Thoughts on Free Will (Plus a New Sleep Tip That Doesn't Work)

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." - Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

"You want to be the director of your own movie. How's that going so far?" - Phillip Moffitt

I want to write a few words about free will, a concept that's interested me for a long time. So much hinges on knowing our freedom, grasping the places where we do have choice and also understanding where we don't have choice.

In America, we tend to take free will as a given. Of course we have free will, right? It goes with the whole rugged individualist thing. Capitalism hinges on the idea (the illusion, perhaps) of free will. While I grew up believing in free will, my faith was shaken in college when I was exposed to certain philosophers who argued very persuasively that there is no free will. This is a discussion for another day (because I don't find academic debates so interesting) but suffice to say, there is considerable doubt among philosophers that anything like free will exists.

What's more important is that we all want to believe we have free will. We generally see ourselves like in the Dickens quote above, as the "heroes of our own lives," the sole authors of our fate. Of course we want to see ourselves this way. It's empowering. It feels good to feel like we're in control. And we have all of American culture and media around us telling us that we can do whatever we want. American culture is a cult of self-improvement; we're practically drowning in inspirational Instagram videos telling us we just need to hustle more, try harder. Permanent happiness is just within our reach. It's up to us. Maybe this is why realities of systemic inequality and racism are so hard to swallow; it points to the fact that we're all thrust into positionalities that we didn't choose and that can define our experience.

What concerns me here, however, is how the view that we're all completely free can cause considerable suffering. Viewing our lives this way can keep us locked in patterns of trying to control things that are outside of our control. In turn, living in a constant state of trying to control the uncontrollable is a recipe for demoralization, feelings of failure, frustration, anxiety, depression. Many people are Project Managers at their job. We like to think we can project manage our whole lives. As the great teacher Phillip Moffitt asks above, "How's that going so far?"

We do have a measure of choice (more on that in a moment) but generally our lives are going to unfold as they will. Think of all of the ways our behaviors are pre-conditioned (i.e. not free): there are our genes and the ways those determine our fate, our childhoods and how they shaped us, the families we grew up in (and the rules, norms and values we internalized or rebelled against), our biological needs and drives, the cultures we live in (and sub-cultures), the particular situation we're in, the ways that the random actions of others impact us, the ways random events impact us. How about our moods? Those can change minute by minute and impact our behaviors vastly. Imagine a mouse riding an elephant and whipping it furiously yelling "Left! Right!" That's us thinking we have free will. Here's another example. When you get up to go get a snack from a refrigerator, you think you're choosing that? You're responding to a hunger cue produced by a complex system of signals involving the brain, the stomach and the nervous system. These signals drive you to the refrigerator and then (milliseconds later, maybe) your brain produces the illusion that you've made a "decision" to get a sandwich.

My broader point is that our cultural obsession with self-determination leads to suffering. I'll provide an example. I am a bad sleeper. Always have been. Sleep has not been my friend. Yet, I really want to sleep. I need to sleep - because a lot depends it! When I don't sleep well, I'm not as present with my clients, my family and friends, and that's extremely important to me. Unslept, I am often a grumpy mess. This regrettable state of affairs means that the hours between 10pm and 3am are usually somewhat of a mental hellscape. It begins with me getting ready for bed at a reasonable time and saying, "I really need to get some sleep tonight. Maybe the tonight's the night!" Then I toss and turn for 2-4 hours getting progressively frustrated, beating myself up, and so on and so forth. It's a pretty miserable way to spend 2-4 hours every night, and I've spent decades of my life doing this.

Then, several weeks ago, I was reminded by a teacher that we need to stop demanding specific outcomes of life. Life is going to unfold like it will. We need to chill out a little (or a lot). After hearing this, it occurred to me to ask: why did I ever think that I could control whether I sleep or not? Friends, I've tried every sleep technique and medication under the sun. I could write a book on sleep hygiene. If it's something that I could master, I would have mastered it by now. So it occurred to me to just try accepting that I might not be able to sleep, that it is fundamentally out of my control. There's just some quirk with my nervous system, or my biology in general, such that I struggle to turn off at night. So I just let it go. For me, letting go looked like simply lying in bed and reading a book, or doing some writing, instead of trying to bully myself into sleeping. Letting go also meant letting go of a kind of perfect ideal of myself as someone who can always wake up perfectly rested and effective. This was an extremely liberating mental shift. To be very clear, it didn't solve my problem. I still struggle to sleep, and that means some mornings I'm a little grumpy and tired. But in ending my battle with life I've bought myself 2-4 hours of peace each night. That's a lot of hours of life to get back. And, it also means that when I eventually do fall asleep I'm in a calmer, happier state and not angry and upset. Yet another result of accepting I'm not in control of my sleep was that I started scheduling my day to begin later in the morning when possible. So there are less days I have to wake up early. I accommodated life rather than demanding it accommodate me, and now everyone's a bit happier.

As a side note, if you do try this sleep tip (that totally doesn't help you sleep), you do need to eventually try a little bit to sleep. This approach doesn't mean giving up on the idea of sleep and deciding to stay up all night playing video games and eating ice cream. Rather, you simply accept that sleep is out of your control. When you start to feel tired, you try to sleep. But if you can't, that's fine. Do something else with your time, something that feels vital or relaxing. Then when you think you might be getting tired, gently try again. This approach reflects the classic principle of efforting: "not too tight, not too loose." Do try, but stop expecting to get an A+ every damn day.

So what choice do we really have then? My belief is that while most of life is out of our control we do have choice in two fundamental domains. First, we can choose to open to any moment with acceptance, which is ultimately the same thing as compassion. In any moment we can choose to stop fighting life. This act is often referred to as "radical acceptance" and this is the kind of lesson we have to learn again, and again, and again. Why do we tend to keep forgetting? Because life is difficult and there's so much on life's journey that's really hard to accept. If it were easy, everyone would do it and we wouldn't need reminders.

In recent years, the concept of radical acceptance has been popularized and it can be mentioned with a kind of cavalier or casual attitude. But compassionate acceptance is often a deeply courageous and difficult act. To be able to open to life as it is requires discipline, training, appropriate effort (and even after all that, one still slips frequently into delusion and avoidance).

There is a second domain of choice. In addition to opening to any moment with compassionate acceptance, we can also choose to align ourselves with a value or intention. The values we choose are up to us. The value you pursue might be kindness, or calmness, or dignity, or joy, or compassion, or truth. I've spent years working with clients helping them orient themselves to their deepest values and this can often be a key moment on the path to growth. Now, just because we choose an intention doesn't mean we'll always be fully aligned with it (once again, with feeling, not in our complete control!). If my value is kindness, in the morning I might be a 9 out of 10 but then someone cuts me off in traffic and my score temporarily plummets...But to align with a value is to have a north star. Life can be bewildering and it's easy to lose track of our priorities. Taking a few moments every day to focus on our intentions and values can orient us in the right direction. It's a way of keeping our eye on the horizon as we walk, even as the journey itself is terribly uncertain.

One of my favorite passages on this topic is by Sharon Salzberg who writes in her book "Loving-kindness": "Life is just as it is, despite our protests. There is a constant succession of pleasurable and painful experiences...The unrelenting flux of life's changing conditions is inevitable, yet we labor to hold onto pleasure, and we labor equally hard to avoid pain." Radical acceptance doesn't mean we have to be happy about our situation and all the dizzying ups and downs that life brings us. Rather it simply means changing our relationship with reality. We stop trying to tame the wild river of our life's experience (imagine stepping into the Mississippi River and trying to divert its flow with your fingertips). Instead, we can let the river take us where it will take us, and we can hold the whole experience with compassion for ourselves and everyone else we meet along the way. We come into accord with life, and find a fundamental unity. In this way, the space of our freedom begins to grow in scope. From one vantage point we control nothing; from another, every moment is a new opportunity for liberation.