In his insightful book How to Think, Alan Jacobs relates the following anecdote.
Once, years ago, I started having chest pains, and my doctors couldn’t isolate the problem: I exercised regularly, my heart seemed healthy, nothing was evidently wrong. But the pains kept coming back, and that scared me. Finally, one doctor asked some probing questions and discovered that I had had, before the pains began, a lingering heavy cough. It seemed that coughing had strained a muscle in my chest, and that was the source of the pain; and when I started worrying about it, the resulting anxiety tensed the muscle and increased the pain—which then led to more anxiety. It was the classic vicious circle of reinforcement. When I asked the doctor what treatment he thought best, he replied, “The diagnosis is the treatment. Now that you know you don’t have a life-threatening illness, you won’t worry so much, and less stress in your mind will mean less stress on your chest muscles. That’ll give them a chance to heal.”
Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, page 28.
Nitpicking a bit, reducing worry and so ultimately relaxing seems to be what is required, but that is clearly enabled here by knowing what is going on. The narrator in fact had been doing something, namely tensing. Knowing better allowed them to stop. As such, reasonably: the diagnosis largely is the treatment.
What to make of that.
Where diagnosis describes the nature of an illness, a problem, of something not-working-as-it-should, treatment refers to what one should do about it. Where one describes a problem, the other points at the solution for it. Usually, these are categorized separately, so it is interesting, when one can largely do the work of both.
Obviously this is not typical, but rather a special case. At the core of it is usually the map-and-territory disconnect. Or rather, reality and how you experience it.
Misunderstanding how something is can very often lead to going about it in the wrong ways, or in ways that lead to negative side effects, wasted efforts, unhappy dead ends, et cetera.
Uncertainty adds to it and can also by itself be a source of stress. How you deal with that uncertainty can add symptoms of its own to the existing situation, creating an unhelpful feedback loop.
There is the reality and then there is what you make of it. Improved understanding by itself can disrupt negative feedback loops and ease the way.
Let’s look at a few examples.
- Marathons are hard. The thing you are pursuing probably has some essentially difficulty. The more substantial the challenge, the greater that difficulty. When you are tackling a challenge, it should not be surprising when it is challenging. It can be easy to get impatient, but that is not helpful nor a way around actually doing the essentially necessary.
- Understand shortcuts. Relatedly, there are times when you can adjust course (literally or figuratively) to let you achieve your objective more quickly. Sometimes you discovered a legitimate shortcut. Other times, you inadvertently skipped one or more important steps. Changing nothing would have been better.
- Emotions. There is what you do and then there is how you feel about it. Emotions come and go, for lots of different reasons. Thinking of them as a sort of weather (eventually going here and there, no matter what) of the mind is perhaps by itself clarifying enough to anchor you — so you can easier resist the temptation of following them into all kinds of possible self-sabotage.
The proper diagnosis helps not necessarily with the essential difficulty itself, but rather highlights and indirectly obviates the needs for the incidental struggle that you experience. Sometimes that is what is getting in the way of solving your problem.
Diagnosis, proper or not, and to the extent that it directs treatment, is not neutral. Sometimes the diagnosis is the treatment. Because that is so, it is possible that that is the case for whatever problem you are currently looking at.
In such a case, misunderstanding, essentially incomplete or incorrect diagnosis, contributes to challenge of the problem, leading to struggle that does not need to exist.
Conceptually this emphasizes the practical value of clarity in understanding. Not as an academic exercise, but for very pragmatically avoiding unnecessary drag.
Clearer understanding of a problem often naturally reveals solutions for it. There are times when understanding of the problem is enough to obviate the need for additional work.
Sometimes, the diagnosis is the treatment.