The Problem of Open Loops

The "productivity management guru" David Allen, the creator and teacher of a system called "Getting Things Done" (www.davidco.com), is a pretty savvy guy in describing how the psyche works. It seems that what he's offering is another time management solution, but what he's actually teaching is something more like "brain resource management," with one of the most useful concepts being his idea of "open and closed loops." It's strange where insight comes from, but he's noticed something fundamental about managing overwhelm, which means something fundamental to overcoming depression.

Loops, open and closed

So, loops. Allen defines an open loop as anything that has a piece of our attention, anything unfinished, or more generally, any attachment to reality being different than it is. Walking past the wilting plant in the office, saying, "Someone should water that plant," and then walking by-that's an open loop. Or, I want to understand why my mother triggers me so much. Or, I need to get some metal screws at the hardware store. All open loops, because they are holding part of our attention, at the unconscious level. They have a bit of our psychic energy. If I'm pleased  with my couch, just as it is, then no open loop.

Closing a loop is when that attachment to reality being different ("Why hasn't that plant been watered yet?") has been severed, either by the task being completed ("I'll water the plant! There, I've watered it!"), or by the attachment being let go of ("You know, I'm actually fine with the plant not being watered. Not my job and I'm ok with it."). Then there's no open loop, no part of our mind that is tasked with changing reality to match an idea. You'll know when a loop has closed because there's a feeling of openness, a return of energy, and a sense of completion and usually satisfaction.

Now, these are pretty easy to understand in the tangible, physical realms. If you pay attention to how your body feels each time you walk past the plant "that should be watered," or the garage which "I should really clean," you'll see what an open loop feels like. Stop right there and do the work to completion, and you'll see what a closed loop feels like.

Loops and Depression

So, what does this mean in terms of depression? The critical overlap is this: you want something in your life to be different than it is. In the office, it might be the plant. In our personal life, it's wanting to not be plagued by our self-criticism. But both are open loops in the sense that they are both desires for life to be different than it is, and they both require some response in order to "close the loop." Otherwise, they keep consuming our attention and energy. Albeit, they require different orders and amount of attention, but are otherwise the same, as loops.

Depression has at its root the experience of "futility that can't be accepted." In other words, you recognize (or judge) something as futile-your self, your relationships, "the world," God, all of the above-but cannot meet that truth with acceptance, nor can you easily change those "problems." In Allen's language, you would have a perpetually open loop, that therefore perpetually consumes, consciously or unconsciously, your energy and attention. You are then left depleted, like Sisyphus, which then makes efforts to change less effective, and more prone to overwhelm. Which is depressing.

Allen's whole response to this reality is, on it's surface, a detailed organizational system with a very particular "throughput," whose purpose is to transfer the psychic RAM (the temporary memory system in a computer) from your brain to the system. You don't have to remember every detail because you trust that the system is holding it.

But underneath that integrated structure of inboxes, "tickler files," and "action folders," is the principle of trust and holding. In Allen's world, that means if you don't stick to the rules of the system, you stop trusting that it is holding what's important, and therefore your brain starts taking back the loops and the system collapses.

With depression, you don't feel trusting, and you don't have a felt-experience of being held. There's little to lean on, there's not much to trust. You don't have a sense of the world as safe, as welcoming, as interested in you, and full enough to allow you to rest in a sense of its embrace. You have nowhere to collapse the massive open loop that is your life: "Life should be different, better, safer, but it isn't and can't be, but I can't accept that without destruction, so I must struggle on."

"Closing" the open loop of depression

Allen's solution to "task overwhelm" is a system tha

t conveys a felt trust in its ability to hold all your disparate responsibilities. You can relax (close loops) because you have something larger than yourself to hold all the disparate tasks.

With depression, the analogous solution to "life overwhelm," is to develop a felt trust in life as the fundamental "system" that holds all your scattered "parts." Which is transformative process, a basic change in how you experience the larger world, and therefore how you experience yourself. With something trustworthy to be held by, you can allow yourself to rest and relax, to not struggle, not not fight a battle with reality, to not maintain a massive open loop. Which addresses both the strong quality of overwhelm, as well as the experience of meaninglessness and futility, which are at the core of depression.

This is the reason why structure is so important, but why it needs to be the right structure, meaning something you trust, and something that's consistent. It's not so much the structure itself that is curative, but that one can trust it, and able to experience resting in it. But ultimately, the "structure" we need to learn to trust is life itself. Resting in "things as they are" is not necessarily an easy task, but it's what is required to close the "perpetual loop" that is depression.