Persuasion (n.): The act of causing someone to do or believe something through reasoning or argument. From the Latin persuadere — to advise thoroughly. Note that nowhere in the definition does it say anything about the other person actually wanting to be advised. I have spent years trying to get Josh to exercise. Not in a controlling way. Or — okay, maybe in a slightly controlling way, but for good reasons. Ten out of ten doctors agree that moving your body is good for you. This is not a controversial position. This is not me projecting. This is just science, and I would like the person I love to be alive and ambulatory for as long as possible, partly because I love him and partly because I have done the math and I cannot physically take care of him if something goes wrong. I have told him this. Directly. Lovingly. With data. His response is not words. It is a look. The look says: you think you know better than me. You think I’m not doing enough. You are trying to control my time. He doesn’t have to say any of it. It lands anyway, fully formed, right in the center of my chest. And just like that, the conversation is over — not because we fought, but because the look closed the door before I could get through it. I asked his sister once. She is excellent at movement, the kind of person who actually looks forward to it, and I thought maybe she had a key I didn’t. Her advice: just take things off his plate so he has more space. I appreciated this. I also wanted to laugh. I have a plate. My plate is full. My plate has things on it that fell off other people’s plates. I cannot take things off Josh’s plate with the plate situation I am currently managing. So for years, nothing changed. And I kept trying the same things — the gentle ask, the walk-to-get-coffee reframe, the calm laying out of medical evidence — and getting the same look. And somewhere in the back of my mind I started to wonder if the problem was not Josh’s relationship to exercise but my relationship to giving advice. Enter Emily Falk. Falk is a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of What We Value, and she studies how the brain actually processes information, change, and persuasion. What she found rearranged something in me. The first thing: the part of the brain that activates when we receive unsolicited advice is the same part associated with social threat. Being told what to do doesn’t just feel annoying. It registers, neurologically, as danger. Josh’s look is not stubbornness or defensiveness or a personal rejection of my very reasonable cardiovascular concerns. It is, in the most literal sense, his brain protecting him. Which means every time I made my careful, loving, evidence-based case for movement, I was accidentally pulling the pin on a grenade. But here is the part that really got me. Because it would be easy to read this and conclude that Josh is the problem — that his threat response is the obstacle, that if he could just receive information without his nervous system treating it like an attack, everything would be fine. Except Falk also has things to say about the person doing the advising. About why we give advice in the first place. About the uncomfortable truth that what looks like concern is sometimes also about us — our anxiety, our need for control, our own fear dressed up as helpfulness. I am trying to control Josh. I thought about the mornings I pick up my phone before I’ve said a word to anyone. Before coffee, before I’ve decided what kind of day I want to have, I am already checking — how is the post doing, did anyone reach out, does anyone still care, am I still here. There was a time when this ritual paid off. Good news, a new collab, someone saying something that made me feel like the work mattered. Now it’s a letdown ninety-five percent of the time. I put the phone down feeling depressed and worthless and like no one loves me. When that is simply not true. I know this. I know it the way I know that Josh should exercise, the way I know that checking the metrics at 7am is not going to make me feel better. I know it clearly, rationally, with my whole brain. And I do it anyway. Every morning. I watch myself do it almost from outside my own body, and I cannot stop. This is Falk’s second insight, the one that I couldn’t argue my way around: knowing something is good for you is almost entirely useless in the moment you are deciding whether to do it. The brain does not make decisions the way we think it does — through calm, rational weighing of evidence. It makes them fast, socially, emotionally, in response to what feels immediately rewarding and what the people around us seem to value. The milkshake wins not because you don’t know better. It wins because knowing better is the wrong tool for the job. So what is the right tool? This is where I want to hand you the book. Because what Falk found — about how change actually happens, about what makes advice land instead of detonate, about why Josh is finally, slowly, taking a few walks a week and how that happened without a single additional conversation about cardiovascular health — is something I could not have predicted, and couldn’t have argued myself into believing. Share this with someone you love. It has everything to do with who is in the room when you make a decision. And almost nothing to do with knowing what’s good for you. I’m not going to tell you what to do with that. You know I won’t. (Or am I kinda doing it right now??) But I will say: something shifted. Not dramatically. Not in a way that makes a clean story. Just — the look comes less often now. And some mornings, I put the phone down before I check. XO, Carissa PS Bad At Keeping Secrets is a podcast by Carissa Potter (me). The audio was produced by Officially Quigley, and the sound editing was done by Mark McDonald. Mark helps people start podcasts, and I highly recommend him if you have been thinking about starting one. You can sign up for a free meeting with him here. PPS One more plug for Emily. Her book is here. PPPS If you are in the Bay Area, THIS SATURDAY, Ashley Neese and Danny Paul Grody are hosting an event at the Berkeley Art Museum. Click here for more info. Get full access to BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS at peopleiveloved.substack.com/subscribe
