The Thermostat You Can't Override: An Alternative to Therapy for When Nothing Feels Broken
Hilma af Klint - The Ten Largest No. 7 - Adulthood - 1907
What is it like when you realize you've been trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
Imagine you're lying in bed at 2 a.m., mind racing through the same questions you've been circling for months. Should I leave this job? Is this relationship right? What do I actually want? You've made lists. You've analyzed. You've sought advice from friends, read books, maybe even hired a coach or therapist. And yet here you are again, no closer to clarity, the questions still turning like a wheel that won't stop.
When therapy feels too clinical and coaching feels too surface, when you don't feel broken but you also don't feel clear, perhaps what's happening is this: you're trying to manually regulate something that already knows how to regulate itself.
Your body maintains a temperature between 97 and 99 degrees without a single conscious thought from you. Right now, as you read this, thousands of processes are adjusting, compensating, fine-tuning. Your hypothalamus is monitoring. Your blood vessels are dilating or constricting. Your metabolism is shifting. All of this happens in the background of your awareness, with a precision and intelligence that would be impossible to manage consciously.
What if you tried to take over this process? What if you decided that your body couldn't be trusted, that you needed to consciously control your temperature every moment of every day? The very attempt would create chaos. The interference itself would become the problem.
And yet this is exactly what many of us do with our lives.
We treat our confusion, our restlessness, our sense that something is off—we treat all of this as a malfunction that needs to be consciously corrected. We believe that if we just think hard enough, analyze deeply enough, make the right plan, we'll finally arrive at the answer. We're standing over our own internal thermostat, frantically adjusting the dial, convinced that without our constant intervention, everything will fall apart.
But what if the opposite is true?
The Intelligence Beneath the Interference
When your body encounters a virus, it doesn't consult you. It doesn't form a committee or make a pros-and-cons list. Your temperature rises—sometimes uncomfortably—because fever is how your immune system fights infection. The discomfort isn't a mistake. It's intelligence at work.
Yet imagine if, every time you felt that fever coming on, you immediately took medication to suppress it. You'd be overriding the very process designed to heal you. You'd be treating the symptom as the problem, when the symptom is actually the solution trying to emerge.
This is what happens when we approach our psychological and spiritual discomfort as problems to be fixed rather than messages to be heard.
The anxiety that won't go away no matter how many strategies you try. That restlessness persisting despite your successful career. The relationships that keep following the same painful pattern. The sense that you're living someone else's life, even though on paper everything looks right.
These aren't malfunctions. They're your deep, internal intelligence trying to get your attention.
But for some reason, our society and our problem-solution oriented brain encourage us to override this intelligence that surpasses anything our brains have ever come up with. We've learned to treat our inner life like a machine that needs better management. Feel anxious? Here's a technique. Feel confused? Here's a framework. Feel empty? Here's a goal to chase.
And so we stay busy. We stay in our heads. We keep adjusting the thermostat, convinced that the next adjustment will finally bring the temperature we're looking for.
What we don't notice is that the constant adjusting—the analysis, the planning, the controlling—this is what's preventing the natural regulation from occurring.
What Gets Lost in the Managing
There's a particular exhaustion that comes from trying to manually run processes that were designed to run themselves. I've experienced it to the level of burnout and breakdown before and it seems to be par for the course these days, so much so, that it is standard operating procedure.
If you had to consciously direct your breathing every moment, you'd never have energy for anything else. Your entire life would become the management of breath—in, out, in, out—with no space left for living. This is what many people discover their lives have become: an endless management of themselves, with no space left for actually being themselves.
The cost isn't just exhaustion. It's deeper than that.
When you override your body's temperature regulation, you lose access to valuable information. That fever was telling you something. That shiver was a signal. By suppressing the symptom, you miss the message.
The same is true with your psychological and spiritual life. When you're constantly trying to fix, improve, or transcend your experience, you can't actually hear what your experience is trying to communicate. The anxiety might be telling you that you're living out of alignment with what genuinely matters to you. The confusion might be signaling that you're at a threshold, that the old ways of understanding yourself no longer fit who you're becoming. The restlessness might be your soul's way of saying that the path you're walking was built by someone else's expectations, not your own authentic direction.
But you can't hear any of this if you're busy treating these feelings as problems to eliminate.
This is where many people find themselves stuck. They know something is wrong. They can feel it. But every attempt to think their way out, plan their way forward, or strategize their way to clarity just deepens the stuckness. It's like trying to fall asleep by trying to fall asleep—the effort itself prevents the very thing you're seeking.
The Cost of Never Stopping
What happens if you keep overriding, keep managing, keep trying to consciously control what your deeper intelligence already knows how to handle?
You can live this way. Many people do. You can stay busy enough that you never have to face the questions your restlessness is asking. You can keep achieving, keep improving, keep moving, until the external markers of success are impressive enough that no one (including you) thinks to question whether any of it actually matters to you.
But here's what gets lost: the possibility of living a life that's actually yours.
Not the life that was handed to you by your family's expectations. Not the life that seemed safe or impressive to the culture around you. Not even the life that the best version of yourself, two years ago, thought you should want.
The life that's emerging from within you, right now, in this moment—the one your confusion and restlessness and vague sense of wrongness are all pointing toward. That life can't be accessed through more analysis. It can't be reached by thinking harder. It requires something else entirely.
It requires that you stop interfering long enough to notice what's already trying to happen.
What Is Philosophical Counseling?
When therapy isn't enough—when you're not looking for diagnosis or treatment but for something that honors the depth of your questions—philosophical counseling offers a different path. This isn't therapy—there's no diagnosis or treatment plan, no assumption that something is wrong with you that needs fixing. It's also not coaching, which often focuses on achieving future goals rather than understanding present experience.
Philosophical counseling utilizes guided dialogues and present-moment inquiries for examining the questions that shape your life—questions about meaning and values, about what matters and how you want to live. Through sustained inquiry together, we create space to hear what your confusion is saying, to understand what messages are emerging in your experience and letting us discover what they are pointing toward.
This kind of reflection-driven clarity arises not through frameworks or techniques, but through the simple act of stopping the interference long enough to listen and notice what your deeper intelligence has been trying to communicate all along.
What Becomes Possible Through Guided Dialogues
In dialogue, we create space to actually listen, follow, and discover what your experience is communicating. Not to fix it or transcend it or improve it, but to hear it. To attend to it and honor it as the sacred gift we have all been given, which without effort and interference, points us in the right direction.
This doesn't always feel comfortable. Sometimes what your internal wisdom is communicating requires changes you'd rather not make. Sometimes it asks you to release identities you've built your whole life around. Sometimes it shows you that the very things you've been trying to achieve are the obstacles to what you actually need.
But there's a particular kind of relief that comes when you stop fighting against yourself. When you realize that the thermostat has always been working, that your job isn't to control it but to pay attention to it. When you discover that the intelligence you've been overriding is more trustworthy than all the strategies you've been using to manage it.
This isn't passivity or abandoning conscious choice. Your body's automatic temperature regulation still responds to your actions—if you step into the cold, adjustments happen. If you exercise, compensations occur. The intelligence is responsive, not mechanical.
The same is true for your inner life. When you stop overriding and start listening, you discover not a predetermined path but a responsive dialogue between your conscious awareness and your deeper intelligence. You're not giving up agency. You're discovering a deeper, more holistic form of it.
An Invitation to Stop Interfering
If you're exhausted from trying to manage yourself into clarity, perhaps the question isn't what new strategy or framework or approach you should try next.
Perhaps the question is: what becomes possible if you stop interfering long enough to notice what's already at work?
This is the work of philosophical guidance—creating space to hear what your confusion is actually saying, to see what the messages arising are and what they are pointing toward, and to recognize the intelligence that's been operating all along beneath your attempts to control it.
If you're curious to explore this in your own life, a free discovery call is a place to start. Sometimes the answers have been there all along, waiting for the interference to stop.
Whether you're in Pensacola, FL and prefer meeting in person, or anywhere else in the world and would like to work together online, you can learn more about sessions and pricing here.
