The psychology behind the gap between knowing and doing & how to finally close it
Knowledge gap → learned helplessness
Without the knowledge of how to apply what we’ve read or heard, we disengage. Or get it wrong. And when we get it wrong or enter that whole new world of frustrated learner, it’s unlikely unless we’re super determined, that we’ll keep going with it.
For me it’s like following a recipe you’ve never seen before. If there’s no image & just basic instructions, it doesn’t really click until I watch someone actually make it or at least see some pictures of what it’s supposed to look like.
How, how do I fold in the cheese?
You just, you fold it in David!
It’s a recipe, the instructions are there, but Moira has absolutely no framework for translating the instruction into action. If you’ve never seen the series…. what are you waiting for?
The broader series arc is genuinely one of the most elegant depictions of identity reconstruction around money, ever put on television without it really being about money explicitly. In the same way that Ted Lasso isn’t really about football.
The Roses don’t just lose their wealth, they lose their entire self-concept that was built on it. What the series tracks is the slow, often painful, occasionally joyful process of finding out who you are when the financial identity is stripped away. Which maps directly onto everything I often discuss; present bias, identity, emotional reappraisal, & getting back to basics.
I love that it ended optimistically. They come out the other side with stronger identities, better relationships, and arguably more self-awareness than they started with. That’s a really hopeful message about money psychology, that financial disruption doesn’t have to be the end of the story.
Of your story.
Even if it feels that way at the time.
Anyway… back to knowing & doing.
The Science Bit
This is a well-trodden area in psychology and there are a few clean frameworks that explain it.
The core problem is that knowing lives in one part of the brain and doing lives in another, and they don’t automatically talk to each other.
Knowing is largely a prefrontal cortex function; rational, analytical, future-oriented.
Doing is driven by the limbic system; emotional, immediate, threat-sensitive.
When there’s any emotional charge attached to a task (fear, shame, overwhelm), the limbic system can effectively veto the prefrontal cortex’s good intentions. This is why “just do it” advice is largely useless.
Nike has never worried about that!
“Just do it” works brilliantly when the barrier is mild hesitation in someone who already has the skills, the confidence, and a positive emotional association with the activity. AKA was already going to do it. A runner who doesn’t feel like going out this morning for example, shows the friction is low and the reward is immediate and known, so that simple yet powerful tagline is a motivating nudge.
This falls apart when the task carries overwhelm, if the person lacks confidence or skill, or if the reward is distant and abstract. “Just do it” (or JFDI as we used to say at work) just adds a layer of self-blame. Now they know what to do, they’ve been told to just do it, and they still haven’t. So clearly something must be wrong with them.
Which is actually a nice illustration of the gap itself. Nike’s slogan is one of the most effective pieces of marketing ever created, everyone knows it, it’s deeply embedded in culture, and yet the global inertia around exercise hasn’t noticeably shifted. Knowing the instruction and feeling the identity pull of it doesn’t reliably produce the behaviour.
What I’m essentially saying is: “just do a budget” is the financial equivalent of “just do it” & it’s assuming the barrier is purely laziness or ignorance, when actually the barrier is psychological, emotional, and neurological. And that’s exactly why the way I present budgeting matters as much as the budgeting itself.
Do you think managing your money comes down to discipline or do you believe there are other ways? Please use that comment section!
How do we connect our prefrontal cortex to our limbic system?
my curiosity whilst writing this blog …
Can they work cohesively?
Is it a habit thing?
Or more of a connection to self identity?
The honest answer is that you don’t override the limbic system with the prefrontal cortex, that battle is one the limbic system wins more often than not. As in, “we buy with our emotions then justify with logic”.
The goal is to get them working in the same direction, which happens through a few distinct routes.
- Regulation first, cognition second
The prefrontal cortex goes offline under stress and threat. So the first job is always nervous system regulation. No one makes a good financial decision under stress, you can’t think your way into calm, but you can feel in your body to get you there. Breathing, movement, grounding. Once the threat response is dialled down, the prefrontal cortex comes back online and rational engagement becomes possible. This is why sitting down to do your budget when you’re already anxious and overwhelmed almost never works. Or ends abruptly in tears - Habit: Automating past the gap
Habits are powerful precisely because they bypass the knowing-doing gap entirely. A habit doesn’t require the prefrontal cortex to initiate it runs on a cue-routine-reward loop seated in the basal ganglia. So once a behaviour is sufficiently habituated, the emotional resistance becomes largely irrelevant.
You just do it (thanks Nike you can enter the conversation now) before you’ve had a chance to feel bad about it. The challenge is getting through the formation period which is where environmental design, implementation intentions, and community come in.
And me. That’s where I come in to be your fairy godmother. - Identity: The deepest lever
This is probably the most powerful and the most underused. The psychologist James Clear articulates it well, behaviour change that starts with identity is stickier than behaviour change that starts with outcomes.
“I want to save money” is an outcome.
“I am someone who proactively chooses where their money goes” is an identity. The limbic system is deeply invested in acting consistently with who we believe we are so if the new behaviour is congruent with the self-concept, it stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like expression.
This is also where shame does its most damage. If someone’s identity includes “I’m bad with money” then doing the household budget feels threatening to the self-concept in a different way. It might confirm the story. Avoidance protects the identity, even a negative one, because at least it’s familiar. - Emotional reappraisal
This is a prefrontal cortex skill that can be trained. The ability to consciously reframe the emotional meaning of a situation. Not suppressing the feeling, but shifting the interpretation. I reframed a difficult financial period as a “declutter” rather than a crisis. Ali, my mate, who’s an exceptional Solutions Focused Hypnotherapist does this too when she suggests “intentional spending” over “cutting back” on her podcast that she invited me to speak on.
Both are nudging the limbic system toward a less threatening read of the same situation, which reduces the emotional veto. - Reward proximity
The limbic system responds to immediate reward. So attaching something genuinely pleasurable to the task. Ali’s Sunday morning coffee ritual is a perfect example, it starts to build a positive emotional association over time. Eventually the cue (Sunday morning, coffee) triggers a mild positive anticipation rather than dread. The behaviour and the good feeling become linked in the limbic system’s memory, which is the neurological basis of habit formation.
This is why I’ve renamed my Substack & Linkedin publications to The Kitchen Table Money Club. I’m there with you slurping coffee, mentoring you through each step of sorting it out & help to make it feel good!
If you’d like to listen to Ali & I here is the podcast link so you can line it up for your next commute:
The connective tissue between them
If there’s one thing that sits right at the intersection of all of these it’s probably self-compassion. A regulated nervous system, a flexible identity, the ability to reappraise, all of these are much more accessible when someone isn’t in a shame spiral. Brené Brown’s work and the clinical research behind self-compassion, consistently shows that people make better decisions, take more considered risks, and persist longer when they’re operating from self-acceptance rather than self-criticism.
The inner critic is a limbic system creature. Compassion is how the prefrontal cortex talks back to it.
How does yours sound?
Like the two headed monster from Sesame Street?
So, how do you know what to do?
When the gap isn’t a knowledge problem, it’s a design problem. The question isn’t “how do I know more?” or “How can I do more?” but “How do I make the right action the easiest action?”
Which is precisely what we do together (and what good therapy does, see Ali for that)
We redesign your environment and your relationship to the task until the gap closes naturally. We reduce the friction & increase the pleasure. (That actually sounds filthy, now I’m reading this back in edit, sod it it’s staying!)
If you DO have sufficient knowledge, but you can’t actually make yourself do the thing, it’s likely boiling down to confidence with a dollop of needing a gentle nudge forwards and the first few steps laid out very clearly. Like a recipe!
Interested in how to regulate your nervous system so that you can get your prefrontal cortex back online?
It’s in the next blog…
Until next time
Lucy x
ps. If you want the full monty experience sign up to my free Substack Publication here:
https://lucywallington.substack.com/p/two-parts-of-your-brain-are-fighting
pps. If you’d love me to show you how to fold in the cheese, why not take a look at the Mentoring page.
Then, if you want a short chat with me to see if this is a good idea you can book your free session here
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