How to Tell If What You Want Is Actually Yours

Some of what you want is not yours. You picked it up by looking at someone else’s life, and your body has been quietly refusing it ever since.

I found this out on a holiday.

For years I was living abroad doing research, and I would come home to Portugal to see my family. I would arrive at my sister’s place and there it was: the house, the husband, the settled life. And every single time I would think — I want that. Maybe I need to buy a house. Maybe I need to start doing this.

And then, one visit, something interrupted me mid-thought.

Wait. Wait a second.

I did not want a house. I wanted whatever it was I imagined she had while I was standing in her kitchen. Those are not the same thing, and I had spent years confusing them.

The tell is the speed

Here is what I have noticed in myself, and in the room, over and over: the borrowed want arrives fast. It is fully formed before you have examined anything. You see the kitchen, and the sentence “I want that” is already finished.

A real want is slower. It has texture. You can say what specifically you want, and what you would trade for it.

There is a plausible mechanism underneath this, and I want to give it to you carefully, because this is exactly the place where people in my field reach for a neuroscience flourish they cannot cash.

Nim Tottenham and Anna Vannucci, at Columbia, have proposed that what attachment theory has long called internal working models are represented in the brain as attachment schemas — consolidated interpersonal-affective memories, held in connections between subcortical and midline cortical regions, positioned to generate predictive inferences about relational life.¹ I want to be precise about the status of that: it is a perspective paper, and the authors themselves call it speculative and motivated by convergence rather than proven. It is a good idea with real evidence pointing at it. It is not a settled finding, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But even as a proposal it is useful, because it names the right shape. The picture of what a good life looks like — what you should want, what would make you safe, what would make you belong — gets built early, out of what was around you, and it runs as a prediction rather than as a decision.

I nearly reached for the famous number here. You have probably seen it: the claim that your amygdala reacts in twelve milliseconds while conscious thought takes two hundred. I am not going to use it. That figure comes from rodent auditory work, and the idea of a fast subcortical “low road” doing this job in humans has been argued against directly in the primary literature.² The honest version is less dramatic and still enough: the prediction is running before you get a vote, and you experience its output as preference.

So when I say the want arrived before I did, I mean that fairly literally — but I am describing something proposed, not something measured.

The shoulds are a borrowed operating system

What happens next is the expensive part.

You take on the shoulds. Then you cannot do them — not because you are lazy or unresolved, but because they were never calibrated to your life. And then you decide something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are forcing yourself to live a reality that is not yours.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument for wanting nothing conventional. My sister’s life is a real life and a good one. The problem was never her house. The problem was that I was running her operating system on my hardware, and then diagnosing myself when the software crashed.

The word that means something different for everyone

Take “stability.” Everyone says they want it. Almost nobody defines it.

Stability for my sister is one thing. Stability for me is another thing entirely. Stability for my brother-in-law is a third. Same word, three completely different specifications — and if you chase the word without checking the specification, you can build the exact thing you asked for and still feel wrong inside it.

That is the part people miss. You build the home. You have your home. And you feel the same.

Which usually means the thing you were actually solving for was never the house. It was belonging. And belonging is not purchasable.

The same is true of freedom, success, security, enough. These are placeholder words. They do real damage when left undefined, because you can spend a decade optimising toward a word whose meaning you inherited.

And if the underlying theme is not belonging, no acquisition closes it. You can move countries, buy the house, assemble the life that photographs correctly, and the feeling waits for you inside it. Because the not-belonging did not start with the house. It started somewhere much earlier, and it is still running.

So the more useful question is not how do I get the thing. It is: when was the first time I did not belong?

Not as a story — the mind will happily supply a story, complete with dates. As a felt thing. When you bring the thought I don’t belong, what happens in your body?

It does not need a specific date. It needs the sensation. That is the thread worth pulling, and it is a very different piece of work from buying a house.

Three questions that separate yours from borrowed

This is what I actually do, and what I ask people to do.

1. Ask where the picture came from

Not “do I want this” but “whose kitchen was I standing in when I first wanted it.”

If the image has a specific person in it, that is worth knowing before you spend five years on it. Not because their life is wrong. Because it is theirs, and you have been using it as a reference photograph without ever checking whether you like the composition.

2. Ask the body, not the mind

Bring the thought — I want this — and then ask: what happens in my body?

Not what do I think about it. What happens in it.

The mind will construct a beautiful case. It will tell you exactly when and why, and produce a whole story on request. The body is a worse liar.

I will give you a small and unglamorous example of how loud the body actually is. I only have to see a trampoline — people bouncing, then throwing themselves down onto a mattress — and something in me goes: I am going to hurt myself. Are you crazy? There is no deliberation in it. The refusal arrives complete, before any thinking. That is the same channel. It is just easier to notice when the stakes are a trampoline and not a decade.

This is not mysticism. It is interoception — the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets and integrates signals from inside the body, across conscious and unconscious levels.³ Disrupted interoception is now recognised as a component of a range of mental health conditions, and altered interoceptive states show up specifically in anxiety and depression.⁴ The practical consequence is blunt: if you have spent years overriding those signals, the channel you need for this question may not be reporting reliably yet. You rebuild it before you trust it. That is most of what somatic work actually is, and I have written elsewhere about what “trauma is stored in the body” does and does not mean.

I am not a physician and nothing here is a clinical assessment. If the signal from your body is pain, numbness or something that frightens you, that belongs with a clinician first, and I would rather you went.

3. Ask what the word means in your specification

Write the actual sentence.

Not “I want stability” but what stability consists of, in your life, in concrete terms — hours, people, money, geography, mornings.

If you cannot write the sentence, you do not yet want the thing. You want the word.

Where this gets expensive: choosing people

The borrowed want does its worst damage in relationships, because there you are not just buying the wrong house. You are choosing a person to build it with.

Two people can both say they want stability and mean incompatible things. For one, stability means the freedom to move, work from anywhere, keep the calendar open. For the other, it means a nine-to-five, one city, a mortgage, the same table every evening.

Both are using the correct word. They are describing opposite lives.

If you have not written your own specification, you cannot hear the difference in someone else’s. You hear the word, you recognise it, you assume agreement. The mismatch surfaces two years later as a fight about something else entirely. There is good evidence that the quality of these relationships is not a soft variable — which is part of why getting the specification right is worth the discomfort of writing it down.

And here is the reframe I want to leave you with. When you do know your specification, you get called picky.

You are not picky. You know what you want. Those are not the same thing, and the people who confuse them are usually the ones still running someone else’s list.

There is a second version of this worth naming, because it is subtler. Sometimes you know exactly what you want and you choose against it anyway — not because you were confused, but because someone you like is going, or because saying no felt harder than saying yes. That is not a wanting problem. That is a boundary problem wearing a wanting problem’s clothes, and it needs a different tool.

On the rush

One more thing, because it is the failure mode I see most and the one I catch in myself.

We live in a world that is always chop-chop. And that urgency gets inside the enquiry, which is where it does real damage. I have caught my own mind mid-session going: yes, yes, this is fine, let’s move, let’s not lose time, I am using this opportunity.

That was my mind rushing my own healing.

It does not work. The body does not run to a schedule, and the thing you skip past because you were being efficient is generally the thing you came for.

What actually changes

Not much, visibly, at first. You do not necessarily give up the house or the ambition.

What changes is that you stop paying interest on a want that was never yours.

I did not end up with my sister’s life. I ended up with a life that would look, from her kitchen, like a strange set of choices — and it fits. Not because I found the right answer, but because I finally asked whose question it was.

The wanting itself is not the problem. Wanting is information.

It only becomes a trap when you never check the return address.

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Frequently asked questions

How do I know if a goal is mine or someone else’s?

Check the speed and the specification. A borrowed want arrives fully formed and fast, usually attached to an image of a specific person’s life. A real want is slower and you can describe it concretely — in hours, people, money, geography. If you cannot write a sentence saying what the thing actually consists of in your life, you want the word, not the thing.

Why do I feel empty after achieving something I wanted?

Often because the thing you were solving for was not the thing you bought. Words like stability, freedom and success are placeholders that mean different specifications to different people. If the underlying theme was belonging, no acquisition closes it, because the not-belonging did not start with the acquisition.

What does “ask the body” actually mean?

Bring the thought — I want this — and notice what happens physically, rather than what you think about it. This relies on interoception, the sensing of internal bodily signals. If you have spent years overriding those signals, the channel needs rebuilding before its answers are reliable. That rebuilding is a large part of what somatic work is.

Is this therapy?

No. I am a PhD — in medicinal chemistry, not in medicine. I do not diagnose, assess or treat any condition, and nothing here is a clinical assessment. What I work with is what living inside a pattern has done to you. If you are dealing with something that needs clinical care, that comes first and I will say so.

What is The First Hour?

Sixty minutes, one to one, online — a first conversation with no obligation attached to it. €35 while I am certifying in Compassionate Inquiry; the rate rises when I qualify. Here is what actually happens in a first session.

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References

1. Tottenham, N.; Vannucci, A. Attachment as Prediction: Insights from Cognitive and Developmental Neuroscience. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 2025, 34 (3), 195–206. DOI: 10.1177/09637214251313714. (Perspective article; the authors describe the framework as speculative.)
2. Pessoa, L.; Adolphs, R. Emotion Processing and the Amygdala: From a ‘Low Road’ to ‘Many Roads’ of Evaluating Biological Significance. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 2010, 11 (11), 773–783. DOI: 10.1038/nrn2920.
3. Khalsa, S. S.; Adolphs, R.; Cameron, O. G.; Critchley, H. D.; et al. Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap. Biol. Psychiatry Cogn. Neurosci. Neuroimaging 2018, 3 (6), 501–513. DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2017.12.004.
4. Paulus, M. P.; Stein, M. B. Interoception in Anxiety and Depression. Brain Struct. Funct. 2010, 214 (5–6), 451–463. DOI: 10.1007/s00429-010-0258-9.