The procrastination demon

Aren’t the stories we tell ourselves, and how they shape our behaviour, interesting?

I promised myself that I would come back to writing a regular blog this year, and yet every time I consider getting going, I keep hearing the response “not yet”.

Now, with all that is going on in my life outside of work, this response might be a true reflection of my capacity at the moment to commit to the practice of writing, or it could be my system potentially resisting because of a story I am telling myself.  Without a level of curiosity about this, I would never know.

So, the last few days, I got curious and started digging…

And what I found underneath my “not yet” was a desire to engage with the creative process of writing, but also a desire to avoid the “pressure” of it.

Now that’s interesting, isn’t it? Nobody is asking me to write, no one has set a subject matter for me, there is no specific deadline, and no parameters by which to measure ‘success’ other than that I have or haven’t written a blog post. So what pressure am I perceiving?

I dug further and turned up a couple of curious stories that might be informing my behaviour in ways that are not entirely to my benefit…

A regular blog means writing something every month as a bare minimum.  People will expect this, and if I don’t meet the standard, I will be deemed to be over-promising and under-delivering, and that will be considered unprofessional.  I don’t know, given what’s happening in my world outside of work, that I will have the capacity to deliver something every month, so it is best not to even start.  My shame is telling me here that I am not good enough, I am not up to the job, so it is better to stay hidden than make myself visible.

When I originally started my blog, I said I would write every month ( a self-imposed target), and I have not delivered on that promise; therefore, people will not be interested in what I have to say moving forward.  Shame is telling me here that I have already, or will be abandoned, should I choose to show up again in my blogspace because .  Stay small, it pleads with me; it is dangerous to be visible.

There is a theme emerging here, huh, stay small, stay invisible, stay safe.

Now, having done a fair bit of self-reflection over the years, I know that this is a story, one which I learned in my early life, which helped me survive in a family system which didn’t feel supportive.

My blogspace is not that system, so why am I feeling this in relation to doing a bit of writing?  Surely, having identified this, I should just be able to tell myself it isn’t true, I don’t need to be invisible, and crack on with writing.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work like that.

Many people would have you believe that all it takes to do something different in your life is to be aware.  Once you are aware, you can choose something different.

But for me, armed with my own personal experience and my awareness of the theories I work with as a therapist, the idea of choice is an interesting concept.  You see, it all depends on which part of us is doing the choosing in any given moment.

We have a number of different areas of the brain which are capable of making decisions for us, but they have slightly different agendas.  To understand this, you don’t need a degree in neuroscience; you don’t even have to know the names of the different areas of the brain.  In order to get to grips with this, let’s dumb down the very complex system that is the brain for a moment into an extremely simplified model of how the brain works.

Think of it as being made of two parts – the front brain and the back brain.

Our front brains are spectacularly clever, they help us think about complex things, solve problems, make plans, form and maintain relationships and much, much more.  This part of our brain is the one that decides it’s a great idea to undertake a new project, or organise a night out, or indulge in something creative, as well as a whole heap of practical things, etc.  It can forward plan, far beyond the current moment.

Our back brain’s entire focus is centred around survival. It is constantly monitoring our system and our environment (through sensory input) for signs of safety and danger, and sending signals to other regions of our body to act in certain ways, depending on what it perceives.  When our back brain detects a threat, it mobilises us to respond in particular ways in order to keep us alive, and when it does this, it takes control away from the front brain.  It’s a pretty clever system, really; it spots an issue and gets us to deal with it before we can get seriously hurt.  But it’s not particularly intelligent or discerning.  This is the part of your brain that can be wandering down a path, sees a snake and makes you jump out of the way in order to avoid the threat.  It is only concerned with decisions which will keep you alive in the next few moments.

This system is fabulous when there is an actual threat to avoid. But the problem is, it’s not always accurate in its assessment of what is and isn’t a threat.  What if it wasn’t actually a snake on the path; it was a stick, and your back brain perceived a threat where in reality there wasn’t one.  Well, when this happens, the front brain often comes back online, realises the back brain’s mistake, chuckles to itself and continues on a nice walk, no harm done.  But sometimes the system needs a bit of assistance to reset itself before front brain can come back online.

In my current situation, my front brain believes that I want to do some writing, simply because I enjoy it.  No high stakes, just sit for a wee while at my laptop, being creative and see what occurs.

And, when I was younger, my experiences led my back brain to believe that making myself visible by expressing myself was very dangerous.  It was true at the time, personal expression often led to ridicule, abuse, rejection and abandonment, so it wasn’t a great idea to make myself visible.  My back brain absorbed this information as a rule about engaging with other people and, still now, can perceive my intention to make myself visible as a threat, particularly when there is a lot of uncertainty or life stress around which has already got my back brain on alert (in my current case, bereavement, relocation, house renovation and unexpected financial costs).

My front brain has learned something different about the way the world works.  It knows that although being visible doesn’t always lead to a pleasant experience, it is rare that expressing myself will lead to actual danger.  So it keeps suggesting that we do things that scare living daylights out of my back brain.  This creates a massive conflict within me that ends up looking like procrastination. I put it off because it doesn’t feel right at the moment, “not yet”.  Back brain doesn’t want me to mobilise, and in times of survival, back brain runs the show.

Tricky huh.  Front brain cannot influence it because it is offline, but front brain has the information needed to be able to mobilise.

Our back brains very rarely respond to words and ideas.  Remember, they are always using our senses to scan our internal and external environment.  So when I’m stuck in procrastination mode like this, my back brain needs some cues of safety fed to it through my senses in order to understand there is no threat, and allow the front brain to have some say over what happens next.

Obviously, this blog post exists, so I must have found a way around all of this.  Let me tell you what I did…

I took my awareness of this inner tussle for a walk.  Walking can help us break up a nervous-system freeze response, which can often be at the root of procrastination.

On my walk, I used my eyes to look for cues of safety in my environment.  I did some nice, long, exhale breathing.  I listened to the birds singing, which sent signals of safety into my system too.

Then I came home and made a warm drink, and I put on my heated gilet; warmth again is a sign of safety.

I donned my noise-cancelling headphones, stuck on a playlist that is meant to support calm, focus and creativity, and I sat down in front of the laptop to see what would happen.

Those measures would appear to have been successful in convincing my back brain that the snake it was perceiving (being visible=danger) was just a stick after all.

And as I sit here wondering how to wrap this post up, I’m chuckling to myself a little, as I think the message I am trying to convey is, in essence, a very simple one, and yet I have spent an hour or two writing now because the ideas that sit underneath the message can be complex to wrap your head around.  It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable process.

In a nutshell, what I’m trying to say here is that change is not as simple as it might at first seem.  We need awareness as a starting point, but that is often only a fragment of the whole process.  Frequently, we also need to take action that, on the surface, might appear entirely unrelated to the change we want to bring about, but is necessary to achieve the desired result.

Awareness was not what got this blog post written, and neither was going for a walk/attending to my nervous system’s need for cues of safety, but the combination did get me to a state where I could sit and write.

If you are curious about what back brain conditioning might be standing in the way of you having a fulfilling life, get in touch and let’s see if we’re a good fit to work together.