Why Can’t I Just…?
Have you ever found yourself thinking
- “Why can’t I just eat normally?”
- “Why can’t I just stop eating when I’m full?”
- “Why can’t I just stick to a diet?”
- “Why can’t I just get myself to exercise like everybody else?”
- “Why can’t I just stop thinking about food?”
- “Why can’t I just lose the weight?”
- “Why can’t I just keep the weight off?”
- “Why can’t I just get started?”
- “Why can’t I just stick to a routine?”
- “Why can’t I just stop procrastinating?”
- “Why can’t I just focus and get it done?”
- “Why can’t I just say no?”
- “Why can’t I just…?”
Or perhaps your question is completely different.
Whatever comes after the word just, if you’ve found yourself asking it, you’re far from alone.
As a clinical psychologist, these are some of the most common questions I hear. Whether someone is living with an eating disorder, years of chronic dieting, body image concerns, ADHD, autism, chronic illness, burnout, or some combination of these experiences, the beginning of the sentence is remarkably consistent.
“Why can’t I just…?”
Most people assume these questions have relatively simple answers.
If they know what they should be doing, then surely the problem must be motivation, discipline, or willpower. They conclude they’re lazy, making excuses, or simply not trying hard enough.
But what if those explanations don’t actually fit? What if you’ve spent years trying to solve the wrong problem because you’ve been working from an explanation that doesn’t fully account for your current reality?
One of the central ideas that guides my work is this:
From accurate understanding comes a knowing about what is next.
People sometimes assume this means that once we understand ourselves, change suddenly becomes easy. I don’t think that’s true.
Understanding doesn’t magically restore executive functioning, resolve chronic illness, undo years of learning, remove grief, or stop difficult emotions from existing. If understanding alone were enough, most people would never seek therapy because by the time they do, they’ve usually spent years trying to understand themselves.
What I mean is something slightly different. I think people don’t need better advice until they have a better explanation. Not a simpler explanation. A more complete one. One that adequately accounts for everything we know about their current reality—their brain, their body, their life experiences, their relationships, their environment, and the countless factors that influence what is and isn’t possible for them today.
Because every piece of advice, every therapeutic strategy, and every intervention is built upon an explanation of why the problem exists in the first place. If that explanation is incomplete, even excellent advice can feel impossible to implement.
When the explanation changes, the path forward often changes too.
The hidden assumptions behind the word “just”
If I had to nominate one sentence that I hear more than any other in my consulting room, it would probably be this one:
“Why can’t I just…?”
Over the years I’ve come to think that the most important word in that sentence isn’t the behaviour.
It’s just.
That tiny word tells me something incredibly important. Not necessarily about the behaviour itself, but about the explanation the person has arrived at for why that behaviour is happening.
Because just assumes simplicity. It assumes that whatever comes after it ought to be straightforward. That it should already be happening. That other people seem to manage it without too much difficulty. And if it should be simple, then there must be a simple explanation for why it isn’t.
Usually that explanation sounds something like this:
“I’m lazy.”
“I have no willpower.”
“I’m making excuses.”
“I’m just not trying hard enough.”
What interests me is that by the time somebody asks themselves, “Why can’t I just…?”, they’ve often already decided what the answer can’t be.
They’ve ruled out context. They’ve ruled out learning history. They’ve ruled out neurodivergence. They’ve ruled out chronic illness. They’ve ruled out burnout, grief, trauma, executive functioning, sensory differences, years of dieting, systemic pressures, unrealistic expectations, and the countless other factors that shape human behaviour. Whether consciously or not, they’ve reached the conclusion that if all of those things are irrelevant, then the only explanation left is that there is something inherently wrong with them.
Ironically, the very fact that somebody is still asking “Why can’t I just…?” usually makes me think that we’re still missing part of the explanation.
Because if somebody could simply “just” do the thing they’re asking themselves to do, I suspect they would have found a way already.
The quality of the solution depends on the quality of the explanation
One of the assumptions I bring into almost every therapy session is that human behaviour makes sense.
That doesn’t mean every behaviour is healthy. It doesn’t mean every behaviour is intentional. It doesn’t mean every behaviour should continue.
It means that, given everything influencing a person at that moment, there are reasons why that behaviour is occurring.
My job isn’t to decide whether those reasons are good enough. It’s to understand them well enough that we stop trying to solve the wrong problem.
I’ve come to think that this is one of the biggest differences between advice and therapy.
Advice usually starts with a strategy. Therapy begins with a question.
What are we not yet accounting for?
Sometimes the answer is executive functioning. Sometimes it’s sensory processing. Sometimes it’s chronic illness. Sometimes it’s grief. Sometimes it’s years of dieting. Sometimes it’s perfectionism. Sometimes it’s trauma. Sometimes it’s unrealistic expectations. Sometimes it’s a nervous system that has spent years in survival mode. And often, it’s the interaction between many of these things.
Until we have an explanation that adequately accounts for what is happening, every intervention is really just an educated guess. That doesn’t mean the intervention is wrong. It simply means we may be trying to solve a different problem from the one that’s actually keeping the person stuck.
The quality of the solution depends on the quality of the explanation.
And perhaps that’s why two people can receive exactly the same evidence-based advice and have completely different experiences of it. One person finds it life-changing. Another leaves feeling as though they’ve somehow failed therapy itself. It’s tempting to conclude that one person was simply more motivated than the other. I don’t actually think that’s where the interesting question lies.
I think the more interesting question is this:
Did the explanation ever adequately account for that person’s current reality in the first place?
Research explains averages. Therapy explains individuals.
I think research and the ever-growing evidence-base it generates is one of the greatest strengths of psychology. Research allows us to observe patterns that none of us could ever identify from working with individual clients alone. It helps us understand mechanisms. It helps us challenge assumptions that don’t stand up to evidence. It helps us develop interventions that improve outcomes for many people.
I care deeply about research. I’ve spent much of my own career conducting and reviewing it. At the same time, I’ve also come to think that one of the biggest limitations of research is not the research itself, but how we sometimes use it.
Research tells us about averages, but an average can only tell us so much. It tells us what tends to happen across groups of people. People, however, don’t experience themselves as averages. They experience themselves as individuals. That distinction matters. Research doesn’t tell us why this particular person, with this particular brain, this particular body, this particular learning history, and this particular set of life experiences, behaves the way they do today.
Somewhere along the way, I wonder whether we’ve become so accustomed to applying between-person research to individuals that we sometimes forget to stop and ask whether the explanation actually fits. We know what tends to help on average, but have we adequately accounted for everything that makes this person’s situation different and unique? Are we expecting research to explain something it was never designed to explain?
I don’t think this means we abandon research. Far from it. I think it means we integrate it.
Research helps us generate explanations. Research can illuminate mechanisms that people might otherwise never recognise. At the same time, lived experience tells us whether those mechanisms actually account for what is happening in this particular person’s life. Neither is sufficient on its own.
For example, research may tell us that a particular intervention is effective for many people with binge eating disorder. That is incredibly valuable information. But it doesn’t automatically tell us why this person continues to binge eat.
Perhaps they’re living with ADHD that has never been recognised. Perhaps they’re navigating chronic illness that has dramatically reduced their physical capacity or changed the way they are able to eat. Perhaps years of dieting have fundamentally altered the way they relate to food. Perhaps their nervous system has learnt that food is one of the few reliably available ways of regulating overwhelming emotions. Or perhaps several of these factors are interacting at the same time.
The research hasn’t failed. Evidence and lived experience are not competing forms of knowledge. They answer different questions.
Research asks, “What tends to happen?”
Therapy asks, “Does that adequately explain what is happening here?”
My role isn’t to choose between evidence and lived experience. It’s to integrate them until we develop the explanation that best accounts for this person’s current reality.
Because once the explanation changes, the intervention often changes with it.
Compared to what?
One question sits quietly underneath almost every “Why can’t I just…?” that I hear.
Compared to what?
Compared to whom?
Compared to when?
Compared to what version of yourself?
Compared to what expectation?
Compared to what understanding of how brains, bodies, and behaviour actually work?
These questions matter because our expectations rarely emerge in isolation. Most of us develop them by comparing ourselves with other people, with cultural ideals, with previous versions of ourselves, or with ideas about how life is “supposed” to look. Over time, those comparisons become so familiar that we stop recognising them as comparisons at all. They simply become reality.
If I believe I should be able to work full time because everyone else seems to, I may never stop to ask whether “everyone else” shares my health condition, my nervous system, my executive functioning profile, my caring responsibilities, or my life history.
If I believe I should be able to recover in the same way someone else did, I may never ask whether we’re actually solving the same problem.
Comparison can be useful. It can inspire us. It can broaden our perspective. But it can also quietly convince us that there is only one acceptable way to function. When that happens, we stop evaluating the expectation itself. Instead, we evaluate ourselves against it.
Where do our “shoulds” come from?
One of the words I listen for most carefully in therapy is should.
- “I should be able to stop binge eating.”
- “I should be more motivated.”
- “I should be able to lose weight.”
- “I should be able to exercise more.”
- “I should know better.”
- “I shouldn’t still be struggling.”
Whenever I hear the word should, I find myself becoming curious.
Says who? Where did that expectation come from?
Was it inherited from family?
From diet culture?
From healthcare?
From social media?
From workplace expectations?
From comparing yourself with people whose brains, bodies, and lives are fundamentally different from your own?
Or perhaps from comparing yourself with a previous version of yourself, without accounting for everything that has changed since then.
The interesting thing about expectations is that they often stop feeling like assumptions. Instead, they begin to feel like facts. Once that happens, every difficult experience becomes further evidence that we’re failing, rather than an invitation to reconsider whether the expectation itself adequately reflects our current reality.
Sometimes the most helpful question isn’t, “Why can’t I meet this expectation?”
It’s, “Is this expectation actually consistent with everything we know about my life right now?”
When certainty replaces curiosity
I’ve come to think that certainty is one of the biggest obstacles to developing better explanations. Sometimes people stop being curious because they’re convinced they already know the answer. They have an explanation that feels so convincing that every new experience simply strengthens it. If I believe I’m lazy, every unfinished task becomes further proof of laziness. If I believe I have no willpower, every binge eating episode reinforces that story. Curiosity disappears because certainty has taken its place.
Other times, people stop being curious for almost the opposite reason. They’ve spent years trying to understand themselves without finding an explanation that feels satisfying. Eventually they conclude that there simply isn’t one. They tell themselves they’re broken, or uniquely difficult, or that everybody else seems to know how to be a person except them. Ironically, that too becomes an explanation. A painful one, but an explanation, nonetheless.
As human beings, we’re remarkably uncomfortable with uncertainty. We would often rather have an incomplete explanation than tolerate not yet knowing. The difficulty is that once we become certain we’ve found the answer, we often stop looking for information that might challenge it.
This is where I think therapy can offer something different. Not because I have the answers. But because I don’t assume we’ve found them yet; we haven’t uncovered the whole explanation yet. Therapy isn’t about replacing one certainty with another. It’s about remaining curious until we’ve developed an explanation that adequately accounts for the available evidence. Because every new piece of information gives us another opportunity to ask: “Does our current explanation still make the best sense of everything we now know?”
One of the assumptions I do bring into every session is that people are doing the best they can with the capacity available to them at that moment.
Capacity changes everything
One of the concepts I return to most often in therapy is capacity. I think it’s one of the most overlooked influences on human behaviour. We often judge ourselves as though our capacity is fixed. It isn’t.
Capacity is incredibly fluid. It changes from year to year, but it also changes from week to week, day to day, and sometimes moment to moment. It changes with sleep. With illness. With pain. With stress. With grief. With burnout. With executive functioning. With sensory overload. With the mental effort required to simply get through the day. It changes depending on our environment, our relationships, our responsibilities, and the resources available to us. It can increase when environments become more supportive, when skills develop, when accommodations are introduced, when shame reduces, or when life simply becomes less demanding. The behavioural lapses people experience at these times are not “for no reason” as they often assume.
Capacity isn’t simply motivation or effort. It’s the interaction between your brain, your neurotype, your body, your physical health, your nervous system, your learning history, your executive functioning, your energy, your relationships, your environment, your available supports, your financial resources, your emotions, your values, and all of the other factors that shape what is realistically possible for you today.
Yet many of us continue comparing ourselves with a version of ourselves who had completely different circumstances. A version of ourselves who has unlimited energy, perfect health, no competing demands, endless executive functioning, abundant support, and none of the constraints that make us human.
That person doesn’t exist! Capacity, on the other hand, does.
This is why I’ve come to think that decisions can only ever be evaluated against the capacity somebody had at the time they made them, not the capacity we wish they had or the capacity they might develop in the future. That doesn’t mean people won’t become capable of something different. They absolutely might. But we can’t assume future capacity any more than we can ignore current capacity.
The only place change can begin is from an accurate understanding of where somebody actually is.
When we don’t account for changes in capacity, it’s easy to conclude that we’ve become lazy, unmotivated, or somehow less capable. Sometimes the more accurate explanation is simply that we’re asking today’s version of ourselves to function with yesterday’s capacity.
Understanding capacity doesn’t mean lowering expectations forever. It means making sure our expectations are grounded in reality rather than wishful thinking.
Because meaningful change can only occur from the place we are actually standing. Not the place we think we should be.
The Importance of Acceptance
I think acceptance is one of the most misunderstood concepts in psychology. My favourite definition comes from the body image field, and I’ve adapted it because I find it applies to almost everything.
“Acceptance is the willingness to receive something as it is, not as I wish it to be.”
- The willingness to receive my body as it is (thanks, Body Image with Bri!)
- My brain as it is.
- My illness as it is.
- My relationship as it is.
- My circumstances as they are.
- My capacity as it is.
Notice that acceptance doesn’t require me to like any of those things. It doesn’t require me to stop wishing they were different. It doesn’t require me to abandon hope or pretend I wouldn’t choose something else if I could. It simply asks me to stop arguing with reality long enough to respond to it.
Importantly, we only need to accept our current reality, including everything that has contributed to it and the natural consequences that flow from it. We do not need to accept our emotion mind’s catastrophic version of a future that hasn’t happened yet.
Those are very different things. Acceptance belongs in the present. Hope belongs in the future. The two are not incompatible. In fact, I think hope becomes much more realistic once it is grounded in an accurate understanding of where we are starting from rather than in a rejection of where we are.
The question changes
One of my favourite moments in therapy isn’t when somebody suddenly feels optimistic. It’s when they pause, look back over everything we’ve been talking about and quietly say,
“Of course. Given everything we’ve talked about… how could it be any different?”
The question gradually shifts. Instead of asking, “Why can’t I just…?” people begin asking,
- “Given what I now understand about myself, what would actually make sense from here?”
- “What is realistic for me, given my current capacity?”
These questions don’t remove life’s difficulties. Chronic illness is still difficult. Grief is still painful. ADHD doesn’t disappear. An eating disorder isn’t resolved simply because we understand it better. But when our explanation accurately accounts for what is happening, we stop directing all of our energy towards solving the wrong problem.
If this resonates with you…
If you’ve spent years asking yourself, “Why can’t I just…?” perhaps the problem isn’t that you haven’t tried hard enough.
Perhaps you’ve simply been working from an explanation that doesn’t yet account for everything shaping your experience.
Therapy isn’t about finding someone who has all the answers. It’s about working together to develop an explanation that genuinely fits your life—one that integrates your experiences, your strengths, your challenges, and the evidence we have available.
Because when the explanation fits, we stop trying to solve the wrong problem. And from accurate understanding comes a knowing about what is next.
If this way of thinking resonates with you, I’d love to help you explore what might be shaping your current experience and work with you towards meaningful, sustainable change.
