The Closed Loop: How Self-Help Keeps You Stuck

There is an exhaustion I see constantly in my practice, and it is one I have certainly felt in my own life. It is deeper than the exhaustion of having done a lot of “work” and still feeling like there is something fundamentally wrong with you.

In my book, Already Human (download for free here), I dive into this exact question: Why are we all so tired? Why are we all so lonely? If the multi-trillion-dollar wellness and self-help industries were actually working, wouldn’t we see a change in the outcome by now?

Typically, in our society, if you are feeling lonely, tired, or unhappy, the prevailing narrative is that there is something wrong with you. The premise is that something inside of you needs fixing, and once you fix it, you will finally feel at peace. So, people start the work. They go to therapy, they turn to self-help, and they try to change themselves. And while there can be some success with that, it tends to be temporary.

We have misidentified the problem.

Individualizing the Structural

In 2023, the Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic, with one in two adults reporting experiencing it. The loss of community, friendship, and places of gathering is staggering. Upwards of 70% of people report feeling isolated, without any close relationships.

We live in a society that is profoundly misaligned with how our biology is wired.

Humans are designed to adapt to small communities of around 20 to 25 people. For most of our history, we lived in multi-generational homes or communal spaces. Today, we live in single-family homes, largely absent from any broader community. It acts as a pressure cooker for both the child and the parents. When a child’s full development is reliant upon one or two individuals, it is inevitable that the child will end up with some belief that they are not good enough or that their worth is conditional. The environment predisposes them to feel that way.

There is a narrative in our culture that if you feel like you are not good enough, or if your performance is tied to your worth, something must have happened in your childhood to make you that way. We immediately label it “childhood trauma.”

While some childhoods are objectively traumatic, if everyone is walking around with some level of negative belief about their worth, the answer cannot be that every single childhood was traumatic.

While it is true that our relational patterns are largely influenced by childhood, that does not mean the childhood was traumatic. It means the child was growing up in a system that did not give them the best opportunity to develop a self free from those beliefs. When a child is raised in the pressure cooker of a single-family home, rather than the communal spaces we are designed for, they are predisposed to self-criticism.

And then, they are thrust into a culture that exploits that exact feeling.

The $9 Trillion Solution

The culture takes those negative beliefs and tries to sell you the solution to them, without ever looking at the structures that created them in the first place. The self-help, wellness, optimization, and mental health industries combined are worth upwards of $9 trillion. We have spent an unfathomable amount of money trying to fix this feeling of not-enoughness.

But biologically, we are wired for something very different from the modern society we live in.

If you zoom out and look at how our modern world is structured, it is desolate compared to what we are biologically designed for. We are so far removed from it that the thought of living in a multi-generational home or a tight-knit community can actually feel uncomfortable. I am a private person; I moved to a small town with land for a reason. But I also have to pause and wonder: maybe the way I have been trying to solve my existential woe is not actually the solution, because I misidentified the problem in the first place.

This is what The Process of Unbecoming is all about. It is about rethinking what it means to be human, and asking how the structures we built are either supporting or hurting that humanity.

The Biology of Shame

A few weeks ago, I talked about shame. We have been trained to think of shame as an emotion that tells us we are wrong or bad. But that oversimplifies it. I don’t even know if I would classify shame as an emotion; it is a biological function. It is a necessity.

Shame is the safeguard that keeps us in the group. Studies show that shame registers in the brain in the exact same way as the distress of physical pain. Our body interprets shame as a physical injury. That is how important it is for our biology to register it.

Even more fascinating: when you recall being physically injured, your brain does not recall the physical sensation of the pain. But when you recall an experience of shame, your brain does recall the sensation. It rehearses the experience again to make sure you do not repeat the behavior that caused the shame.

What does this tell us about our biology? It tells us that belonging, social connection, and staying in the group are arguably more important for our survival than avoiding physical injury. We have to have other people.

The Loss of Repair

What happens to shame when it doesn’t get repaired? It festers into self-loathing, self-criticism, and the deep feeling that you are fundamentally wrong. The cruelest part of shame is that it also tells you nobody wants you around anyway, making you too embarrassed to connect with others.

The only reason shame can fester this way is that we are so isolated that we do not get proper repair from the get-go.

In the past, when we were raised in communal settings, there were many safe relationships around for a child to experience repair. Repair doesn’t always have to be a direct apology from a parent. Shame can be repaired simply through the feeling of belonging. If a child felt shame after being disciplined, they could run to an aunt, a cousin, or a grandfather, be welcomed with open arms, and realize, “Oh, maybe I’m not so bad.” The repair happened naturally through the experience of being “in.”

When you strip a human of the ability to repair shame naturally through community, you are left with what so many of us feel today. You are sent into a culture that is extremely isolated, run by adults who are also experiencing this shame, who then put it back into the culture. And the solutions sold to us—diet culture, optimization, endless inner work—are all outward or aesthetic, which only serves to internalize more shame.

The Commodification of Healing

Here is the angle we rarely talk about: the self-help industry doesn’t just sell you the solution; it actively commodifies your isolation. It tells you that healing is a solitary pursuit. You must meditate, journal, regulate your nervous system, and “do the work” before you are fit for human connection.

This creates a perfect, closed loop. You feel broken because you are isolated. The industry tells you that you are isolated because you are broken, and that you must fix yourself in isolation before you can belong. It is a brilliant business model, but it is a biological disaster.

It asks you to do a massive amount of work in isolation before you are allowed to connect with another human. That is not how we are wired. That approach can actually increase shame, perpetuating the very problem you are trying to solve.

The Most Healing Thing

The primary solution being sold to us for this feeling of brokenness is that we must do more inner work. I believe in inner work. I recommend it. You have to be accountable and self-reflective. But it is only a piece of the pie.

If we had more social interaction, more community, and more support from the get-go, we probably wouldn’t need as much inner work as adults, because we would have these natural repair experiences happening constantly.

The number one predictor of success in mental health treatment is the relationship between the client and the therapist, not the specific intervention used. What does that tell you? Do we need more therapy or more human interaction? Do we need more spaces where we can simply come together?

If the most healing thing for a human has always been another human, what does it look like to start treating the problem that way? What is it like to think about the most healing thing being another person? Is it scary? Overwhelming? Too vulnerable? Does it feel like a relief?

If we keep relying on self-help to solve structural issues, we will never get anywhere. We are just going to keep getting more and more tired.

So, maybe next time you are in a tough spot and you feel like you need to journal, process, and regulate before you call your friend, just try calling your friend in the middle of it. See what happens. And if you don’t have a friend to call, that is a good place to start.

Maybe the reason we all feel like we are not good enough is because we have been operating from a false premise. Maybe it is not your fault. Maybe it is not your childhood. Maybe you feel lonely and broken because you have been raised in a world that breeds those feelings, exploits them, and then sells you the solution.

You are not broken. The paradigm is.

Listen to the podcast episode on this topic here.