We believe that cause and effect are always linked. Maybe. But you don’t need to know the cause to deal with the effect. This is especially true in my line of work. Who knows why someone is depressed, or has a difficult relationship around food?

As soon as there’s a problem, we love to speculate, but that can be a waste of time.

Anything could have caused anything else, we can never know for sure. So rather than focus on problems, a more productive path is to look for solutions.

If you suffer from unhappiness or a psychological ailment there are armies of experts and shelves of self-help books ready to explain the cause of your problem.

The only certainties are how it affects you now, and that you want relief.

Speculating on what caused something is a different exercise from finding a way out of it.