You wake up at three in the morning.
You look at the clock and immediately think, I need to get back to sleep.
You close your eyes. You try to relax. After a while, you check whether you’re getting sleepy. You aren’t.
Now you’re thinking about how tired you’ll be tomorrow. You calculate how many hours you have left. You notice that your body still feels alert, so you deliberately slow your breathing. Then you check whether that worked.
It didn’t.
By now, you’re no longer simply awake. You’re worried about being awake, frustrated that you’re still awake, and working increasingly hard to make yourself sleep.
Being awake has become a problem you’re trying to solve.
The same thing can happen with other patterns. You notice yourself becoming anxious and immediately start watching the anxiety. Is it getting worse? Can other people tell? Why is this happening again?
Now there are two things happening: the anxiety and everything you’re doing because you don’t want to be anxious.
Over time, that second response can become a pattern of its own. You monitor yourself. You look for signs that the problem is returning. You avoid situations that might bring it on. When it appears anyway, its appearance seems important.
I’m doing it again.
Why hasn’t this gone away?
What if I can’t stop it?
The original response may still have its own causes. But now it occurs inside another set of conditions: attention, worry, frustration, judgment, prevention, and effort.
Those conditions can change what happens next. Trying not to appear nervous can make you more aware of every movement you make. Trying not to think about something requires repeatedly checking whether you’re thinking about it. Becoming angry with yourself for becoming angry gives you something else to be angry about.
Even improvement can become difficult to notice when you’re constantly checking for the pattern. A brief recurrence can become evidence that nothing has changed. An uncomfortable moment becomes something that needs to be prevented next time.
None of this means that we should simply stop trying to change things. Some patterns need attention. Some circumstances need to change. Sometimes deliberate effort is exactly what is required.
But our response to a pattern doesn’t stand outside the pattern. It becomes part of the conditions under which the pattern continues.
Sometimes we develop a pattern of responding to the pattern.
And that pattern can help keep the first one alive.