Last Friday I went on a retreat. I almost did not go. There was a list of reasons not to, the kind that always sound urgent in the moment and forgettable a week later. I went anyway, and I came home with one idea that I have not been able to put down since.
The idea is this: what if I optimized my decisions for long term joy, instead of for the avoidance of feeling bad.
I want to be careful with that sentence, because it is easy to hear it as another piece of wellness advice, and this is not that. This is something I am actively working through, in real time, with a good amount of skepticism still intact. I am not writing this because I have solved it. I am writing it because I think a lot of you will recognize the pattern I am about to describe, because I see it constantly in the people I work with, and because I have lived inside it myself for most of my adult life.
The Operating System Most of Us Are Running
Here is the pattern. Many of us, myself included, were trained to believe that the only reliable fuel for getting anything done is feeling bad. Guilt gets you to the gym. Shame gets you to eat less at dinner. Fear of judgment gets the project finished at midnight. Somewhere along the way, the brain concluded that discomfort is not just a byproduct of achievement, it is the mechanism of achievement. No bad feeling, no action. No fear, no discipline. No discipline, no success.
And here is the uncomfortable part: for a lot of us, this strategy worked. It got me through medical school. It got me through residency. It is, in a very real sense, part of how I became the physician I am. So when I say I am trying to dismantle it, I am not describing an easy edit. I am describing an attempt to renovate a load-bearing wall.
The brain holds onto this strategy for a reason that deserves more compassion than we usually give it. Its job is not to make us happy. Its job is to keep us safe. And a nervous system that has learned fear and shame are what keep the wheels turning is not being dysfunctional when it reaches for them again. It is doing exactly what it was built to do, based on exactly what has worked before. Understanding that has done more for my own self-compassion than almost anything else I have encountered clinically or personally. The problem was never a character flaw. It was a survival strategy that outlived its necessity.
The Question I Am Trying On
The retreat was led by Patrick Harbula, of the Living Purpose Institute, who has been teaching and coaching in this territory for over two decades. His broader approach centers on the idea of living from the felt sense of an accomplished vision, so that the pursuit of a goal becomes something closer to joyful movement rather than forced discipline. What I took from our time together, and what I am now sitting with, is a specific practical question, one I have started asking myself at ordinary decision points during the week.
Here is one version of it. It is nine at night. I can put my kids to bed, or I can open the laptop for one more hour of work. The guilt-and-fear operating system answers that question by calculating what I will regret, what will pile up, what someone might think if the work is not done. The long term joy question asks something different: which of these two choices, ten years from now, will I be glad I made.
The long term part is doing almost all the work in that sentence. This is not about which choice feels better in the next five minutes. Closing the laptop does not always feel good in the moment, especially mid-task. This is about training the decision toward what compounds. And what I am starting to test against my own life is that delayed gratification does not have to feel like deprivation. It is possible, apparently, to feel joy in the delay itself, when the delay is in service of something you can already sense the shape of.
I do not think this is a universal solvent. I do not think every hard clinical or personal decision reduces neatly to a ten-year gut check. But when I run my own history through this filter, backward, I notice something. The stretches of my life where I was happiest, most effective, most fully inside what I was doing, were rarely the stretches driven by fear of failure. They were the stretches where I could feel, even faintly, that the effort was pointed at something I actually wanted to become. Fear got me through some rooms. It did not build the rooms I am proudest of.
Where I Actually Am With This
I want to resist tidying this up into a five-step framework, because that is not where I am. My nervous system is still skeptical. Old patterns do not get replaced by a good weekend and a compelling teacher, no matter how good the weekend or how compelling the teacher. What I have is a new question I am practicing asking, at the small decision points during an ordinary day, and enough early evidence in my own life to keep asking it honestly instead of performing the answer I think I am supposed to give.
If you try this on yourself this week, I would be curious what you notice. Not because there is a right answer, but because the noticing itself tends to be where the useful information lives. Ask it small. At the moment you are choosing between the extra hour of work and the extra hour of sleep, or between answering one more email and calling a friend back, just ask which one you will be glad about later, and see what your gut says before your habits answer for you.
I will keep you posted on where this goes. It might be a permanent shift. It might be one of those ideas that fades in a month once ordinary life resumes its pull. Either way, it felt honest to bring it to you exactly as unfinished as it is.
On a different note, and in a much lighter register: Mindful Wellness turns six this Tuesday, September 22, from 5 to 7pm at our Manhattan Beach office, in partnership with the Manhattan Beach Chamber of Commerce. It is free, open to everyone, and you are welcome to bring a friend. Come say hello if you are around.
