Letter 19: The Cost of Sleepwalking Through Life
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
—Henry David Thoreau
I sometimes wonder that if caterpillars experienced fear the way humans do, they would never agree to the transformation required to become butterflies. Imagine entering the pupa, bound for months in uncertain darkness. Think of the bizarre, ungainly mess of forms that a caterpillar must travel through, the discomfort of a body splitting apart to yield new wings. It must feel like a kind of death. In some ways, it is a death. The old form is gone, and with it, its earthbound gravity, the slow, painstaking crawl across the earth. Instead, they learn to fly.
Caterpillars teach us that transformation requires slow and painful change, and long periods of uncertainty. Butterflies show us that while transformation is slow, uncomfortable, and often disorienting, it is worth it. Beyond that dark, twilight state of discomfort and uncertainty lies something strikingly new and more beautiful.
But caterpillars have no choice. They are driven by instinct to endure this necessary discomfort. It’s part of their life cycle. Humans, however, do not live by instinct alone. We live by neural shortcuts.1 By habits. By comfort. By stories that maintain coherence, even when that coherence comes at the cost of our vitality.
As I’ve written in my letters on Neuroscience and Perception, the human brain has evolved to prioritize efficiency over effort. Our nervous system evolved to protect us, not transform us. That is why it is so difficult for us to change, even when we know our behaviors and habits are hurting us, whether that’s a toxic relationship, addiction, or the persistent little voice of the critic that dominates our inner world. Change is metabolically expensive. It requires energy, focus, and the willingness to face uncertainty. Our brains are programmed to avoid all three.2
While it’s true that some of us may hit “rock bottom” where staying the same hurts more than changing, this is not universal. Others lose almost everything—homes, relationships, careers—and still cling to the same patterns, much like people who mistake an anchor for a life raft and refuse to let go as they drown.
The problem is that we get used to the cost and begin to believe it’s just part of life. But that is not the case. The costs of sleepwalking through life are too painful and consequential to be accepted, ignored, or numbed.
I call this unconscious way of living the Sleepwalking State—a term inspired by the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, who observed: “…the saying bears witness to them: absent while present they are.”
When we are sleepwalking, we are only partly aware. We function, we make decisions, but much of our life is happening on autopilot.3
The costs of sleepwalking show up everywhere in our daily lives.
We have all had the experience of driving home from work or a social event, replaying a conversation in our heads, only to arrive without remembering the drive. Or we drift off during a meeting, snapping back only when we hear our name and realize we haven’t been listening.
Then there are the sleepless nights, waking at 3 AM with panic as we worry about work, getting our children into the right schools, our finances, or the impossible balance between home and career. Our anxiety increases as we calculate how little sleep we’re getting and worry that we won’t be able to function the next day. We’ve been here many times before, yet we still don’t register the long-term cost to our health and families. We tell ourselves there’s nothing we can do, feeling trapped as we look outside ourselves for the cause.
Or how many of us catch our reflection while getting ready for work, again feeling that familiar sense of disgust. We gained too many pounds in the past five years; our eyes are puffy from last night’s bottle of wine—the same bottle we swore we wouldn’t open. Every morning, we promise ourselves that today we’ll eat better, but somewhere underneath that promise is a knowing that by evening we’ll be too depleted to cook and will order takeout again.
The shame we feel is not merely for how we look, but for the knowledge that we don’t really care for ourselves. Our whole life is diminished by the lack of confidence that arises from feeling like a failure, which we then project onto our partners or our children.
We find ourselves in the repetition trap, in the same fight with our partners—mostly about house chores, or money or time, but really, it’s about feeling unseen and unheard. We hear ourselves saying the same unhelpful things and feel our defensiveness growing. We already know exactly where the conversation is going.
A new way to go unconscious has now taken over—mindless scrolling. We open Instagram at 11 PM, telling ourselves we’ll just check for a few minutes, and suddenly it’s 1:30 AM. We have consumed hundreds of images and videos, our minds buzzing with self-comparisons and artificial stimulation, and we now face another night of sleep cycle disruption.
The algorithm quickly learns our insecurities and feeds them back to us. We lose ourselves in content that numbs us as it adds to our sense of inadequacy.4
A part of us knows social media is a curated fiction—it glorifies life in a way that quietly reshapes our expectations. Measured against that idealized version, our own lives can begin to feel not enough. The scroll becomes both an escape from our dissatisfaction and a magnifier of it, a perfect mechanism for staying unconscious while perpetuating our feelings of inadequacy and keeping us trapped in our unconscious addictions.
These costs don’t exist in isolation. They compound, creating a life that feels increasingly hollow and desperate. When we can’t say no at work, we bring that exhaustion home with us. Stress builds, patience wears thin, and we snap at our kids or end up fighting with our partners. When we try to soothe our loneliness with shopping, we only add money worries to our lives. And often, without realizing it, when we fail to honor our own needs, we model these same patterns for our children, passing unconsciousness to the next generation.5
From the outside, our lives often look fine, even successful. We pay our bills, maintain our relationships, and fulfill our social obligations. Our suffering is private. It is dismissed as “normal adult stress” or “just part of life.” We are often praised for being selfless, hardworking, and responsible. Yet when we live these qualities on autopilot, without awareness of our own limits, they can slowly wear us down over time.6
This is where the pain can become a great gift, as the ultimate motivator.
Dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and spiraling anxiety are not random occurrences. They are signals from our bodies that are pointing to the cost for our automatic behaviors and the stories that justify them. They’re clues that the way we’re living, and the way we’re perceiving our place in the world, is taking a toll on our well-being.
The problem is that we often misunderstand the source or root cause of this pain. We blame external pressures, stressful jobs, and relationship issues, while missing the ways we ourselves keep these patterns going. It’s our learned habits, adaptations, and automatic responses that continue to create the dynamics that exhaust us.
Take my letter about Jennifer as an example. Jennifer first came to me because she was uncomfortable with the hypocrisy she found in her field; she wanted to learn how to be a more effective leader in the hopes of having a lasting and positive impact on the culture around her. Initially, it was a global pain that motivated her to seek change.
Carefully we began to peel back the layers of Jennifer’s unconscious behaviors. This process repeatedly revealed painful rejections by her mother, and her attempts to “earn” her mother’s affection through mollification and learned “yes” behaviors. Only when she became aware of her patterns and began to live in accordance with her true needs did her relationship with her mother improve—slowly.
Pain is a good starting place, but it is only a start. Pain, frustration, constant disappointment, helplessness—these must be carefully oriented, and mapped back to their true source, in order to serve as useful guides.
Most of our perceptual filters were established early in life and have become part of our automatic operating system. While this system is essential for our survival, helping us navigate familiar situations quickly and safely, it can also trap us in outdated patterns. For example, a child raised in a home where she experienced heavy criticism can develop a brain that perceives people as dangerous. She grows up constantly on guard, bracing for disapproval. Years later, that vigilance continues to serve her unconsciously. When she walks into a coffee shop and the barista greets her with a neutral expression, her nervous system fills in the blanks. An old program kicks on. What might register as nothing to someone else becomes judgment to her. Suddenly, she’s scanning herself—her clothes, her makeup, her body—wondering what’s wrong, what needs fixing, how she might be failing.
Her reaction is not conscious, not intentional. Her brain is simply running the same protective program: “I must be doing something bad or wrong.” It is this belief that protected her when criticism threatened her sense of belonging and safety. She perceives and reacts to her life through the lens of that failing child—detecting threats that aren’t actually present and feeling emotions that belong to another time and place. This is our Sleepwalking State: we move through life physically here, but emotionally rooted in the past, filtering the present through interpretations we formed as helpless children trying to survive.
It is almost impossible to perceive the cost of sleepwalking through our choices, our relationships, and our day-to-day moments. We naturally externalize reasons for our behaviors.7 That’s why, for most people, the costs are only recognized as external threats: the unsatisfying job, the constant feeling that something is missing, the suppressed longings, the repeated patterns around food, or sex. In fact, a life spent sleepwalking rather than experiencing living is the cost of not learning how to live.
The tragedy is not just personal. When enough individuals live this way, our entire culture becomes a collection of sleepwalkers, each person trapped in their own unconscious patterns, unable to see or respond to life as it unfolds. We create families where nobody really knows each other. We work in places that extract life-force rather than nourish it. We live in communities where people feel deeply alone, even though they are surrounded by others. In future letters, I will explore how these costs ripple through our immediate communities, and into our global society.
In my next letter, I will shift from theory to a lived experience. I will introduce you to Anna and Will, whose seemingly simple exchange about washing dishes reveals how our unconscious childhood patterns create invisible barriers between us and the people we love.
Whether we examine individual lives or entire cultures, the fundamental challenge remains the same. Ultimately, the true cost of living as we do today is this: we are caterpillars living inside outdated wiring, afraid to move through the darkness of the unknown. Too attached to who we’ve been, we hesitate to stretch toward what’s possible—to grow wings.
With love and tenderness,
Ronit
Johan E. Korteling, Anne-Marie Brouwer, and Alexander Toet, “A Neural Network Framework for Cognitive Bias,” Frontiers in Psychology, September 2018.
Zahid Padamsey and Nathalie L. Rochefort, “Paying the Brain’s Energy Bill,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, February 2023.
Dalitso Njolinjo, “Most Daily Actions Run on Habit, Not Conscious Choice,” Neuroscience News, September 2025.
Nina Vasan and Sara Johansen, “A Psychiatrist’s Perspective on Social Media Algorithms and Mental Health,” Stanford HAI, September 2021.
Leon F. Seltzer, “How Do Parents Model Exactly What They Don’t Want?,” Psychology Today, July 2017.
Ronit Herzfeld, “You Are Not Uniquely Disturbed,” Huffington Post, February 2012.
Kendra Cherry, MSEd, “Using Rationalization as a Defense Mechanism,” Verywell Mind, July, 2025.