When Being Smart Works Against You

Your mind is your best tool. It's what got you here. You're good at thinking your way through problems, analyzing situations, figuring things out. When something doesn't make sense, you research it. When something feels off, you name it and try to understand it.

This works for most of what life throws at you. If you're the kind of person who reads articles like this one looking for the answer, you're exactly who I'm talking about.

But there's a category of problems your mind can't solve. And if you're reading this, you might already suspect what I'm talking about.

The override

Somewhere along the way, you learned to push through. Tired? Keep going. Uncomfortable? Ignore it. Anxious? Think your way around it. You got good at overriding the signals your body was sending because you had things to do and those signals were inconvenient.

This is a skill. A useful one. It got you through school, through demanding jobs, through situations where slowing down wasn't an option. High-achievers are often especially good at this. The ability to power through discomfort is part of what makes them high-achievers.

The problem is that what works in the short term can become a liability in the long term. You've been overriding for so long that you might not even notice you're doing it anymore. The body keeps sending signals. You keep rerouting around them. And at some point, the signals get louder, or stranger, or harder to ignore.

Why thinking doesn't fix it

Here's what most people don't understand about anxiety, burnout, or that chronic sense that something is off: these experiences don't live in the thinking brain. They live in the nervous system. And the nervous system doesn't respond to logic.

The nervous system doesn't update through understanding. You can't talk it out of a stress response any more than you can talk yourself out of a fever. The part of you that's activated isn't listening to your analysis. It's running on circuitry that was there before you learned to speak.

This is frustrating if you're used to solving problems by understanding them. You've done the insight work. You've read the books. You've thought about this a lot. And thinking about it hasn't made it stop.

That's not a failure of effort or intelligence. It's a category error. You're using a top-down tool for a bottom-up problem.

And then there's what happens next. You react in a way that feels out of proportion. You snap, or shut down, or feel flooded by something that shouldn't be a big deal. And because you don't understand why it happened, you turn on yourself. You call it overreacting. You wonder what's wrong with you. You add a layer of shame on top of something that was never in your conscious control to begin with.

The reaction wasn't a choice. It happened faster than thought, in systems that operate below awareness. Shaming yourself for it is like shaming yourself for flinching.

The before before

This is where a different kind of attention changes things. Not analyzing the reaction after the fact, but learning to notice what happens in your body before the reaction takes over. The before before. The moment your stomach tightens before you say something you'll regret. The tension creeping into your jaw an hour before the headache arrives. When you don't set a boundary, your body sets it for you.

Most people only notice once they've already snapped, or shut down, or woken up with the headache. The work is learning to catch it earlier, when there's still room to respond differently.

Top-down vs. bottom-up

Top-down processing starts with the thinking brain and works downward. You analyze, interpret, make meaning. This is what traditional talk therapy often does. You tell the story, you understand the story, and the hope is that understanding changes how you feel.

Bottom-up processing works the other way. It starts with what's happening in your body right now, before interpretation, before narrative, before the thinking brain gets involved. The tightness in your chest. The way your breath goes shallow. The sensation in your gut that you don't have a word for.

For the things that live in your nervous system, bottom-up is what actually works. Not because insight is useless, but because insight alone can't reach what's happening below the level of thought.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony here. I'm explaining this to you intellectually, hoping it helps you stop relying on intellectual understanding. Stay with me.

What this looks like in practice

In somatic therapy, we slow down. Instead of talking about what happened or why you feel the way you feel, we pay attention to what's happening in your body in this moment. Not to analyze it. Just to notice.

This can feel strange at first, especially if you're used to leading with your mind. There's nothing to figure out. No problem to solve. You're just tracking sensation.

But something happens when you stop overriding and start noticing. The nervous system, which has been waiting for your attention, begins to shift. Not because you've understood anything new, but because you've finally stopped bypassing what's been there all along.

The body has its own intelligence. It knows how to release what it's been holding. It just needs you to stop thinking long enough to let it.

This isn't about becoming less smart

I want to be clear: this approach doesn't ask you to abandon your mind or stop being analytical. Your intelligence isn't the problem. It's just not the right tool for this particular job.

Think of it this way. You wouldn't try to digest food by thinking about it. Digestion happens below the level of conscious thought, in systems that run on their own logic. The nervous system is similar. It has processes that need to complete, and those processes don't respond to reasoning. They respond to attention, to safety, to time.

The goal isn't to become less capable. It's to stop using your best tool in the one area where it doesn't work.

If this sounds familiar

I work with people who've spent years trying to think their way through something that won't budge. They're not lacking insight. They're often the most self-aware people in the room. What they're lacking is a different way in.

If you've been wondering why understanding hasn't been enough, this might be the missing piece. Not more thinking. A different kind of attention.

If this resonates, I'd be glad to talk.

Margaret Sigel is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) in Santa Monica, California, specializing in somatic therapy for anxiety, trauma, and burnout. She works with adults in person and online throughout California.