourself week to week. You can identify the problem, you can tell why it’s happening, but you still spin in the same loop.

And that is where frustration builds because you feel like you’re running circles around your own brain. But you’re too smart to be stuck, and you are. You are stuck. And you can see the gap. Often, you can see it very clearly, but you’re not closing it. And that gap is the gap between understanding and action.

That is insight paralysis. It’s knowing better but not doing better. Okay, so now that we’ve defined what insight paralysis is, let’s talk about why it happens. Why do so many smart, capable women who have killed it in medical school or law school or the board room or in their businesses, why do so many women get trapped here? Well, let’s talk through it.

So first, there’s the false safety of awareness. And here’s what I mean by this. Awareness feels like progress. It feels like forward motion because your brain loves the aha moment, meaning when you can connect the dots and realize, all right, I see it. I’m not snacking because I’m hungry. I’m just snacking because I’m stressed. That gives your brain a hit of dopamine, and that feels satisfying. It feels like you’ve solved something. And in the moment, that feels like forward movement.

And awareness also gives you a sense of control. If you can name it, you might feel like you can manage it. And there’s actually some truth to that. When you name something and call it out, it changes your relationship to it. It’s the whole idea of the observation effect. When you name something, it changes your relationship to it. So when you call it out, this is boredom eating, you’re no longer swimming in the jar of boredom eating. You’re observing it. You’ve pulled yourself out of the jar. And for high achievers who thrive on mastering things, labeling the problem fulfills that need for understanding. But here’s the catch. Awareness doesn’t actually change your life. Knowing your pattern is different from interrupting it. Naming your trigger, while helpful, it does not automatically change how you respond to it.

So, this is like my client who told me every week, “I eat on the weekends because I’m bored.” She knew what was happening. She nailed the awareness. She could give me detailed insights on her triggers and her emotions. But every weekend, she was still standing in her pantry reaching for Goldfish crackers. So why? Because nothing in her behavior changed. So awareness explained the problem, but actions were what was going to solve it, and she hadn’t taken that step yet. And this is the trap. Your brain convinces you that because you understand the problem, you’re working on the problem. But understanding is not the same as solving, and thinking about change does not equal making change. Okay?

So another reason that insight paralysis happens is your fear of failure. It makes total sense. If you don’t act, you can’t fail. As long as you stay in thinking mode, your plan stays perfect in your head, untested, and therefore unblemished. And that feels safer than risking the sting of trying and falling short. And I see this play out with clients all the time. They’ll spend weeks researching different workout programs or constantly recalculating their macros or rewriting their meal plans, and it’s all under the guise of researching and planning. And they tell themselves and me that they need to prepare. But beneath all that preparation is actually fear. It’s the fear of, what if I try this and I can’t stick with it? What if I fail again?

And here’s the problem. That fear is exactly what creates insight paralysis. When you avoid action because you’re afraid of failing, you stay stuck in awareness. You keep circling the problem in your mind, convincing yourself that planning and reflecting are progress. But the truth is, all that thinking is a shield. It’s your brain’s way of avoiding the risk of failure. And that cost is high because when you avoid failure, you also avoid growth. You never build evidence that you can follow through. You never collect the feedback that would help you refine your approach.

So, yes, failure is uncomfortable. No one will deny that. But failure is also information. So there’s a reason for the saying, you’re either winning or you’re learning, right? Trying and failing, that tells you what worked, what didn’t, and then what to adjust. But without that information, you just stay stuck in theory, and that’s what insight paralysis is at its core. So avoiding failure may keep you comfortable in the short term, but it guarantees that you’ll stay stuck in the long term.

All right, next, perfectionism is one of the biggest drivers of insight paralysis, and here’s why. Perfectionists want flawless execution. They don’t want to just make progress. They want the right plan, the right time, and the perfect conditions before they’ll even consider taking action. And if those conditions aren’t there, they stall. They keep planning, tweaking, and reworking instead of doing. So I had a client who did exactly this. Every time we met, she had recreated her entire meal plan. And as soon as she went off it at all, she trashed the plan entirely and started over instead of sticking with the plan and working on the reasons that she wasn’t sticking to it because she thought the plan wasn’t good enough. So to her, anything less than perfect meant failure.

And this is how perfectionism directly fuels insight paralysis. You don’t avoid action because you fear failure, you avoid action because you’ve made imperfect action unacceptable. So instead of moving forward, perfectionists keep analyzing their plans because it feels safer to think about doing something than to actually do it imperfectly. They raise the bar so impossibly high that anything less than flawless execution feels like failure, which makes not starting at all seem like the safer option.

They convince themselves that fully understanding why they’ve struggled in the past is progress when really, it’s another way to avoid testing whether they can succeed in the present. And most of all, they stop at awareness because awareness is safe. Awareness doesn’t risk mistakes, and it doesn’t expose flaws. But execution, execution, on the other hand, means facing imperfect action head-on, and that’s exactly what perfectionists are working so hard to avoid. And the result is a vicious cycle. The more they cling to insight, the less action they take, and the deeper they sink into paralysis. So perfectionism makes you believe it’s better to keep planning, reflecting, or analyzing than to take messy, imperfect action.

All right, so here’s another big one that leads to insight paralysis, and that is identity conflict. So very simply, identity conflict is when the way you see yourself doesn’t line up with the behavior you’re trying to create. And when that mismatch is there, no amount of awareness will move you forward. Okay, so what does this actually mean? It means you can know all the reasons you overeat. You can name every trigger you’ve got. You can analyze the stink out of every emotion that you notice, and you might be doing all of those things. But if deep down, you still believe at your core, “I am a stress eater,” or, “I never stick with things,” or, “I am lazy,” then your brain will do its best to prove that true despite all the insight you’ve got.

So if you ever wonder why I talk about identity as often as I do, this is it. Your identity is powerful, and it’s like your internal GPS. Even when you have all the insight in the world, your brain will keep rerouting you back to the identity that you’ve chosen because it wants to stay consistent with the story you believe about yourself. So I saw this with a client who really wanted to stop her late-night snacking. She had razor-sharp insight. She knew her eating wasn’t about hunger. She knew it was about stress, habit, boredom, and a need to decompress. And despite all of this awareness, every night she would find herself eating cookies. So, why was that? Because her identity was louder than her insight. She had been telling herself for decades, “I am a stress eater.” And that belief was stronger than any logical explanation she could uncover.

And it was not until we started working on her story and shifting it from, “I am a stress eater” to, “I am someone who can handle stress without food,” that her behavior finally began to change. And that habit, no, it did not vanish overnight at all. But the shift in identity did give her a new lens. And she could come back to that identity and ask herself, “What would someone who handles stress without food do right now?” And coming back to that identity over and over again and really leaning into that process, that, that is what pulled her forward. It pulled her forward in a way that her insight and awareness never could.

And this is the heart of the problem. Identity drives your behavior. If your self-concept is misaligned with your actions, then your insight will not be enough. Awareness can explain the what, and it can explain the why, but it cannot override a deeply ingrained identity. And until you rewrite and practice reminding yourself of the story you want to believe about yourself, you will keep circling an insight paralysis. All right?

And last, let’s talk about overthinking and over-scientizing, which are both really easy to do when you’re an overachiever. So, I mentioned this recently, but I’ll reiterate it here. Collecting data feels safe. It feels like you’re being productive. It feels like progress. When you tell yourself, “I’ll just track for a week,” or, “I’ll read that one book,” or, “I’ll research this supplement system,” it gives you the illusion of working on the problem, when in reality, you’re avoiding the actual work of changing your behavior. And this is the connection to insight paralysis. Overthinking is insight paralysis. You stay stuck in your head, turning the problem over and over, convinced that if you just find the right piece of information or the perfect formula or the newest gadget, that things will clear up. But all of that is thinking, it’s not doing. And you end up swimming in information without any action to back it up.

So I had a client who logged every bit of food she ate. She logged a lot of information actually. Calories, macros, micronutrients, glucose readings, readiness scores, all of it. She knew the exact problem in her diet down to the gram of protein. But the problem was she wasn’t willing to actually change what she ate, and the numbers became her buffer. As long as she was tracking data, she could tell herself she was working on it, even though nothing in her life was changing. And there’s the trap.

Overthinking keeps you in motion, but it’s not progress. You’re busy, but you’re busy crunching numbers and updating your gadgets and thinking or perseverating, but you’re not busy moving forward. You’ve got spreadsheets, but you don’t have habits. Or you’ve read another book, but you haven’t practiced a new skill. These are all the ways that I’ve seen overthinking and over-scientizing show up for my clients, where you’re adding to your awareness, but you’re not converting it into action. And that is insight paralysis at its core.

So, now that we’ve gone over the many reasons why insight paralysis happens, let’s take it a step further. So if you heard yourself in any of what we just talked about, and if you feel you’re stuck in insight paralysis, let’s talk about some tools. So here are some tools to get you unstuck. This is how you bridge the gap between knowing and doing.

So, remember that insight paralysis happens when the space between what you know and what you actually do gets too wide. It means you’re circling the problem around and around in your head, but you’re not converting it into action. So the first fix is to shrink the gap between understanding and action. Okay, so what does that mean? It means closing the distance between the time you’ve got an insight and the time you act on that insight. So this is about timing. The longer you wait to do something, the more room your brain has to overthink or talk you out of it or decide to start over on Monday.

So that means instead of asking yourself, “What do I know about this?” or “What do I need to know?” which totally keeps you in analysis mode, instead, you ask, “What will I do now?” Or, “What will I do in the next 24 hours?” And do you see what we’re doing here? We’re using a question that invites action. What will I do? And that question forces you to translate awareness into a concrete behavior. It’s taking something internal, your thoughts, and making it external with an action.

So as an example, let’s say you know you stay up too late scrolling. Great. There’s your awareness. That awareness will not change your life or your sleep until you decide, “All right, tonight, I will plug my phone in the kitchen at 9:00, period end.” And that right there, that is shrinking the gap. That’s moving from “I understand my problem” to “here’s what I’ll actually do about it today.” Or here’s another example I see all the time with my clients. So say you’ve realized that you tend to skip workouts when you wait until the evening to fit them in. Okay, there’s your awareness. You see the problem. Shrinking the gap in this situation looks like saying, “Tomorrow morning at 5:00, I will walk for 10 minutes before work.” That’s it. You’re taking insight and immediately attaching it to an action with a timestamp on it.

And here’s why this matters. The longer that gap stays open, the more comfortable your brain gets living in the space of thinking. But shrinking the gap interrupts the pattern of thinking and analyzing and moves you into doing. So even if the step is tiny, and in reality, it should be tiny, it should be very, very tiny, but it doesn’t matter because that tiny step forward is what keeps you taking action. And that is how you move out of insight paralysis, by making the bridge between knowing and doing as short as possible. All right?

So another way to get out of insight paralysis is to treat your awareness like a hypothesis. Instead of treating it like a conclusion. So what does that mean? So that means you don’t stop at naming the problem. So too often, I will work with a client and she’ll be able to name the problem. She can diagnose the trigger that causes the problem, and then she’ll stop there. But she’s not done yet because until you test this out, it’s just theory. So that means instead of thinking, “I snack at night because I’m tired and leaving it at that,” you’re not done yet. Turn it into an experiment. Test it out. Go to bed 30 minutes earlier this week. There’s your action or experiment. And then, if you still feel the urge to snack despite your earlier bedtime, then maybe tiredness is not the only contributing factor here. But if you go to bed early and your urge to snack decreases, then you just learned something important.

And this is how you break the cycle of endless reflection. When you experiment, when you try something, it forces you to move, it forces you to do. You’re testing a hypothesis. Like if you tell yourself, “I keep skipping my evening workouts because I’m too drained after work,” you can test this out by moving your workouts to the mornings for a week or cutting your workout time in half to see if you still stick with it. And what you’re doing is testing whether your missed workout is really about energy or if it’s about timing and expectations. And you’re just experimenting, you’re trying something out. That’s it.

And the beauty of this tool is that you don’t have to get it right. Even a failed experiment gives you data that you didn’t have before. So awareness without testing is really nothing more than mental clutter. But when you take awareness and pair it with experiments, that is how you learn and adjust your actions going forward. All right?

So another tool for getting through insight paralysis is to lower the bar. So a little while ago, I talked about shrinking the gap, and that was about timing and acting as soon as possible. So lowering the bar, on the other hand, that is about scale. So this is about making the entry point small on purpose. And here’s where any perfectionist listening might groan, but this is critical. Insight paralysis thrives when the bar is set too high. And this is where so many of my perfectionists get trapped. If the only acceptable outcome is a flawless 60-minute workout five days per week or a perfectly balanced week of meal prep with no slipups, then you’ll freeze before you even start.

Because here’s how your brain works when you’re a perfectionist. If you can’t guarantee success at 100%, it feels safer not to try at all. Instead, you’d rather stay in planning mode, making a color-coded spreadsheets or pinning recipes on Pinterest than risk falling short of your own impossible standard. So, think about it this way. If your definition of success is never missing a workout or always sticking to your exact calorie target, anything less than that will feel like a failure. And who wants that?

So, instead of risking failure, you keep circling in your head. You plan more, you research more, you analyze more, but you don’t act. And that’s how perfectionism creates insight paralysis. So, let me be super honest about this. Holding yourself to impossible standards is just another way for your brain to avoid discomfort because if you never take action, you never have to feel vulnerable. You never have to feel the sting of falling short. But on the flip side, you also never get the chance to grow. You never get the data that comes from trying. You never get the satisfaction of building momentum from finally taking one small step at a time.

So please hear me. Lowering the bar is not about lowering your standards. It’s about creating an entry point to habit change that is actually doable. It’s telling yourself five pushups counts, chopping a vegetable counts, 10 minutes of movement counts, it all counts. And those tiny steps, they are not failure. They are your way out of paralysis. They are how you prove to yourself again and again that progress does not require perfection. Okay? And if you are a perfectionist, please know that this is the hardest and also the most freeing shift you can make, to allow yourself to do it messy, to allow yourself to do it small, to allow yourself to get less than 100% and still call it success. That right there, that’s how you get unstuck.

All right. Another way out of insight paralysis is to anchor in your identity. So, remember that awareness can explain your habits, but it does not override your identity. So if deep down you see yourself as lazy or as someone who does not follow through, your behavior will follow suit even if you don’t like it. And so the way out is to intentionally choose the identity you want to have and then go prove it with repeated, small, consistent actions. And that means shifting the question from, “What do I need to do?” to “Who do I want to become?”

And remember this, if you want to be a runner, that identity does not begin the day you finish the marathon, okay? It begins the day you lace up your shoes and go jog for 10 minutes. If you want to be someone who eats healthy, that identity does not start when you’ve meal-prepped a perfect week. It starts when you put eggs on your plate for breakfast instead of a stack of mini donuts. Every small action counts and it all leads you towards a new identity.

And here’s how this pulls you out of insight paralysis. When your focus shifts to your identity instead of fixating on perfect action, you take the pressure off. You don’t have to wait for the flawless plan. You don’t have to prove anything. You just have to take one step that lines up with who you want to be. And those steps build evidence, and that evidence slowly rewires how you see yourself. And when your identity changes, your actions naturally follow. It’s a really cool self-perpetuating cycle.

So instead of circling thoughts like, “I know I shouldn’t snack at night. I know I should go to bed earlier. I know I should exercise.” Instead, you start asking, “What would a woman who takes care of herself do right now?” And then you go do that one small thing. It’s an identity-based question. It’s one of my favorites. It moves you out of your head and into action. And that is the antidote to insight paralysis. When your identity and your actions line up, you stop just thinking about who you want to be and you start living it. All right?

So another tool you’ve got for moving past insight paralysis is building self-trust. So every time you say, “I know what I need to do,” and then you don’t do it, you chip away at the belief that you can rely on yourself. And the longer that goes on, the harder it feels to break that cycle because deep down, you’ve taught yourself not to believe your own promises. So if deep down you don’t believe yourself, how do you repair that? How do you rebuild self-trust? Well, you do it the same way you would repair trust with another person, not with one big sweeping gesture, but instead through small, consistent follow-through done.

So this means choosing commitments that are specific, realistic, and measurable, and then honoring them. So you’re not saying vague statements like, “I’ll eat better this week,” or, “I’ll move more.” Those are fuzzy at best, and it’s really easy to wiggle your way out of those. So instead, it’s, “I’ll put my workout clothes out tonight so I’m ready for the morning.” Or, “I’m packing a piece of fruit in my lunch for tomorrow.” And then when you actually follow through on those small, concrete promises, you reinforce the belief that you can count on yourself.

And here’s how it all connects. When you’re stuck in insight paralysis, you’re trapped in thought. You’re rehearsing the same insights over and over without action. But rebuilding self-trust flips that. It forces you to shift your attention from thinking about what you should do to proving to yourself what you will do. And that proof, even in the smallest way, that starts to erode the paralysis. And once you’ve got some proof in front of you, you’ll feel the momentum. You will move from, “I know, but I don’t do,” to “I do what I say, even if it’s small.” And that shift in self-trust is huge, and it’s what opens you up to bigger changes. All right?

And last, I want to talk about this. One of the most frustrating features of insight paralysis is the swirl. That’s the mental loop that you get caught in when you keep repeating the same insights without acting on them. And it goes like this, “I know I need to plan ahead. I know I need to do some form of meal prep. I know I should go to bed earlier. I know I should exercise,” over and over. Those words feel familiar, almost rehearsed, but over time without action to change them, those insights become like white noise because you’ve said them to yourself so many times they don’t mean anything.

When you keep circling the same insights without adding action, you create mental white noise. Your brain is stuck on the same track, spinning and spinning, operating in the background. And meanwhile, you never move forward. And the longer you stay in that swirl, the more powerless you start to feel. You hear yourself saying the same things, and with every repetition of those “I know” statements, your belief in your ability to change lessens.

So interrupting that swirl is about breaking the pattern. It’s not so much about acting quickly on a fresh insight, but instead, it’s about snapping yourself out of a stale, worn out loop and creating movement where you’ve been stuck. And you can do this with one simple but very direct question. What am I willing to do about this today? And that is a big one. That question is powerful because it snaps you out of the abstract and forces you into the present. And instead of letting your brain spin on why you’re not doing something, you shift the focus to what you’re going to do right now.

So, as an example, if you catch yourself saying for the 10th weekend in a row, “I know I should meal prep.” Great. Now, interrupt the swirl and follow it by asking, “What can I do about it today?” And the answer might be as simple as, “I’ll chop veggies for tomorrow’s lunch before I go to bed.” But that tiny pivot transforms an old, tired insight that you’ve said to yourself 1,000 times and turns it into action. And the key here is disruption. Don’t give your brain the opportunity to negotiate. And remember that your action does not have to be huge, it just has to be different. So even the smallest interruption, like closing your laptop, standing up, walking around the block, that breaks the loop and reminds you that you can absolutely do something new.

So in essence, you stop being the person who talks about change and start becoming the person who does something about it, even in the smallest way. And every time you interrupt the loop, you transform an insight that you’ve been recycling endlessly into something tangible. All right?

So here is what I want you to walk away with today. Insight is not the problem. Most of you listening already have plenty of it. You know your triggers, you know your patterns, you know where you’re getting in your own way. But the real problem is what happens next, when you stop at awareness and don’t take the next step. And that is insight paralysis. And it’s sneaky because it feels like you’re making progress when in reality, you’re circling the same thoughts over and over again.

But the good news is that you don’t have to stay there. You’ve got tools now, things like shrinking the gap, running experiments, lowering the bar, anchoring in identity, rebuilding your self-trust, and interrupting the swirl. And none of those are fancy. None of them. None of them require you to be perfect, but they do require you to stop thinking about change and start doing something about it, even if what you do is tiny.

Because here’s the truth. Your life doesn’t change when you understand yourself better. Your life changes when you take action. So the next time you catch yourself saying, “I know what I need to do,” stop and ask, “What am I willing to do about it today?” And then go do that one thing. That’s how you break the cycle. That is how you stop spinning in circles and start walking forward.

All right? And if you’re tired of circling the same conversations with yourself and you want help moving from insight to action, let’s go. This is what we do in coaching. Head to www.CarrieHollandMD.com/contact and let’s talk about how coaching can help you take the steps you already know you want to take. All right? Thank you again for hanging out with me and I’ll catch you again next week.

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You’ll also find strength training tips to help you train smarter and see real results. My goal is to help you get strong and this strength-training guide will help you do it. Go to CarrieHollandMD.com/build strength and check it out.

Thank you for listening to the Strong Is a Mindset podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build both a strong mind and a strong body by eating, moving, and most importantly, thinking, check out CarrieHollandMD.com.