Phantom Strings
In 2016, Anthony Bourdain sat across from a journalist and said something that should have been impossible. He was at the absolute peak of his career. Parts Unknown was winning Emmys. He was wealthy, famous, respected, free. He could go anywhere, do anything, eat with anyone. The world had opened itself to him completely.
And yet.
"There's a restaurant I haven't worked at in over twenty years," he said, leaning forward. "And I still have nightmares about it."
He didn't elaborate immediately. He just let that hang there, the way someone might confess to a crime they're not sure they committed. Then he moved on to other topics, other stories, other kitchens. The interviewer didn't press. Maybe they thought it was just a throwaway line, the kind of colorful detail that makes for good copy.
But I never forgot that little moment.
Because what Bourdain was describing wasn't nostalgia. It wasn't PTSD. It was something stranger and more insidious, a feeling that he was still accountable to a place that no longer existed, to standards set by people who were no longer watching, to a version of himself he'd long since left behind.
What he was describing was a phantom string.
***
To understand what was happening to Bourdain, you have to go back to Vienna, 1927, to a cafe where a Russian psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik was drinking coffee and watching the waiters.
As she watched, she noticed something peculiar.
The waiters had perfect recall of every unpaid order. While customers were still eating, a waiter could tell you exactly what was on table seven, who ordered the schnitzel, who was having their second coffee. Their memories were flawless, almost photographic.
But the moment the bill was paid? Gone. Completely erased. If you asked that same waiter thirty seconds after a customer left what they had ordered, they'd look at you blankly. The information had simply vanished.
Zeigarnik became obsessed with this. She designed a series of experiments where she asked people to complete various tasks: puzzles, crafts and other simple assignments. But here's the twist: she interrupted them randomly. Some people finished their tasks. Others were stopped midway through.
Then she tested their memory.
The results were stark. People remembered interrupted tasks nearly twice as well as completed ones. The unfinished work created what she called "task-specific tension." This was a kind of psychological itch that wouldn't resolve until the loop was closed.
It became known as the Zeigarnik Effect, and it explains everything from why cliffhangers work to why you can't stop thinking about that email you haven't sent yet. Or why, if you're like me, you've started the same paragraph seventeen times today because someone interrupted you three hours ago and your brain is still trying to finish the thought. The effect is so reliable that screenwriters and novelists deliberately use it. They'll end a chapter mid-scene, even mid-sentence, knowing your brain will nag you until you turn the page.
But here's what Zeigarnik didn't study… What she couldn't have studied in her café in Vienna:
What happens when you close the loop, but your brain doesn't believe you?
***
Let's go back to that restaurant. The one Bourdain hadn't worked at in over twenty years.
He described the nightmares in fragments across different interviews, different years. In one, he's back on the line during a Friday night rush. The orders keep coming. He's moving, sweating, perfect execution. But there's a terrible knowledge underneath, as he knows he doesn't work there anymore. He knows this isn't real. And yet the panic is absolute.
In another version, he shows up for a shift and realizes he's forgotten how to cook. His hands won't work. The other cooks are staring at him. The chef is screaming. And underneath it all, this gut-punch feeling: I shouldn't even be here.
These weren't occasional dreams. They were recurring. Persistent. Even as he traveled the world, even as he ate in the finest restaurants, even as he became the thing every line cook dreams of becoming, he was still that line cook.
The string was still pulling.
Here is what makes this so devastating: Bourdain had objectively closed the loop. He'd paid whatever debt a cook owes to the kitchen. He'd worked the hours, earned the respect, climbed out, and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. The task was complete. The bill was paid.
But some part of him never left that kitchen.
Some part of him was still waiting for someone to tell him he was good enough, that he could stop now, that he was free to go.
And no one ever did.
***
I know this pattern because I've lived it.
For years after I sold my first company, I would wake up at 2 AM with my heart pounding, thinking about the P&L. Not the current company's P&L. The old one. The one I no longer owned. The one that legally, financially, literally had nothing to do with me anymore.
I'd lie there in the dark, running through the numbers, checking the margins, worrying about the team, until I would, eventually, catch myself and mutter… "You don't work there anymore."
I knew that. Intellectually, I knew that.
But my nervous system was still reporting for duty.
You know the absurdity of this, right? I'd successfully exited. I had the wire transfer to prove it. And yet there I was, at 2 AM, stress-testing financial models for a business I didn't own, solving problems that weren't mine, carrying water for a fire that had been put out years ago. If you'd asked me during daylight hours if I was still involved with that company, I'd have laughed. But my subconscious had never received the memo.
There was a bank officer from that first company who was demanding, impossible to please, the kind of person who loved to make sure you knew they controlled the keys to the funds that kept your company alive. I had talked to this person for over three years when I caught myself rehearsing a conversation with them in the shower. Defending a decision. Explaining a solution. Preparing for a meeting that would never happen with a person who no longer had any authority over my life.
Three years.
And I was still performing for them.
This is what phantom strings do. They keep you tethered to standards you've already met, to judges who've left the bench, to versions of yourself you've already outgrown. The actual relationship ends. The actual job ends. The actual obligation ends.
But the string remains.
***
Zeigarnik's research pointed to something she didn't fully explore in that café: successful people aren't free from these loops. They're more trapped by them.
Because here's the terrible math: the higher you climb, the more loops you open. Every promotion, every new venture, every higher standard you reach is another task begun. And if you're the kind of person who made it to the top, you're probably the kind of person who never learned to close loops.
You learned to exceed them.
Which means you never actually completed anything. You just moved on to the next, higher standard, carrying all the previous ones with you like an invisible weight.
Think about it: you got promoted from manager to director, so you stopped doing manager-level work. But did you stop holding yourself to manager-level standards? No. You added director-level standards on top. Then VP. Then C-suite. The original standards never went away. They just got buried under new ones. You're not climbing a ladder. You're building an increasingly unstable Jenga tower of expectations, and you're terrified that if you remove even one piece, the whole thing collapses.
Zeigarnik found that task-specific tension resolved when people finished what they started. But what if you're never actually finished? What if the "finished" line keeps moving? What if the person you're trying to satisfy no longer exists? Or worse, never existed in the first place?
That's when the phantom strings appear.
They're invisible to everyone else. Your therapist can't see them. Your spouse/partner/family can't see them. You've objectively moved on, objectively succeeded, objectively closed the chapter. But you can feel them. At 2 AM. In the shower. In the most unsettling of dreams.
Still pulling.
This is why Bourdain's confession matters. Because he wasn't some fragile person who couldn't handle success. He was one of the most accomplished people in his field. He'd done the work, paid the dues, earned the freedom.
And he was still trapped.
***
Tom Brady retired from professional football on February 1, 2022. He was 44 years old. He'd won seven Super Bowls. He owned virtually every meaningful passing record in NFL history. He'd played 22 seasons at the highest level. The task, by any objective measure, was complete.
Forty days later, he announced he was coming back.
"These past two months I've realized my place is still on the field and not in the stands," he posted on social media. He returned for one more season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It wasn't his best year. The team finished 8-9, his first losing season ever. He threw the fewest touchdowns of his career. They lost in the first round of the playoffs.
On February 1, 2023, exactly one year after his first retirement, he announced he was retiring again. "For good," he said this time, as if saying it with emphasis would make it stick.
It didn't.
Five months later, in May 2023, Brady revealed in an Instagram post that he'd been planning to unretire for a third time. "The only downside to 2023," he wrote, "was when I was about to unretire in May and my friends threw a surprise retirement party. Kind of forced my hand."
A retirement party forced his hand. Not his body breaking down. Not his team telling him he was done. Not even his own clear-eyed assessment that it was time. A party.
By April 2024, he was saying publicly that he wasn't opposed to coming back again if a team needed him late in the season. "I'll always be in good shape," he told a podcast host. "I'll always be able to throw the ball. So, to come in for a little bit, like MJ coming back, I wouldn't be opposed to it."
This is a man who'd accomplished everything. Who had nothing left to prove. Who could see, intellectually, that his performance was declining. And yet he couldn't let go.
The field kept calling him back.
Not because he needed the money. Not because he needed the glory. But because some part of him still believed that his value was measured by being on that field. That without it, he wasn't Tom Brady. He was just Tom.
The string was still pulling.
***
I was on a coaching call two years ago with a founder who'd just exited her company for eight figures. Life-changing money. Freedom money. The kind of exit that makes other founders whisper your name with reverence at conferences. She should have been celebrating.
Instead, she was crying.
"I can't stop checking Slack," she said. "I'm not even in it anymore. They removed me. But I keep opening the app like it's going to load. Like I'm going to see messages I'm supposed to respond to."
We sat with that for a moment.
"It's been six months," she said. "Why can't I stop?"
I asked her what she thought would happen if she did stop. If she deleted the app, threw her laptop in a lake, moved to a different city.
Long silence.
Then: "I think... I think I'm afraid they'll realize they didn't need me. That it's all working fine without me. That I was never as essential as I thought I was."
There it was. The real string.
It wasn't about the company. It was about the story she'd been telling herself, the one where her value was measured by being needed, where her worth was proven by being indispensable, where her identity was fused so completely with the work that walking away felt like self-erasure.
The company was fine. The team was fine. The product was fine.
But if she stopped watching, stopped checking, stopped remaining tethered to something that no longer needed her, who would she be?
The phantom strings don't come from the outside. That's the first thing to understand.
They come from inside of us.
We're the ones holding them. We're the ones keeping the tension alive. We're the ones who, long after the actual relationship has ended, continue to perform for an audience that left the theater.
I kept waking up at 2 AM thinking about that old P&L because some part of me believed that my vigilance was keeping it all together. That if I stopped watching, something terrible would happen. That I'd be exposed as someone who got lucky rather than someone who earned it.
The bank officer I couldn't stop defending myself to? They never actually demanded perfection. I demanded it of myself, then outsourced the enforcement to them. When they left, I kept their seat warm. Kept them in my mind. Kept the standards high, the criticism sharp, the pressure on.
Because without that pressure, I didn't know who I was.
Bourdain kept returning to that restaurant in his nightmares because some part of him never believed he'd earned the right to leave. The kitchen was where he proved himself. Where he became someone. Where he learned that if you just worked hard enough, moved fast enough and executed perfectly enough… Then, you'd be valuable.
The problem is, you can't un-become someone. You can't unlearn the standards that made you successful. You can't turn off the internal drill sergeant just because the external one went home.
So we keep the strings attached ourselves.
We become our own puppet masters.
After Zeigarnik published her research, other psychologists tried to replicate it, extend it, and understand its limits. One finding kept appearing: the tension doesn't resolve just because a task is finished. It resolves when the person acknowledges it's finished.
Which is harder than it sounds.
Because acknowledgment requires a kind of death. You have to kill the version of yourself that needed that string. You have to admit that the work is done, the debt is paid, the loop is closed, not because someone gave you permission, but because you're giving it to yourself.
You have to fire the ghost you've been working for.
***
That founder on the call, the one who couldn't stop checking Slack?
She went quiet for a long time after her confession. Then she said something I've never forgotten:
"I just realized I don't have to do this anymore."
It wasn't resignation. It wasn't defeat. It was something closer to wonder. Like she'd been carrying a heavy bag for so long she'd forgotten it was in her hand, and someone had just pointed at it and said, "You know you can put that down, right?"
She laughed. Not a happy laugh. More like the kind of laugh you give when you realize you've been doing something absurd without noticing.
"I've been waiting for someone to tell me I did a good job," she said. "But they already did. The exit was them telling me. The money was them telling me. I just... I didn't believe them."
When I asked what changed she said, with a smile, "I think I finally heard it."
When I asked her how she finally saw the strings clearly, she told me she'd started doing something simple: every time she woke up at 3 AM with anxiety, or found herself mentally defending a decision in the shower, she'd write it down. Just three things: What was the thought? Who was it for? Is that person still in my life?
After two weeks, she had a list. And when she looked at it, she could see it clearly: almost every anxiety was a performance for someone who'd moved on. The board member who'd left three years ago. The early investor who'd cashed out. The employee who now worked somewhere else. She was still seeking their approval, still meeting their standards, still proving herself to them.
Once she could see the pattern, once she could name the ghosts, cutting the strings became possible.
She deleted Slack. Not dramatically, not ceremonially. She just removed it from her phone one afternoon while waiting in line for coffee. She told me later it felt like pulling out a splinter: a small pain, then relief.
The first week was harder than she expected. Phantom limb syndrome for her phone. Her hand would reach for where the app used to be. Her brain would generate imaginary notifications. She'd catch herself composing messages to people who weren't listening anymore.
But then something shifted.
She started sleeping through the night. That knot in her stomach that had been there for six months? Gone. She took a vacation and didn't check her email once. Not because she was trying to prove something, but because she genuinely didn't need to.
The company was fine. It had always been fine.
She'd just been standing guard over something that didn't need protecting.
When I talked to her a year later, she'd started a new project. Smaller, quieter, entirely for herself. And when I asked her if she felt the old pull (the need to prove something, to exceed standards, to remain essential), she said no.
Not because she'd become less ambitious. But because she'd finally closed the loop. She'd told herself what she'd been waiting to hear: You did it. You can stop now. You're free to go.
And this time, she believed it.
***
Anthony Bourdain never got to that place.
In interview after interview, you can see him wrestling with it. The success never felt real. The accolades never landed. He kept waiting for someone to discover he was a fraud, to send him back to the line, to take away the freedom he'd earned.
The phantom strings pulled harder the more successful he became.
In one of his last interviews, he talked about impostor syndrome. About feeling like he'd gotten away with something. About the fear that one day the charade would be up and he'd be back where he started: unknown, unspecial, ordinary.
This from a man who'd written multiple bestselling books, won Emmy awards, dined with presidents, and had millions of people tune in every week to watch him eat all over the globe. If Anthony Bourdain was a fraud, then fraud is the highest form of achievement. But that's the thing about phantom strings. They don't care about evidence. They don't respond to accolades.
They just pull.
He never understood that he'd already paid the debt.
That the restaurant had released him decades ago.
That the only person still holding him accountable to those standards was himself.
I think about what might have happened if someone had sat him down and said what that founder finally heard: You can stop now.
If someone had pointed at the invisible strings he was carrying and said, You're holding those yourself. You can put them down.
If someone had helped him see that the nightmares weren't coming from the kitchen. They were coming from the part of him that never believed he'd earned the right to leave it.
But maybe that's not how phantom strings work.
Maybe you can't be told. Maybe you have to discover it yourself, the way my client did, the way I eventually did, through the slow, painful process of realizing you've been performing for an empty theater.
That the judge left the bench years ago.
That the debt was paid long before you thought it was.
That the only person still keeping score is you.
I don't have nightmares about that first company anymore.
Not because I learned some technique or mastered some practice. But because one day I woke up at 2 AM with my heart pounding, started running through the old numbers…
And stopped.
Not because I forced myself to stop. But because I realized, clearly and completely, that I didn't work there anymore.
The company was fine. The team was fine. The bank officer who was living rent-free in my mind? He had moved on years ago. They weren't thinking about me. They probably never had been, definitely not in the way I imagined.
I'd been defending myself in a courtroom that had been demolished.
The string had always been in my hand.
I'd been the one pulling it.
The Zeigarnik Effect explains why we remember unfinished tasks better than completed ones. But it doesn't explain what happens when we refuse to acknowledge that something is finished.
When we keep the loop open, not because it needs to remain open, but because closing it would mean admitting we're different now. That we've moved on. That the version of ourselves who needed that validation, that pressure, that impossible standard no longer exists.
Phantom strings aren't about the past pulling us backward.
They're about us refusing to let it go.
And the only way to cut them is to finally believe what everyone else already knows:
You did it.
You can stop now.
You're free to go.
The question is whether you'll believe yourself when you say it.
Bourdain never did.
Maybe you will.
Further reading:
On the Zeigarnik Effect:
"Zeigarnik Effect Examples in Psychology." McLeod, S. (2024). Simply Psychology. A clear explanation of the effect and its modern applications: Read here
On Bourdain:
Bourdain, A. (2000). Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. The memoir that introduced the world to the intensity of restaurant kitchens and the lasting impact they have on those who work in them.