Sometimes you can see your own patterns very clearly. You know what you are doing, why you are doing it, even how it is affecting you. And still, nothing really changes. That gap between awareness and action can feel frustrating in a very specific way.
Jeff Guenther, a licensed professional counsellor based in Portland, spoke about this in an Instagram post on March 31. He described a type of person therapists often refer to as “high insight, low change”. Someone who understands themselves deeply, but struggles to translate that insight into actual behaviour change.
What does high insight, low change actually mean
Jeff expressed how difficult this experience can be. He said, “I want to acknowledge how incredibly painful and crazy this is because there's something uniquely demoralising about it. Like ignorance is almost easier. At least then you have an excuse… But when you know exactly what you're doing, you can see the pattern. You can narrate it in real time, and you still can't stop. That is a very specific kind of hell.”
It is not about a lack of awareness. If anything, it is the opposite.
Why insight does not always lead to change
According to Jeff, thinking and behaviour are influenced by different parts of the brain. He explained, “Insight lives in your cortex, the thinking, analysing, narrating part of your brain; but behaviour change, that's operating way deeper. And the parts of your brain that run on habit, emotion, survival - those parts don't care how smart you are.”
So even if you understand everything logically, the deeper systems that run on habit and emotion may not respond in the same way.
He also pointed out how insight can sometimes work against you. He said, “It's just narrating your own stuckness in increasingly sophisticated language.” It can feel like progress, but it is not necessarily leading to change.
How to move from awareness to actual change
Jeff suggested that one of the first steps is accepting that action needs to happen even when you do not feel ready. Waiting for that feeling may not work.
He explained, “Second, start by doing the embarrassingly small versions of the thing, not the big, huge version you think you should be doing. The version that feels almost too easy to count. Because your brain, the deep part, the part we're trying to reach, it doesn't learn from grand gestures. It learns from little repetitions.”
At first, it may feel fake. That is okay. The idea is to build the habit first and let the feeling catch up later.
He also highlighted the importance of not keeping it to yourself. As Jeff said, “Shame loves privacy. The more isolated that gap stays, the more power it has over you. You bring one person into it, one real person, not your notes app, and something shifts. Not magically, but the dynamic changes when it's witnessed.”
It may not feel like a big shift right away. But even small steps, repeated over time, can start to move things forward.
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