Letter 19: The Cost of Sleepwalking Through Our Lives

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

— Socrates

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Dear Future Human,

I often think that if caterpillars experienced fear the way humans do, they would never agree to the transformation required to become butterflies. Think of entering the pupa, bound for months in uncertain darkness. Think of the bizarre, ungainly mess of forms that a caterpillar must travel through, and 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, along with its earthbound gravity and slow crawl—replaced by flight.

What caterpillars teach us about transformation is that the process of becoming new, of doing or being anything new, requires slow and painful change, and periods of uncertainty. What butterflies teach us is that transformation is worth it—that beyond that dark, twilight state of discomfort and uncertainty lies something strikingly new and more beautiful than what came before.

But caterpillars 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 habitual brain shortcuts (mental shortcuts).^¹ By habits. By comfort. By stories that maintain coherence, even when that coherence comes at the cost of our vitality.

As I have discussed in my letters on Neuroscience and Perception, the human brain has evolved to prioritize efficiency over effort. Our nervous system has 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 it’s a toxic relationship, addiction, or the persistent inner critic that dominates our mind. Change is metabolically expensive. It requires energy, focus, and the willingness to sit in uncertainty. Our brains are programmed to avoid all three.²

While it is true that some people reach a “rock bottom” moment in which the pain of staying the same exceeds their fear of change, others may lose everything—homes, families, careers—and yet continue to hold on to their familiar patterns, much like people who mistake an anchor for a life raft and refuse to let go as they drown.

The challenge is that we habituate to the costs, believing they are an inescapable part of life. But they are not. The costs of sleepwalking 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 uncomprehending, when they have heard, are like the deaf; the saying bears witness to them: absent while present they are.” Sleepwalking is a condition of only partial awareness. Most of us may appear awake and perform complex behaviors, but we are not fully conscious. We may walk, talk, or even drive, but have little to no memory of those events later.³

Maybe you can relate: we have all had the experience of driving home from a work event or a date, ruminating about what we said or shouldn’t have said, only to realize we have arrived home with no memory of turning onto our street. Or we find ourselves searching for something we mindlessly set down without being aware of where we placed it.

The costs of sleepwalking show up everywhere in our daily lives.

The sleepless nights, when we wake up at 3 AM in a panic as we reflect on work—fearing our boss, troubled by our finances or feeling like we are drowning in the home life/work balance. Our anxiety only increases as we calculate how little sleep we are getting and worry that we may snap at our children tomorrow. We have been here before many times, but we don’t seem to recognize the long-term costs to our health and our families. We believe we are helpless to do anything about it—continuing to feel trapped as we externalize our predicament.

Or how many of us in middle age catch our reflection while getting ready for work and feel that familiar sense of disgust? We have gained weight 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 day we promise ourselves we will start eating better today, yet we already know we will order takeout again tonight. The shame we feel is not merely about our appearance, but from realizing we are not truly caring for ourselves. Our whole life is affected 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 partner—something about dishes or money or time, but really about feeling unseen and unheard. We hear ourselves say the same cutting words that never lead anywhere good, see the familiar defensive response and know the conversation is spiraling into the same painful dead end. Part of us can observe this cycle, can see how predictable and futile it is, but we feel powerless to step out of it.

And now we have a new way to go unconscious—we numb ourselves with endless scrolling. We open Instagram at 11 PM, telling ourselves we’ll just check for a few minutes, and suddenly it’s 1:30 AM. Hundreds of images and videos later, our minds buzz with comparison and stimulation; we face another disrupted sleep cycle. The algorithm learns our insecurities and feeds them back to us.⁴

A part of us knows social media is curated fiction, but the shame of our empty life feels unbearably real. The scroll becomes both an escape from our dissatisfaction and a magnifier of it, keeping us stuck in unconscious cycles.

These costs compound. When we feel unfulfilled at work, we bring our frustrations home and take it out on our families. When we feel stressed, we snap at our children, fight with our partners—creating the very disconnection we most fear. We medicate our loneliness with shopping, which leads to financial stress. A parent who never learned to honor their own needs raises children who inherit the same patterns, passing sleepwalking to the next generation.⁵

From the outside, our lives often look successful. We pay our bills, maintain our relationships, and fulfill our social obligations. Our suffering is private, dismissed as “normal adult stress” or “just part of life.” We are praised for our selflessness, our work ethic, our responsibility—never recognizing that these very qualities, when lived unconsciously, become the instruments of our own slow destruction.⁶

Pain, however, can be a gift—an essential motivator. Pain, dissatisfaction and spiraling anxiety are internal signals. They alert us to pay attention—something is wrong with the way we are going about life. Our automatic behaviors, coupled with the stories we make up to justify them, are costing us greatly. They form the loops that keep us stuck. The trouble is we often point to external causes without seeing how our own adaptive behaviors perpetuate the cycle.

Take my letter about Jennifer as an example. She first came to me not because she wanted to talk about her family dynamics. She came because she was in pain over the hypocrisy she found in her professional field and her desire to become a more effective leader. It was a broader pain that first motivated her. Only through careful work did we begin to peel back and discover her deeper pain and dissatisfaction—the unconscious ways she replayed her childhood patterns. Jennifer repeatedly exposed herself to painful rejections by unconsciously seeking external validation, the same strategy she had once used to “earn” her mother’s affection through mollification and yes-behaviors. As she began to meet her own true needs instead of pleasing others by meeting their demands, her relationship with her mom naturally began to improve.

Pain can be a good starting place, but it is only a start. Pain, frustration, constant disappointment, helplessness—these must be carefully oriented, mapped back to their true source, in order to serve as useful guides.

As discussed in my letter, The Neurons That Fire Together Wire Together, most of our perceptual filters are established early in life and become part of our automatic operating system. This essential mechanism for our survival—helping us navigate familiar situations quickly can also trap us in outdated patterns. For example, someone raised with heavy criticism can develop heightened sensitivity to perceived judgment. Fast-forward twenty years, and a neutral glance from a barista might trigger the same response, even though the current situation poses no threat.

This is our sleepwalking state: we are physically present but emotionally living in the past, filtering everything through interpretations we formed as helpless children in order 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 is 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, Sleepwalking itself is the cost; but to recognize it requires cultivating a deeper and fuller way of seeing and being.

The tragedy is not only personal. When many people live this way, our entire culture becomes a collection of sleepwalkers. We create families where nobody really knows each other. We work in places that extract life force rather than nourish it, and live in communities where people feel deeply alone, even though they are surrounded by others.

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.

But whether we examine individual lives or entire cultures, the fundamental challenge remains the same. This is the true cost of remaining as we are today: we are caterpillars trapped in a chrysalis of outdated wiring and inherited beliefs, afraid to stretch through the darkness toward the unknown, the new, the real, and the unexpected. We become so attached to our identities as caterpillars that we refuse—absolutely—to grow wings.

With love and tenderness,

Ronit

1. Johan E. Korteling, Anne-Marie Brouwer, and Alexander Toet, “A Neural Network Framework for Cognitive Bias,” Frontiers in Psychology, September 2018.

2. Zahid Padamsey and Nathalie L. Rochefort, “Paying the Brain’s Energy Bill,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, February 2023.

3. Dalitso Njolinjo, “Most Daily Actions Run on Habit, Not Conscious Choice,” Neuroscience News, September 2025.

4. Nina Vasan and Sara Johansen, “A Psychiatrist’s Perspective on Social Media Algorithms and Mental Health,” Stanford HAI, September 2021.

5. Leon F. Seltzer, “How Do Parents Model Exactly What They Don’t Want?,” Psychology Today, July 2017.

6. Ronit Herzfeld, “You Are Not Uniquely Disturbed,” Huffington Post, February 2012.

7. Kendra Cherry, “Using Rationalization as a Defense Mechanism,” Verywell Mind, July, 2025.

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