There is a particular quality to the difficulty of abstract thinking that is worth naming, because most people experience it as a failing rather than as a feature.
When asked to move from the specific to the abstract — to keep asking “what is this an example of?” until they arrive somewhere genuinely unfamiliar — many people, including highly intelligent ones, find themselves uncomfortable. The mind keeps pulling back toward the concrete. Toward the named situation, the specific person, the particular behaviour. The abstract feels slippery, elusive, somehow less real.
This experience is not a sign of inadequate thinking. It is a sign of nervous system capacity meeting its current edge.
And meeting your edge is exactly where expansion happens.
What Is Actually Happening When Thinking Feels Hard
The difficulty of abstract thinking is not primarily about intelligence. It is about familiarity. Thinking in a way you have thought before is easy because the neural pathways for it are well established. The thought travels quickly along routes that have been used repeatedly. It requires minimal effort and produces a familiar quality of experience.
Thinking in a way you have not thought before is harder because the pathways are less established. The thought meets more resistance. The processing takes longer. There is a quality of effort to it that thinking-in-the-usual-way does not have.
This is sometimes described in learning contexts as the difference between fluency and disfluency. Fluent processing is fast and easy. Disfluent processing is slower and more effortful. And the research on this is consistent: disfluent processing produces more durable learning, more flexible application, more genuine understanding than fluent processing does.
The difficulty is the mechanism. Not the obstacle to the mechanism — the mechanism itself.
When you stretch into genuinely abstract thinking, when you hold yourself in territory that is unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable rather than defaulting back to the concrete, something changes neurologically. The nervous system expands to accommodate the new pattern.
This is not a metaphor. It is a description of what happens.
Why This Matters for the Specific Work
The chunking up process is, among other things, a tool for building nervous system capacity.
It is easy to chunk up once you have done it many times. The first time, it is genuinely difficult. The mind pulls back. The abstractions feel forced. The recognition takes longer to arrive, or does not arrive at all. This is normal. It is the signature of operating at the edge of current capacity.
With repetition, the process becomes more available. The ability to move fluidly between levels of abstraction — to take a concrete situation and move quickly to the structural pattern underneath it, then back down to a concrete action — develops. It becomes a cognitive skill in the same sense that any skill develops through practice.
And it compounds with other capacities. People who develop comfort with abstract thinking tend to find, over time, that they can hold more complexity without collapsing back into simplistic framings. That they can navigate genuinely difficult situations with more flexibility and fewer reactive responses. That the field of available options in any given situation becomes larger, because they can perceive it from more angles.
These are not small gains.
Who Finds This Hardest
In my experience, the people who find abstract thinking most difficult are often the people whose professional or creative work has trained them most deeply in the specific.
Writers. Analysts. Academics. Engineers. People who work with precision language, with exact argument, with the close reading of particular texts or data. People whose expertise is the specific and the concrete.
This makes sense. The same capacity that makes someone excellent at working with specificity — the ability to hold detail, to resist the premature move to generalisation, to stay close to the actual rather than the abstract — is the capacity that makes chunking up feel unnatural.
It is not a deficit. It is a skill set that requires complementing. The ability to move upward — to abstract, to pattern-match across domains, to find the structural connection between a family conflict and a business finance situation — is a different cognitive operation from the one that makes you good at specificity. It requires practice precisely because it runs counter to a well-trained strength.
The discomfort is therefore not evidence that this kind of thinking is not for you. It is evidence that you have been operating in a different register, and that moving into a new one requires exactly the kind of edge-meeting that produces expansion.
The Practice
Abstract thinking, like any capacity, is developed through use.
The chunking up process is one way to use it. Take any situation in your life that is currently generating a charge — a relationship, a recurring difficulty, a pattern you recognise but haven’t resolved — and apply the process. What is this an example of? And what is that an example of? Keep going until you feel the resistance, and then stay with it just a little longer than is comfortable.
Not indefinitely. Not until you’ve forced an answer. Just a little longer than the point at which the mind wants to default back to the concrete.
That pause at the edge is where the expansion happens.
Over time, the edge moves. What required effort becomes available. What was abstract becomes accessible. The capacity that felt limited turns out to have been training, not fixed.
This is true of every cognitive and perceptual skill I have worked with in over 20 years of transformation work. The people who grow most are not the ones with the most natural facility at the outset. They are the ones who are most willing to meet the edge and stay there.
Abstract thinking is hard. That difficulty is not a barrier to the work.
It is the work.
