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We spend a lot of time trying to change what we do.
Stop overthinking. Stop reacting. Stop checking. Stop worrying. Speak up. Calm down. Let go. Set better boundaries. Be more confident. Make a different choice.
When a pattern of behaviour is creating an outcome we don’t want, it seems logical to focus on the behaviour itself.

But what if the behaviour isn’t really the problem?
What if, from where you are standing, it actually makes perfect sense?
That question has changed the way I understand why we do what we do:

What is making this response make sense?

Because behaviour doesn’t happen in isolation.
It makes sense in the context of what we believe, expect, have learned and experience as safe, necessary or true.
And when we begin to understand that context, behaviour can start to look very different.

Behaviour makes sense from somewhere

One of the difficulties with understanding human behaviour is that we tend to look at it from the outside.
We can see the thing we’re doing and recognise that it isn’t helping.
I know I don’t need to worry about this.
I know getting angry won’t fix it.
I know I don’t need their approval.
I know I should let it go.
And yet knowing that doesn’t necessarily change what happens next.
For a long time, I thought the answer was greater awareness.
If you could see your patterns clearly enough, understand where they came from and recognise them while they were happening, surely you could choose something different.
Awareness matters enormously.
But I’ve come to realise there is a difference between 

seeing a pattern and understanding what makes the pattern make sense.

You can understand yourself brilliantly and still find yourself having the same response.
Because from within whatever is organising that response, it may still be entirely logical.
If I feel powerless, fighting makes sense.
If I expect rejection, checking for signs of it makes sense.
If intensity feels unsafe, controlling it makes sense.
If uncertainty feels dangerous, monitoring makes sense.
When we look at what a response is accomplishing — what it is helping us anticipate, avoid, manage or create — it often stops looking irrational at all.
The more interesting question becomes not simply:
Why am I still doing this?
but:
What would I have to believe, expect or feel for this response to make sense?

A pattern of behaviour that looked like a problem

I had a wonderfully physical example of this recently while running.
It was my first run back after an injury. My fitness felt rusty, but unusually, I wasn’t treating that as a problem.
I stopped when I wanted to. I wasn’t chasing a distance or trying to prove that I was back where I had been.
I was enjoying being out there.
I was open. Curious.
And because I wasn’t so focused on making the run right, I noticed something.
I kept lifting my chin.
The obvious response would have been to correct it.
Crown up. Chin in. Better alignment.
But instead of repeatedly forcing my head back into the position I thought it should be in, I started paying attention to what actually happened when I changed it.
With my head more aligned, my whole orientation felt different — taller, more present, looking out from a different physical position.
Then I noticed my vision.
At first I thought it felt strained, but that wasn’t quite right.

It felt restricted.

And that made me curious.

With my head in the new position, I had a distinct impulse to lift my chin because lifting it seemed to give me greater visual freedom and perspective.
I began to wonder whether that mattered for another reason too.
If the visual field feels restricted, the body may not simply experience that as less vision. It may register as I can’t see enough of what is around me.
And if your system is organised around needing to know what is happening — to stay alert, aware or vigilant — increasing the field of vision could make perfect sense.
Suddenly, the chin lift wasn’t simply bad posture.

It was doing something.

The visible behaviour was only the beginning

Then I ran from the new alignment.
And other things started announcing themselves.
I felt tension through my hip flexors. Later, tension between my shoulder blades, more strongly on one side.

I hadn’t gone out to investigate my hips or my upper back.
I had changed one apparently small part of the way I was organising my body, and suddenly I could perceive things elsewhere that hadn’t been obvious before.
What had looked like one little habit wasn’t one little habit at all.
The position of my head was part of a larger organisation involving how I was seeing, orienting and moving.

I couldn’t tell from one run exactly what was compensating for what.
The useful discovery was simpler:

the visible behaviour had a reason.

The chin lift appeared to be giving me something.
And changing it revealed more of the pattern.
That is very different from simply deciding the chin lift was wrong and becoming increasingly skilled at holding my head somewhere else.

What changes when we stop trying to fix the behaviour?

This is where the state I was in during that run mattered.
Had I gone out thinking:
Fix your posture.
Get your form right.
Get back to where you were.
I could easily have treated every chin lift as another error to correct.
And I might have succeeded.
I may even have become very good at holding my head differently.
But I might never have become curious enough to notice what the old position was accomplishing.
Because I wasn’t fighting where I was, I could receive the information that was there.
The question changed from:
How do I stop lifting my chin?
to:
Why does lifting my chin currently make sense?

And then:
What can I learn if I stop treating this as something to fix?

That is a very different place from which to create change.

Behaviour has a job

The same principle appears far beyond running.
A response that looks unhelpful from the outside may still be doing something important on the inside — creating certainty, restoring a sense of agency, reducing overwhelm or helping us anticipate what comes next.

That does not mean every behaviour is useful forever.
And it certainly doesn’t mean our actions have no consequences.
It means that while a response is still solving something for us, simply labelling it irrational or trying to suppress it may miss the more interesting information.
The behaviour is showing us something about the conditions underneath it.

• What feels dangerous?
• What feels uncertain?
• What are we expecting?
• What are we trying to prevent?
• What are we trying to create?
• What feels unavailable without the response?

These questions take us underneath the behaviour rather than putting us immediately into battle with it.

When the job changes

Sometimes genuine change becomes visible in a surprisingly quiet way.
An old response starts to appear and something in you simply goes:
Oh. I don’t need to do that anymore.
Not as an instruction.

Not because you won an argument with yourself.
It simply doesn’t make quite as much sense as it once did.
If something no longer registers as dangerous, protection doesn’t need to organise the response in quite the same way.

If intensity can be experienced without becoming overwhelming, it doesn’t need to be controlled simply to remain manageable.
If reassurance is no longer required to create certainty, checking loses some of its purpose.

When the job changes, the behaviour changes with it.

This is not always immediate.

Awareness can help us pause rather than automatically completing a familiar pattern. A different way of experiencing the situation may need time to become familiar.
But there is an important distinction between creating space for something new and becoming increasingly skilled at fighting the old response.
The aim is not simply:
I still need to do this, but I’m stopping myself.
Sometimes the deeper change is:
Why would I do that? It doesn’t fit anymore.

Look at what the behaviour is telling you

Understanding why we do what we do does not make behaviour irrelevant.

What we do matters.
Our choices have consequences.
But patterns of behaviour may be more useful as information than as a problem to fix.
If a familiar response keeps returning, perhaps the first question isn’t:
How do I stop this?

Try asking:

What is making this response make sense?

• What am I expecting here?
• What feels true to me in this moment?
• What job is this response doing?
• What feels unsafe, impossible or unavailable without it?
• What might I discover if I stop treating the behaviour itself as the problem?

That doesn't remove responsibility for what we do.
It gives us somewhere more useful to look.

Because our responses are not appearing from nowhere.
They make sense from somewhere.
And when that somewhere changes, what makes sense can change too.