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The law of reversed effort explains why overthinking can become its own obstacle.

Sometimes the highest-leverage move is to stop monitoring whether something is working.

We can control our actions, but trying to force an internal state often backfires.

Creating the right conditions may work better than pushing harder for the result.

For the better part of this decade, I suffered from a severe case of insomnia. Initially, it had biological origins. After coming down with COVID early in the pandemic, the virus triggered a rare autoimmune condition in me called Morvan syndrome. Morvan’s gift to its victims is profound, treatment-resistant insomnia (agrypnia excitata), and the syndrome can be fatal in up to 20 percent of reported cases. Fortunately (though it’s hard to diagnose), once it’s identified, it’s quite treatable. Unfortunately, prolonged insomnia can develop a learned psychological component, even after the original biological problem improves, so my sleepless nights continued even after IVIG immunotherapy resolved most of the other consequences of the condition.

So, as behavioral scientists often do, I was determined to solve my problem through intellect and science. I bought an Oura Ring and started tracking my sleep. I learned everything I could about sleep hygiene. I hired a sleep coach, therapist, and hypnotherapist. I got a silly pair of glasses and bought all the supplements. I even started injecting myself with peptides purported to help with sleep. Like so many who suffer from insomnia, I just wanted out of it. I jumped the shark when I bought a machine to freeze my prefrontal cortex, a machine so loud my poor wife was now not able to sleep either.

After more than five years of suffering, one little trick made it stop: I decided to stop caring. To be clear, I didn’t suddenly abandon my healthy sleep habits; I just stopped treating good sleep as something I needed to achieve.

The Law of Reversed Effort

If you follow my work, you know Alan Watts has been a significant influence in what I do. Although the law of reversed effort didn’t originate with him, he helped popularize similar ideas through his writing about Taoism and effortless action. Watts even described Lao-tzu as a master of the law of reversed effort.

Despite the name, the law of reversed effort is........

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