How Depression Helped Me Conquer the Loss Aversion Bias

Every day I make more decisions about what I’m not going to do than what I am going to do.

The next time you’re meeting up with a group of people pay attention to how long it takes the conversation to turn to how busy they are. Extra points if at least one person complains about being overly busy. The hectic lifestyle is our cultural norm. Try to not talk about being busy. I dare you.

Unfortunately, I can’t do busy. It will send me straight down a dark depression spiral. In order to stay healthy, I have to make sure there is a lot of open space in my days. This means I’m almost never too busy. And most of the time I’m not what you would even call busy. I do a lot of stuff every day, but I don’t do even more. I used to be as crazy busy as the next person, but then a bout of really bad depression made it impossible to maintain. I was forced to deal with my loss aversion bias in the most dramatic ways: I had to stop doing basically everything.

The loss aversion bias is people’s preference for gains over losses. We have a preference for solving problems by adding something rather than subtracting. Loss aversion is one of the major reasons people become exhausted and burned out. When I hear someone talk about how overly busy and stressed out they are, I know the next thing they’ll say is probably going to be about how they’re adding even more to their plate.

No one ever says they’re jettisoning things. They may talk about carving out time to be mindful, resting more. But that’s adding something, right? That’s one more thing to put on the to-do list. Or they may talk about how they’ve “failed” at accomplishing something. But almost never do they ever say they’re letting things go on purpose, joyfully. People prefer to figure out how to do everything more efficiently, using productivity hacks. Better time management, better sleep, better diet—we can do it all if we find the right ingredients to add to our life.

When you have mental health challenges you learn over time how to prioritize tasks, whittle life down to the essentials. When you are forced to jettison everything, you begin to understand what really matters. You become inured to and even accepting of the loss of productivity because you’ve learned to recognize extraneous stuff that you don’t really have to do, were doing only because you thought you had to, or were giving in to external pressures. Over time you figure out how to divide your goals into those that really do enhance your quality of life, and those that decrease it. And you jettison the latter,because you have one overarching goal: feeling good enough that you want to be alive in this world. Everything else follows from that.

I honestly think that on my better days my quality of life and happiness may be on par with or even greater than what I see in people who don’t struggle with mental health issues. Sure, I have some bad times, but they’ve taught me to slow down, open up space for myself, let go of all the pressures. I’ve been forced to learn the important lesson that if you want to get the most out of life, you have to give up more than you add.

This goes against instinct. Why? Because when you lose things, you feel bad. Adding things gives you that nice dopamine hit. Adding things is condoned, busyness makes you seem accomplished and important. Doing less? On purpose? I can tell you that in conversations about busyness I am always the only person who talks about not getting stuff done in a positive way, as something I intentionally practice. Maybe people think I just must not have ambition or the responsibilities they do; possibly they think I’m lazy. True, not true? Who knows. Comparing two people’s lives is that whole apples and oranges thing. What I do know is that every day I make more decisions about what I’m not going to do than what I am going to do. This is the way I choose to live. And I believe that most people have the capacity to make empowering choices for themselves regardless of life circumstances.

Does this way of life mean I lose out on things? Absolutely. Does it mean I sometimes disappoint people? Yep. And that is hard, but it gets easier over time. Because what I gain is so much better than anything I ever got from adding to my burdens in a misguided attempt to solve them. Every time I “lose out” on something because I’ve made a decision to pursue quality of life over productivity, busyness, and giving in to external pressures, I feel better. It becomes a bit like ripping off a Band-Aid. There’s always a sting, but you kind of start to look forward to it, because that fresh air hitting new skin is the feeling of freedom.

Learning This Decision-Making Principle Will Inoculate You Against Burnout

Make decisions based on energy, not time.

Our way of life is harming us. We’re not happy, as a people, are we? Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by life shouldn’t be normalized. Busyness shouldn’t be worshiped (though it’s easy to see why it is in our culture: business/busyness). The answer isn’t to figure out how to be more efficient and productive so we can fit it all in (where does it end?!). There’s no getting around it, the answer really is to do less. But how do we do less without feeling like we’re falling behind? How can we begin to change our lives so that we don’t burn out, we feel happier and more relaxed, and space opens up for us to pursue our true desires?

Let me start with a question. Do you make decisions about energy based on time, or decisions about time based on energy?

If you’re like most people in a Western(ized), postindustrial culture, it’s the former. You make calculations for what you can get done around how much time it takes to do it and time availability in your day. It’s a pretty simple equation: you expend energy based on time. Another way to put this is that you prioritize time usage over energy reserves (with the assumption that you’ll find that energy somewhere). This decision-making methodology will inevitably lead to exhaustion or even burnout for most of us.

But it seems like the obvious and correct way to do things, right? For example, you need to mow the lawn. Do you have a spare hour on Saturday afternoon? Yes? You schedule it in, and then you do it without thinking much about the energy side of things: you mow the lawn regardless of whether you feel like doing it. It seems natural to do things this way. When you have a long to-do list of things you (feel you) absolutely have to get done, there really is no other way to guarantee you do it. You have to find or make the time, schedule it in, and get to work.

It’s not wrong to do things this way. But it does lead to a particular experience of the relationship between time and energy that can be unpleasant. Feeling overloaded, overwhelmed, and exhausted are the extreme effects, but often the unpleasantness manifests in more subtle ways. Feeling chronic dissatisfaction, unfulfillment, tiredness, boredom, malaise. All those existential problems we associate with modern living. But this is not an inevitable consequence of modernity. It has to do with how we manage that relationship between our energy and time.

What if you decided to switch that relationship? Make decisions about how to use time based on energy? How would you do that, what would it look like?

It would look like living life in a way that appears, on the surface, to include two states of being we have an absolute abhorrence for in modern Western culture: being lazy and wasting time. It’s important to understand that terms like these are judgements, not realities. They belong to a paradigm, or worldview, that influence how we conceptualize work vs. inactivity. Here is the trade-off life gives us within this paradigm: either we run ourselves into the ground (feeling overwhelmed is normal! Everyone feels that way, it’s just part of life), or we let things slide, give in to our baser natures that want to waste hours, not just minutes but hours!, scrolling through Instagram while Netflix plays some inanity in the background. Neither of those choices are any good, in my opinion.

Here’s a different paradigm: feeling satisfied regardless of how much you get done, ending each day calm and happy, and not worrying at all about whether any given activity, including Instagram scrolling, is lazy or wasting time. How about not feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and inadequate to the tasks of our lives? How about not taking account of every minute spent, living in a constant fog of time-is-getting-away-from-me anxiety? It can take a long time to change your life in this way, but where you start is by making decisions about time based on energy.

This is what it looks like. There are all these things you think you need to do…dig deep and examine that. What’s going to happen if you don’t do them? Is someone going to come and arrest you? Probably not? The things we think we need to do are tangled up in all kinds of largely subconscious beliefs about our identity, what other people think, perfectionism, you name it. The next time you have something scheduled in on that Saturday afternoon, ask yourself if you feel up to it. Do you have the physical, mental, and emotional energy to tackle it? In other words, will it either energize you to do this task, or at least not deplete you? Yes? Do it. No? Use that time to do something you do have the energy for, even if it’s scrolling through Instagram. Because if that’s what you feel compelled to do, it’s because your brain needs a break from strenuous focused tasks. If you feel like taking a nap, that’s your physical body telling you it needs a break. Feel like reading? Your emotions need some quiet time.

Wait a minute, surely I’m not suggesting you do stuff based on whether or not you feel like it? Yeah, I am. Not all the things—obviously living your life entirely like this isn’t feasible for most. But you can start small and then gradually make changes in your life as you gain confidence that everything isn’t going to fall apart if you do things this way. You will learn to trust yourself that you will get done the stuff you absolutely have to, and you’ll feel better doing it because you’ll have greater energy reserves. You may even start enjoying that must-do stuff more, now that you’re not so depleted all the time (I actually learned to enjoy mowing the lawn, which used to make me cry in despair every time).

Dealing with your knee-jerk, culturally indoctrinated reactions to doing things this way is going to be your greatest challenge. This is a transformational process. It will entirely change the way you live your life, what you see as important, and how you feel. But it takes practice. The resistance you will feel at first is a normal response to going against cultural norms. It can feel like you’re breaking some kind of law (you are, a cultural law). That’s why the question, “Is someone going to come and arrest me?” can be an effective counter.

You’re going to have to fight with yourself for a while around this, because cultural indoctrination runs deep. It took me some years to get to a place where most of my decisions are energy based. Yes, it means I end up not getting a lot of things done. I’ve realized I never needed to do most of those things anyway. Like I said, the answer really is to do less. And what a difference this makes in the quality of my life. I feel like I’m living my life, rather than it passing me by in overstuffed chunks of time I’ll never get back.

Get Friendly With Your Ultradian Rhythm

Learning to trust our intuitive preferences is essential.

Back in the olden days when I thought that being a “real” writer meant developing certain specific writing habits and hitting explicit targets like word count, an author I admired did an interview about her work routine. She said that when she finally decided to get serious about writing, she committed herself to writing four hours a day. For a long time, much longer than I like to admit, I thought that four hours a day was what you had to put in to be a real writer. But now I understand that’s bullshit.

I think that four hours is too much time to dedicate to writing. To any single task. And while it may work for that particular author, in general trying to remain focused that long is not only difficult but can actually be harmful. This is because humans operate in accordance with an ultradian rhythm. You have no doubt heard of the circadian rhythm that governs each 24-hour day. The ultradian rhythm governs our biological functions throughout the day in 90-minute increments. For example, when we sleep we cycle in and out of REM sleep on an ultradian rhythm. Our ultradian rhythm also governs how long we can focus deeply on any particular task before our brains give out.

Before I learned about ultradian rhythms, I thought something was wrong with me that I only seem to be able to sit down and write for about an hour, hour and a half max. The thought of writing for four hours straight seems nuts to me. I suppose in rare cases I could power through such a session if I had to (I’ve never had to, even when writing my dissertation), and I don’t doubt that some people like working in longer sessions. But most of us will only be able to do around 90 minutes of focused work before we fade (and that’s an average—my ultradian intervals seem to be around 60 minutes; some people’s may be closer to two hours).

If you pay attention, you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact moment that brain fade happens. Your brain basically says, “Yep, I’ve had enough now.”

Learning to stop when that happens is essential to developing a sustainable writing habit (or any other kind of habit), because it allows you to rest and regenerate before you’re entirely depleted. As I’ve talked about recently on my podcast, it can take a lot longer to recover from burnout than it would have taken for you to rest and regenerate in order to avoid it. While it’s possible to power through in the short term, you’re harming your chances of being able to sustain your motivation over the long term.

Many people can only do one ultradian period of highly focused work in a day. But I find it’s possible to do two or more periods of around 60+ minutes as long as I make sure to rest during (learning how to strategically use procrastination and distraction can help) and between. I use these periods for creative work. Other activities in my life, such as admin work and household chores, don’t require that kind of focused energy, so I intersperse that stuff in between my creative sessions. And of course I also schedule copious amounts of rest and rejuvenation periods, which include taking walks, watching TV, or journaling.

I find that chunking my daily life according to a loose ultradian rhythm feels natural and relaxing. It just makes sense in some deep way—because it makes biological, physiological sense. Throughout the night I usually wake up around every 90 minutes (particularly in the first half), and I no longer view that as indicating I’m doing sleep wrong. I’m just cycling out of an ultradian interval.

Learning about the ultradian rhythm made me realize just how important trusting my intuitive preferences is. I’ve always naturally found myself doing writing sessions of 60 to 90 minutes; it’s what feels good to me. I could have saved myself years of angst if I’d just accepted that as how much I need to work. Instead, I felt bad about myself, tried to force more. How many other intuitive behaviors do we have that we don’t accept and learn to work with because culture tells us they’re wrong? If we paid attention to what feels good to us and let that guide us, we’d probably find that life starts to feel a whole lot better. And we may even end up getting more done, because we’re working with our energy cycles, not against them.  

No Time for Creative Practice? Learn to Listen to Your Energy Cues

Most of us have an energy problem, not a time problem

The major reason we don’t get around to our creative projects isn’t that we’re too busy. Most of us have the time somewhere in the day, even if it’s just twenty minutes. And that is absolutely enough daily time for a solid and rewarding creative practice. The problem is that when that twenty minutes shows up in our schedule, we either don’t notice, are too revved up to sit down and be creative on cue, or are too exhausted to do anything but collapse on the sofa and catch an episode of 30 Rock on Netflix. But by doing a little energy magic, we can open up more energetic space in our lives that we can fill with creative practice – and other stuff!

We need a framework to understand energy before we can start to work our magic, and this article in the Harvard Business Review provides a good one. It divides energy into four categories: physical, emotional, mental, and spirit-sustaining. The trick is to figure out what activities in these four categories give you energy rather than drain you. The best way to do this is to simply pay attention to the activities you are already doing throughout the day. Chances are you’re already working some energy magic without realizing it.

Physical energy is the one we tend to be most cognizant of in our health-obsessed culture. Often just that act of moving through the day is physically draining for most of us. Getting out of bed, going to work, doing chores…these activities are usually not generative in terms of physical energy. But exercise often is. Many people use exercise as a way of counterintuitively generating more energy. It may tire them out, but it also releases endorphins, which are both calming and energizing. Now, I don’t like exercise. But I do like talking walks. That counts! Maybe for you it’s gardening, yoga, jumping rope, or wiggling. Move your body in a way that renews you.

Emotional renewal usually comes in the form of interactions with others. For sensitive creative types, interactions can often be draining, but if you pay attention, you’ll find that there are certain types that give you a burst of energy. For me it’s often a simple, low-pressure exchange with a check-out person in a store. It’s brief, usually friendly, just a perfect type of interaction for me. The HBR article suggests practicing expressing appreciation for others, which I think is brilliant. It also points out that we often feel emotionally drained when we feel like victims of circumstance. Learning how to examine our assumptions objectively can help us move past that mindset and reconnect with our personal power.

Mental exhaustion is perhaps the most common type we deal with in our productivity-centered culture. The truth is we just don’t have as much capacity to focus and get stuff done as we think we do. In the course of the day we have one, maybe two 90-minute windows to concentrate on challenging tasks before we’re drained. This is called our ultradian rhythm, and understanding it can be life-changing. I’ll be writing a separate post on this in the near future, but to start working with this rhythm the first thing to understand is that pushing yourself past it results in rapidly depleting energy and quality of work. You can learn to recognize your own ultradian time period by paying attention to when you reach that point where you are having to really force yourself to concentrate. You may hit it sooner or later on any given day. That’s your natural stopping point. Give the task a rest and come back to it later, preferably the next day.

Spirit-sustaining energy is the one we often stumble on the most, and it’s the one most important to creative practice or any activity that’s closely connected to what we would call our heart or soul. When we feel our lives lack purpose and meaning (an extremely common affliction in our culture), we lack this energy and everything else gets harder. But here’s where us creative folks have a leg up: for us, creative practice can give our lives a feeling of purpose and meaning. It really can be that simple. We have a magical energy-generating engine inside of us: our urge to create. Uncovering it and keeping it running through creative practice can permeate all other areas of our lives with clarity and vitality.

If you learn to recognize your energy cues throughout each day, you can gradually make changes that will open up that energetic space you need for your creative work.

Why Do We Talk So Much About Goals?

It’s okay to not have goals.

Have you ever noticed how much we talk about goals in our culture? From new year’s resolutions to aspirational advertising, we live in a very future-oriented, acquisition-based, improvement-obsessed paradigm. We rarely question the assumption that we need goals. But do we?

The problem with a goals mindset is that it orients us permanently toward the future. We are always thinking about the arrival. Achievement, satisfaction, even happiness all exist in the space where the goal is realized. But of course when we get there, we realize there are ever more goals. It never ends. There’s always more to do, always more to get. There’s nothing wrong with having ideas about where we’re headed, nothing wrong with dreams. But if we’re regimenting our lives around goals, we risk neglecting the quality of our lives.

Is this the case for you? Only you can decide if it is, and what that means to you, but if the space of your day is taken up by how much you can get done, and you find yourself exhausted, dissatisfied, and experiencing existential terror as the years tick by and you still haven’t found purpose or fulfillment, you may want to examine your relationship with goals and their associated outcomes.

Consider that you may not want what you think you do.

I used to have a big dream for myself. I wanted to get a novel published. And I failed. It devastated me. I wasn’t able to write another novel for fifteen years. Now I’m on the road to publication again, but I’m going about it differently. While I nominally have a goal of publishing my novel, I recognize that what I really want is how I imagine publishing will make me feel. Like I’ve arrived, like I’m a real writer.

It's okay to want those feelings. But it’s important to recognize that publishing isn’t the only, or even the best, way to get them. And letting a goal dictate how you feel about yourself is a dangerous game. The world is full of stories of middle-aged folks having crises because the things they thought they wanted didn’t make them feel happy or fulfilled.

I only started feeling like I was a real writer, like I’d arrived, when I started taking myself seriously despite any goal and achievement thereof. This is what brings fulfillment and eventual happiness: the ability to find value in the self for how you live rather than in what you achieve. Achievements are nice but they’re icing. When you live based on a clear understanding that it’s the feelings around achievement that you are actually craving, you can begin to look for other, smaller ways in your daily life to attain those.

Here's what that looks like in reference to my example of wanting to feel like a real writer: I write as much as I can, I regularly put stuff out on a blog while I toil away at the larger project of my novel, I insist on seeing myself as a real writer and describing myself as such. Together all this adds up to a feeling of arrival. What about publishing my novel? I still really want that! But I feel good about the journey now, as challenging as it can sometimes be. That’s a big win.

Goals talk is only just talk because that’s what it’s supposed to be.        

We all know go-getter types who actually do set goals and achieve them, as if they’re part machine, but most people we know probably spend more time talking about their goals than they do actually achieving them. We’re probably a bit like that ourselves. Most of us use goals talk to feel like we’re doing goals. Imagining accomplishing our goals feels like we’re actually doing it in the moment. But the come-down is that later we feel awful when we don’t accomplish them. It’s a bit like a drug reaction. But if we understand that this is what goals can do for us, give us a chance to test out ideas and have good feelings in the moment, we can have fun goals talk without the hangover.

I’ve learned over time that goal setting is best done sparingly, if at all. My quality of life is higher without them. As I point out above, this doesn’t mean living without any idea of the direction I’m headed. But I no longer use a goal setting methodology (visualize outcome, create steps for achievement, feel bad when things aren’t going well, consider it a failure if I don’t realize the goal…). Instead I focus on how I want each day to feel. Sometimes I want to feel busy and accomplished, and sometimes I just want to sink into an endless peaceful moment. Then I find activities that go with those feelings. Somehow the stuff that needs to get done gets done. Most of the time haha.

Doubling Down on Creativity in Difficult Times

Make your creative practice sacred.

When life gets busy and we’re stressed out and exhausted, what are some of the first things we jettison? You’d think it would be what’s causing us so much anxiety, but no, we double down on those things. If we just work harder, faster, more, we’ll get things right and life will feel good again. It’s the pleasurable activities we jettison: our hobbies, our leisure time. Let me just get through this busy period, we think, and then I’ll have time for the fun stuff.

I’ll have time this weekend to write. I’ll have the energy then. Maybe.

I want to wait until I have the space to really focus on my music. Next month after all these deadlines, then I’ll be able to really dedicate myself to it. Maybe.

My new year’s resolution is going to be to spend more time painting. Next year is going to be my year. Maybe.

How many weeks, months, and years have gone by like this? Life always gets in the way somehow, doesn’t it? And meanwhile we still don’t feel creatively fulfilled or like we’re fulfilling our potential. I’ll get to it when life doesn’t feel so hard, we promise ourselves. Except life always feels hard.

I spent years of my life making promises to myself that I’d finally finish a novel, and I never did. Until I realized something about creativity that changed everything for me. Creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s not something we have to wait until we are free and clear of life difficulties so we have the space and time to do it. Creativity is the way through difficulties. We have evolved the capacity for creativity because it’s how we move through challenge.

Think about it. Which of our ancestors were more likely to survive existential threats? Often it was probably the ones who were willing to get creative. Creative thinking has been selected for throughout the evolution of human beings. Creativity isn’t something that is gifted on some and not others. It’s a type of cognition and energy we can all tap into that can lead us through difficult times in life if we trust it.

Instead of waiting for the space and time for creativity, we can use creativity to make time and space for ourselves. The key is to find a creative practice that is generative for you (energy-producing rather than energy-draining), and use it as a way to heal and regenerate from the daily traumas of life. When you hear people talking about creative practice as sacred or spiritual, this is what they mean. It is a way to step away from ordinary, stressful life and reestablish your connection to your inner peace and joy. This is creative practice as sabbath, or as a meditation or mindfulness practice. It is creativity as refuge.

It sounds good, but perhaps isn’t easy to put into practice, right? Like any habit, in the beginning it requires a little pushing, but not in the form of a grand plan or schedule. Not in the form that has failed in the past: I’ll carve out some time this weekend, next month, next year. I’ll put in fifteen minutes a day, starting Monday. The problem with plans is that they always start in the future. Plans are thoughts, not action. And when you make a plan for something that is in actuality quite a tricky thing to establish as a habit, there is going to be a high failure rate.

The secret to having a creative practice is to do it now. That’s right. Why not now? But you have all this stuff you have to get done…. Do you, though? Right now, this instant? Do you have five minutes? That’s enough to start. Make a doodle. Write three sentences. Sing something. Then go do those things you feel you have to do, and let the knowledge that you just experienced something creative, sacred, all your own go with you as you continue through your day.

That’s your start. Do it again the next time you think about being creative. How about now? Be creative now. Let that part of yourself lead you through a few minutes of special space and time that is your secret little sabbath-in-the-middle-of-the-day.    

August Prospective 2021: Thoughts on Burnout and Breaks

I’m taking an August holiday - see you back here in September!

Hello Readers! I want to thank you for visiting my blog and reading my essays. I’ve been posting weekly here for a year and a half, and it has been a joy. I plan to continue my regular posts here well into the future. Writing is how I think and learn and have fun.

I’ve decided to institute an annual August holiday from blogging. Mostly this is due to a question that has been on my mind lately: “Can I really continue to post every single week…forever?” And while I have not encountered any serious impediments thus far to doing so (my inspiration has not failed me yet!), this question just won’t leave me be. Surely at some point this will become onerous. Right? I mean, posting every single week can’t be sustainable forever. Right?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know that creative work is my lifeblood, and if it ever stops being fun, that will be a very bad day. And I also know that burnout doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s a cumulative process where we push ourselves a little, then a little more, then a little more… Like a frog in a pot of water being slowly heated to boil (what a horrible metaphor, I hate it, but it aptly describes the circumstances that lead to burnout, I think). By the time we realize we are on our way to burnout, it’s often too late to forestall it.

I don’t ever want that to happen when it comes to my creative work. And lately I’ve been feeling a little tired. Traffic is down on all my platforms - here, my podcast, social media - probably because people are either on their summer holidays (Europe) or getting ready for the school year to start (US). August feels like a good time to take a break, give myself a breather, take my own staycation holiday.

And to begin to prepare myself for the next phase of creative entrepreneurship. Over the next six to eight months, I will be working on turning my creative business into an actual business. That is, launching my first major product and upping my game in market research, networking, and promotion. In addition, I’ll be readying my novel for querying or possible self-publication. It will be a thrilling but nerve-wracking time, and I want to be ready. Because I want to be able to enjoy it. I want it to be a time I remember as life-giving and full of creative joy.

So I will see you all back here in September!

Creativity Requires a Different Kind of Productivity

Making anti-productivity work for you.

Can you define productivity? Go ahead, give it a try. Or if you’re anything like me, just keep reading to see where I’m going with this haha.

Most of us would probably define it something like “doing lots of work efficiently.” We may also specify that the work has to be of a certain quality. You’re not being productive if all you’re producing is crap. Another important aspect of productivity is that you have to have an idea beforehand of what kind of work you want to get done and what it’s going to look like when you finish. This is so you can measure whether or not you’ve been productive. Did you accomplish the goal, meet expectation? Productivity is as much about judging results as it is about making them.

So. Productivity = a combination of efficiency and output that is measurable. Do you apply standard productivity goals and measures to your creative practice? I’d be surprised if you don’t. Productivity is the framework we apply to almost all types of work. Do you have a goal to do your creative work on a daily basis? For a certain amount of time? Do you have a time deadline for completing your project? That’s using a standard productivity framework.

Does it work for you?

Does it really?

Do you feel like you’re tapping into your creative potential? Do you enjoy your creative process? Do you feel creatively fulfilled? If you do, then you are suited to standard rational models of productivity. If you don’t, you may want to consider an intuitive approach to productivity. A method I call anti-productivity.

Anti-productivity is how to be productive in the creative realm. And it’s pretty simple. First you toss out all those external goals and measures. No more word counts, hours spent, timelines. Now, it’s difficult to entirely get away from such things. It’s okay if you still have vague goals along these lines, especially at the beginning. Keep reminding yourself that for now you’re experimenting with not doing it that way. You will find as you grow in skill at anti-productivity, you’ll increasingly just not care about that stuff.

The second step is to link your work to how you feel. Pay attention to your feelings and how they manifest in your body not just when you’re doing your creative work, but when you think about it at other times of the day. When you have good feelings that make you feel expansive and excited inside, that’s what you want to focus in on and explore. If something feels bad, makes you tighten up and feel anxiety, that’s your body telling you it’s not the way. Do what feels good. Put what feels bad aside for now. Eventually you’ll get to a place where you’ll trust yourself and the signals your body sends you. Your creative practice will start feeling amazing. And then you’ll take off with it, and nothing will stop you.     

It probably seems like I’m just telling you how to develop intrinsic motivation vis-à-vis your creative practice, but that’s only part of it. Intrinsic motivation helps productivity across the board, not just in terms of creativity. What I’m getting at here is that creativity is productivity in its fullest sense. Standard productivity that centers on goals and measurements is a method that has extracted some components of human labor and drive to work and rationalized them for mass production. Real productivity is inherently creative, and creative work is inherently productive. They are one and the same. We just have an incomplete understanding of what productivity is in our society, one that is suited to capitalism but not to human nature.     

Creative productivity works very differently from standard (extracted) productivity. In fact it thrives on the very aspects that have been eliminated from our understanding of productivity. Procrastination, for example. A recent study has shown that moderate procrastination enhances creativity. So pay attention to your feelings and they tell you that today isn’t a great day to do your creative work. Indirect focus is another counterintuitive part of creative productivity. Standard productivity requires sustained and methodical focus. Creativity thrives when you don’t do that, because creative thought originates in our subconscious mind and requires an unfocused, mind-wandering type of cognition (the type that happens when you are daydreaming, for example).

I like calling this anti-productivity because that appeals to the rebel in me, and I think so much of the info out there about productivity gets it wrong. I like feeling like I’m being anti-establishment and going against the grain. But you may find that a different way of conceptualizing it works for you. Playing around with ideas and framing is part of the process. Ultimately having fun has been shown to be one of the best ways to enhance productivity, so try eliminating the unenjoyable parts of your creative practice and see where it leads! You may be surprised by the results.

Interlude: What I Do When I'm Just Not Feeling It

Instead of pushing through, pivot.

You know those weeks that are an almost-comical series of awful and exhausting things? I’ve just had one of them. The blog post I was trying to write, well, it’s just not done. I could push through, put it up, but I wouldn’t feel good about it. I haven’t said all the things I want to say in it yet. It needs more time to develop.

This desire to give it more time clashes with my equally strong desire to be consistent about putting up a new blog post here every Friday. And for all the time I’ve been writing this blog, this is the first week I’ve ever felt this conflict. I’m sure it won’t be the last, though!

The usual response to this type of thing is to push through, right? I’ve made a commitment to putting up a weekly blog post. And while there will undoubtedly be weeks when I do have a good excuse for not following through, this doesn’t feel like one of them. But I’m equally committed to not forcing myself when I feel resistance turn into that particular brand of anxiety known as dread. And I’ve been feeling that this week.

I’ve written about how I believe creativity should be enjoyable. Not all the time, but most of the time. There are two reasons for this. One, if it’s not enjoyable, eventually you’ll be forcing yourself through it every time, and that’s neither sustainable nor conducive to doing your best work. Two, if it’s not enjoyable, what’s the point? Creativity is what makes my life feel like it’s worth living. It’s what gets me out of bed every morning. For me, it has to be enjoyable.

You can see my conundrum. Do I fail at my deeply held belief that creativity should not be forced, and finish that blog post even if it feels awful? Or should I fail at following through on my commitment to my readers to have a weekly blog post up on Friday?

I finally realized that this perspective was too either/or. It was so constrictive and uninspiring that it was depressing me. What was the third option here? I thought about what is exciting me right now. My fiction. This summer I’m trying to finish the third draft of my novel, The Gentle History. This is a big deal, because it will be the first finished draft of a novel I’ve been able to complete in 15 years. And I’m loving the process, which is itself also a big deal (my attempts to finish novels in the past only led to misery because I was - you guessed it - forcing things).

So I decided that this week in lieu of my typical blog post, I would post some excerpts of my novel. Will people want to read them? Maybe, maybe not. That’s not the point. The point is, I feel excited about it, and it has allowed me to continue to be in touch with my creative flow of inspiration even in an impossible week. It gives me a way of honoring my goal of putting up a weekly post, and it’s a way of sharing my process, which is also something I’m committed to. So many boxes ticked!

Sharing excerpts from a novel is challenging, because novels are longform, and excerpts are short. So these are really more vignettes, in no particular order, that give a feel for the novel.

The Gentle History a novel about a woman who discovers she drowned as a child. It best fits into the genres of literary slipstream, dark psychological, and mystery/thriller.

Draft 3; excerpts.

Sometimes I get flashes in my mind of geometric shapes sliding together, gone so fast that what I sense are afterglows, more a feeling of something visual; apparition. I wonder if they are brief revelations of the inner workings of my mind. Not its organic workings, but the way it perceives how the world fits together. Angles and planes, points and ledges, moving across and over each other, merging, folding, subsuming.

The way yesterday slides under today. Then today bends and buckles at its own horizon, and yesterday emerges again. Yesterday contracts, lengthening into a line that arrows forward in a loop that comes back around to pierce the center of a disc that is another day.

I am a single point that sometimes becomes a line and sometimes a spiral. I spin under the water, a whirlpool, I come up as a wave. I can’t remember what I remember. So I start back at the beginning.

It was dark, and I was alone.

*

When I struggle up through layers of hangover-laced sleep and open my eyes to the pitch black of my basement apartment, I can believe that this is some strange afterlife or purgatory. The house phone’s ringing upstairs. It rings and rings, stops, then begins again and seemingly again and again. Or maybe this happened over the space of days. Or all at once, just one everlasting ringing. I close my eyes on it all.

Later, I pad to the bathroom, the glow of my laptop on my bed my guiding light, keeping the door open so I can pee without turning on the overhead bulb. Then I turn on my coffee maker, which I miraculously stocked at some point so it’s ready. Coffee, a bit of milk from a fridge with the inside bulb screwed out - I find the milk by feel - and I’m back on my bed, leaning on a stack of pillows propped up against the wall, laptop on my thighs. I go straight to the Bandits & Bureaucrats webpage to see if there are any new pictures from the weekend gig.

Paige has a kickass life, she somehow made it and I didn’t. The thing is, I was always ok with that, or I think I was. She was the one who couldn’t handle things. She acted like I was jealous of her success with music and all her cool music friends, but I wasn’t. Things just started getting dark for me. I was less and less of a real person, and she took it personally. At least I think that’s what happened. But I’m not sure, sometimes I’m so utterly confused by it all.

Bandits & Bureaucrats have gotten pretty big in Philadelphia. Paige plays the cello, which makes the band stand out. I’ve never been much into music, but I liked going to Paige’s gigs. Cello is definitely my favorite instrument. I can’t stand violin, it’s too high-pitched, but cello is in the right vibrational zone for me.

Tonight there are some new pictures of their Saturday night gig. Paige sits in a purple-pink haze at the left of the stage, wrapped around her cello. Her expression is what it always is when she’s playing, serious and lost-in-it, eyes gazing at things the rest of us can’t see. In one photo she holds her bow at the ready, head cocked to one side. Her brown hair is pulled back, her face sheened with rose from the lights. She’s beautiful. I mean, really.

No, I was never jealous of her when we were still friends. I’m jealous of her now, though. All the photos of her and the band, her husband, other friends who show up here and there, all people I know but not on my own, outside of Paige…it makes me feel sick. But still I look. I want to see.

*

Minutes pass, or don’t pass. The river moves. A light in an apartment across the way comes on and is extinguished almost immediately. Another light, this time left on for an indeterminate time. I don’t notice when it goes off, only that it is no longer on. The river moves some more. I have another mini vodka, and then one more. It’s the hour of nothing, the empty hour between three and four in the morning. The space between the end and the beginning. My time. It just feels so good to sit here alone in the dark office, drinking, watching the river and the apartments across the way.

Then, there’s something in the water. It floats along near to the shore and catches in some debris. It’s large and lengthy, and it takes my brain some time to catch up with what my eyes are telling it. It looks like a person, possibly face down, what seems like its head bobbing against the debris it’s caught up in. The leg end floats wide, circles, dislodges the head, and it continues its slow float past the office. I stand, peering at it until it disappears under the bridge a few hundred feet down the river.

In this empty hour, I’m not sure I’ve seen what I think I have. Across the way, the condos are all dark now except for one, where there’s a blue flickering from a tv. I stare at it, idly trying to discern a pattern to its intermittent flash, and wondering what I should do. Was it really a body? It could have been a log, it could have been a long cushion or piece of foam – hell, it could have been just a bunch of trash traveling en masse down the watery avenue. Why had I assumed it was a person, a dead person? Now, in retrospect, it seems quite obvious that it wasn’t. I sit again and scoot the chair up to the desk, eyeing the phone. I could call it in, but if it was a dead body, does it matter if I do? There’s no one to save here. I quail at the thought of speaking to a 911 dispatcher. I’ve never called 911 before, and assume they will want me to stay here to speak with the police about what I saw. I clearly can’t do that, they might smell alcohol on me. I really can’t be sure, after all, that I really saw a dead body. It was dark, the lights along the river are not strong enough to illuminate details. More and more I am convinced what I saw was nothing more than trash, an illusion of a body.

“Dammit,” I whisper. I turn on the computer and log on. Can I send an email about it? I do a quick online search. Doesn’t look like it. There is a phone tip line. I could probably call it in anonymously.

But even doing that, for something that is increasingly vague in my mind, feels like too much. I’d be wasting their time, calling. Now I don’t even know if I saw anything at all. I could just be having flashbacks of a dream from last night, or something that came from my subconscious. It’s already gone, a phantom, another lost memory.

At a Creative Impasse? Here's How to Use It to Move You Forward

A creative impasse just means it’s time to regroup.

I need to come clean about something. I’ve really been struggling with my fiction lately. I’m working on a novel, and am nearing the end of draft #2. Lately I’ve been feeling more and more resistance to sitting down to write. Some resistance is normal, and I’m good at working through it. But this is reaching a level where I feel like I’m forcing things. And as I’m always saying, I don’t force things. To me, forcing it is a signal that I need to consider not doing the thing. And so I’ve slowed down on my fiction writing. And that makes me feel bad, and even resentful toward my writing. And then I want to write even less. Vicious cycle, am I right?

I’m used to this cycle, sadly. It happens every time I try to finish a novel draft. I just can’t seem to get it done. I peter out somewhere around the middle or a little past. I start to struggle more with writing, and feel less and less enthused, until I’m forcing things to the degree that I kind of just give up in despair. I haven’t been able to finish a novel since I finished my first, some fifteen years ago. Yikes.

What am I doing wrong? Why do I always find myself at this impasse? Maybe you’ve experienced something like this in your own creative practice.

Last night, after I decided yet again that I wasn’t going to force myself to write, and was feeling guilty about being a bad writer who can’t stay committed to her craft, I’d finally had enough of feeling terrible about all this. Feeling terrible sucks. I don’t want to do it anymore. What if I stubbornly and willfully refuse to see this impasse as a bad thing, and pretend it’s marvelous instead? Like, eff you, impasse, but wait, come back, because I’m going to embrace you whether you like it or not! That’s more like it.

Here’s what the impasse tells you:

• It’s time to take a break and let things percolate.

• It’s time to find a new direction, and it’s gotta be an enjoyable one.

An impasse just means it’s time to regroup. That’s all. Creative work needs to be enjoyable for the most part – using that dopamine connection is how you can create motivation for consistent practice – and if it stops being (mostly) fun, that’s your sign that something needs to change. For me, it seems to be a sign that I’ve taken the story as far as I can in the current iteration of my novel. In each draft I get a little further, so it makes sense that my impasse signals the need to start a new one. Draft #3, here I come! First I’ll do some percolation activities, like assessing my story and analyzing its themes and character arcs, but then I’ll start in with the writing again. And hopefully draft #3 will take me a bit further.

The most important thing to remember when you are at an impasse is to not give up. It’s not a sign that something’s wrong, or you’ve lost your passion, or the project is a failure! Sleep on it. Go do something else for awhile. And then sit down and think a bit about it. If you start feeling stuck or anxious again, repeat all this until space opens up in front of you for whatever the next step in the project is. It will happen! Trust that it will, and enjoy your impasse while it lasts, because soon enough you’ll be back in the saddle.

The Difference Between Becoming More vs. Less of Who You Are

What if we leaned into the stuff that’s “wrong” about us?

One of the most intriguing aspects of modern culture is our deeply ingrained belief that we must continually be working on improving ourselves. There’s always something we need to work on. Better time management, less lazy. More veggies, fewer bowls of pasta. This work never ends. Some of this has to do with capitalism – most of the things we buy aren’t necessities, they’re to improve ourselves and our lives. Self-improvement is big business and a ubiquitous advertising technique. And some of our obsession with self-improvement is a consequence of reaching a level of wealth where we have leisure time to spend on it. But I believe part of it is that we are afraid being ourselves. Think about it. Most of the self-improvement we are called to do involves becoming less of who we are, not more. Like there’s some kind of magical state of moderation of the personality, where our “good” traits at least equal if not outweigh our “bad.” And we apply this to our lives, too, where we are always trying to balance out or overload the productive/good side of the scale.

When our work begins to drain us and we feel such dread about it that our productivity falls, what is our response? To try harder, stay later, feel bad about ourselves. When we slack off on our exercise routine because life is calling us to focus on other things right now, what is our response? To try harder, bleed more moments from the day and more energy from our muscles, and feel bad about ourselves.

Let’s try a more amorphous type of dissatisfaction. What if you feel like something’s just not right with your life, you’re not sure what, but you are plagued by a constant sensation that there’s more out there for you. But you have a good job, many privileges, and you’re cognizant of that. What do you do?

If you’re like many of my clients, this is what you do: tell yourself you should be grateful for what you have, that something’s wrong with you for not being able to be satisfied with it, and you try harder, stay later, bleed more moments from the day and more energy from your soul, and feel bad about yourself.

But what if the answer is to step further into all the stuff we feel guilty about? Yes, you have privilege. But you’re still unhappy. That’s okay! It’s allowed! Step into that. You can appreciate your privilege but you don’t have to feel grateful for stuff that makes you feel like shit. Got it?

What about this one. You got a degree, maybe even multiple degrees, for a certain type of job. You invested time, money – maybe even other people’s money – in them. Then you get the job. You don’t like it. It drains you to the extent that your life feels dull, gray, and perhaps full of dread. What do you do?

Do you tell yourself that there are things you do like about the job, that you appreciate this or that aspect, that it’s a good job and you’re grateful for it? Do you expend major energy convincing yourself that you can like it enough to keep doing it, because after all it’s what you’ve trained for?

What if the answer is to step into your dislike? What if you stopped punishing yourself into “liking” your job and just decided you’re going to be honest about what you hate about it? What if you let yourself feel the full extent of your antipathy toward what you are forcing yourself to do every day? What if you let yourself stop feeling grateful?

Your life would stop being so dull and gray, that’s for sure. And you’d realize that you probably have to do something about your situation, that it’s not okay to just exist in it and keep going for as long as you can until you burn out completely. Things would become a bit clearer. And all you need is a little crack in that shell of excuses to begin to move forward.

Instead of punishing ourselves into doing things “right,” what if the answer is to step more fully into our “wrongs”? What if leaning into our lazy allows us to find more time and space to do what really matters to us? What if leaning into the boredom or dread we feel about our job gives us the impetus we need to take steps to change our situation?

What if we don’t need to change ourselves at all, but become more of what we already are?

Give Boredom a Chance if You're Creatively Blocked

Why we should relearn how to be bored, and techniques for facilitating boredom.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I can remember often being bored as a child. I was of that generation that was largely left alone to raise itself – I had the freedom to run the neighborhood as I pleased, wasn’t overscheduled with extracurriculars, and I was a latchkey kid. I had lots of time to be bored. And I didn’t like the feeling! Being bored is usually an unpleasant sensation, and it’s particularly difficult for children to handle. We learn how to be bored as we mature, but not in a positive sense. We discipline ourselves into being able to sit still and not fiddle when we’re, say, listening to a boring lecture. We inure ourselves to boredom.  

Then when I was sixteen I spent a year with in Italy, where I lived with a family whose mother was from a Swiss Calvinist background. Boredom was not acceptable in that family. This was the first time I came across the belief that being bored is morally suspect. My host sister told me that when she complained about being bored as a child, she got yelled at. She was expected to fill her time with worthy tasks, be they play or work. Being bored was a sign of sloth and mental indolence.

Boredom, suffice it to say, does not have a good reputation. It’s either something to avoid at all costs, or it indicates something is wrong with us. But it may be key to creativity. There is a theory that creative people are more likely to get bored. But what if it’s the opposite?  What if people who are more likely to get bored have the capacity to be more creative? What if boredom is somehow necessary for creativity? If this is the case, it means that those of us trying to access our creative potential need to relearn how to be bored, and unlearn all the negative connotations we’ve internalized around boredom.  

Boredom is a “paradoxical emotion,” i.e. one that creates one emotional state in order to bring about its opposite. When we are bored, our immediate instinctual reaction is to move through it as soon as we can. We’ll pick up our phones, take a look at our to-do list, turn on the TV, anything to stop feeling bored. And that’s good! That shows that our minds are actively seeking engagement. This process contains the seeds of creativity – we just need to learn how to cultivate and enhance that. And the first step is to let ourselves be bored more often and for longer periods of time instead of immediately jumping into the first knee-jerk activity at hand.

One way to do this could be something similar to my intentional practice of wasting time. Whenever I find myself getting time anxiety, when I’m overwhelmed by all the things I feel I have to do, I sit down and breathe, and purposefully “waste” time until my mind has lighted on something I actually want to do. It is easy enough to repurpose this into a creativity practice, with a focus on letting the mind wander instead of settling on an activity. I call this type of thing “staring at a wall.” Give it a try. Just have a seat somewhere comfortable and stare at something. Maybe the scene out your window, or a cozy fire, or a fake fire on TV, or whatever. Sit through the antsy-ness. Don’t give in to your desire to get up and do something. Let your mind wander, and when it settles on something, gently push it to wander some more. The bored mind will naturally try to creatively solve its state of boredom. Let it cycle through a number of ideas and solutions. The important thing is to not see any of them as necessarily requiring action. The purpose of this exercise is to train your brain to work creatively.

Once you’ve loosened up your brain a bit by getting it used to boredom, you can step things up by using tasks that have a meditative quality to them, such as washing dishes by hand, as part of your creative practice. One of the most effective is walking. Writers in particular seem to find a regular walking habit conducive to creativity. Studies have shown that it’s the act of walking itself that enhances creative thought, so it can take place on a treadmill if that’s what’s available to you, but it must be somewhat leisurely. If you are walking explicitly for exercise, i.e. at a fast clip, it doesn’t work. When I was experiencing burnout and couldn’t write, I started walking daily through my neighborhood. I didn’t think of it as a creativity practice per se, but I eventually walked myself straight out of my creative block.

Two final activities that have been shown to enhance creativity are writing or reading something boring. And by boring, I mean very boring. One study actually gave participants pages from a phone book (lol so old-fashioned) to copy down by hand or read, and then tested them on creative tasks. Morning pages, where you write three handwritten pages in stream-of-consciousness style as soon as you wake up, may rely on the same mechanism. Another trick many writers use is to copy passages from other people’s work. While this is meant to help with learning writing style and technique, it is an inherently boring task (trust me, I’ve tried it).

Maybe you already have things in your own life you find deeply boring that you could repurpose as a creativity practice. Something that pops into mind for me is when I have to wait for something, like for other people to arrive, or in a medical office. See what you can come up with! Sometimes those “wasted” minutes and hours can be our most valuable.

Sometimes Doing Nothing Gets the Best Result

If you’re feeling unmotivated, fear not! Sometimes what you need to do is nothing at all.

Some years ago, a friend sent me a children’s book called What Do You Do With An Idea? I was excited to read it, because I’m an idea person. I have lots of them, all the time. But at the time this book appeared in my life, I was feeling deeply unmotivated about everything. I had burnout and wasn’t able to act on my ideas. My life was stagnant; I was stuck. I was filled with an urgency to do something – anything! – to effect change in my life. And here was a book that was going to tell me how. I read it with eager anticipation. What was the secret it would reveal?

Here’s what it said I should do with my ideas. Nothing.

Yep. It’s about a kid who hangs out with an idea he has and that’s about it. He feeds it and they play together. The idea grows, and he builds a new home for it. It teaches him how to walk on his hands, because that will help him see things in new ways. Then one day the idea takes wing and the kid discovers what you do with an idea: “You change the world.” Okay, except he didn’t really do anything with the idea except spend time with it! How does that change the world? Notably missing from this narrative are the step-by-step plans of how to use the idea to change in the world. Where is the goal setting, the list of pros and cons, the projected costs? Where is the struggle, the arduous journey, the courageous crusade? How can an idea change the world when you don’t do anything with it?!

Okay, let’s calm down for a minute. Take a breath. Children’s books are supposed to be full of timeless wisdom, right? So I sat with this little fable for a while, letting it percolate. When that failed to enlighten me, I decided to do an experiment. I’d try doing nothing and see what happened. It wouldn’t be hard – I was feeling so unmotivated about everything that doing nothing was basically what I was already doing. Except I would do it intentionally now. Instead of doing nothing because everything just felt so hard, I’d try doing nothing because maybe it was the inspired choice, a way to make magic happen.

And guess what happened? Nothing. Shocking, right? Except that’s not entirely true. Nothing big happened, sure. My life didn’t change, I didn’t feel more motivated, I was still stuck. But I noticed that my ideas started getting more…well, sparkly. Now that I wasn’t expending energy forcing myself to do something, anything, or on feeling bad about not getting anything done, I had a lot more to put into my ideas. The new attention I gave them made them feel more present, rounder, real. Like things that maybe could manifest in the world, if I gave them a chance.  

There was this one little idea I’d pushed away because it seemed too big for its britches, and I started thinking about it more. It was about starting my own creative business, hanging out my signpost as a creativity coach, starting a podcast. Yeah right, I thought. Who would want to listen to me? But I decided I’d give the idea a chance, and we hung out together. I’ll admit it, we had fun dreaming about life together. But that was all it was. An idea. I still didn’t know how doing nothing about it was supposed to change the world.

But the idea grew, just like it said in the book. And then one day the idea was so big I decided to make a webpage for it. A new home, just like it said in the book. And then it taught me how to walk on my hands – just kidding. But I did start to see things in new ways. Like, maybe this could be a real thing, my creative business. Maybe this idea was worth it. Maybe I’m worth it. So I continued hanging out with the idea, doing whatever felt like the next right thing. I’m still doing that now, even when the next right thing is doing nothing.

It feels magical how much this approach has changed my life. It did change the world – my world. Sure, sometimes I’m busy and getting a lot accomplished, but by maintaining my focus on only doing what feels like it’s the next right thing, I end up not doing a lot, too. Because I’m not doing things because I should or just to get them done, I’m free to do what emerges organically from the situation. And what I’ve discovered is that life doesn’t require us to do all that much. Our sociocultural beliefs are what require us to do all the things. And those are just beliefs. We can challenge and change them if we want to.

So try hanging out with your ideas rather than seeing them in terms of actionable steps, efficient practices, and productivity goals. Maybe they’ll have something to teach you. Maybe they need space to grow some more. They’ll speak to you if you listen, and they may even be able to point you in directions you wouldn’t have considered. Be patient, open-minded, and kind to your ideas, let them know they can trust you, and they’ll show you the way.

Why I Have an Intentional Practice of Wasting Time

The counterintuitive practice of wasting time can help you overcome time-related anxiety.

For many years of my life, I was in thrall of the doctrine of wise time usage. My major daily goal was to account for the majority of my minutes and hours with productive activities that showed results. Anything I did for enjoyment had to either have a dual usefulness quotient, like reading a book that also taught me something new, or it had to be confined to extra spaces of time after I’d finished the more important productive work of the day. And I was really good at using my time well. I was scarily productive. People admired me for it. I never procrastinated or let things fall to the wayside. I was on top of it all. 

But I wasn’t particularly fulfilled. And I was usually stressed out. When I sat down to write, it was with the goal of being able to say that I got that part of my day done. To check it off the list. Even my allotted times for enjoyment were tinged with a kind of aggressive determination to enjoy things, dammit. In retrospect, I have to laugh at myself. But also, when I look at my shelves and see all the books I read just to say I read them, I feel sad.

Talk about wasting time. That’s the irony. That in my obsession with not wasting time, I ended up doing just that.

I don’t blame myself for this obsession. Most of us have it to some degree. We can’t help it, growing up in a socioeconomic culture committed to efficiency, productivity, and bigger better faster. The problem is that our attempts to use our time wisely often have the opposite effect: we end up dispersing our energy on checklist tasks. Some may be important, some may just be busywork, but they’re all done in service of using time the “right” way. If this has always felt unfulfilling to you, or outright depressing, here’s why: it’s imposing a schedule and restrictions on your life from the outside in, as opposed to letting your life take the shape it needs to – i.e. living your life from the inside out. The former controls and constrains your life, and in so doing you are only ever skimming the surface of your true potential. The latter immerses you into the heart of your life’s independent energy, the source of your potential.

Using your time “wisely” will only ever serve to keep you in line. The problem with productivity models that train you to work better and faster is that they put you into a stress cycle. There’s always more you can fit in, more that needs to be done, a better way to do it. We live under a constant coercive anxiety: what do I need to do next so I’m not wasting time? Some people like this feeling. It energizes them. If you are a gentle soul like me, though – introverted, sensitive, intuitive – it can actually be a painful sensation. As counterintuitive as it seems, learning how to waste time intentionally is the antidote to the anxiety associated with wasting time.

It’s easy to start this intentional practice of wasting time. It just requires a bit of dedicated practice – but honestly not even that much. The next time you start to feel that anxiety of having too much to do, or conversely, needing to fill some empty moments with activity so they aren’t wasted, sit down. The feeling I’m talking about here isn’t the discomfort you may feel when you have a specific task you want to get done but aren’t looking forward to doing. Rather, I mean that diffuse and pervasive anxiety of having an overloaded schedule or needing to productively use your time. Sit down. Not at your desk or other place of work, but somewhere you’d usually only sit when you are resting, or where you would never sit at all. A sofa, that odd chair you keep in the corner for junk to go on, even the floor. This signals to your brain that regardless of all the things you feel you need to do, you’re not going to do them right now. Because they can wait. Because they aren’t emergencies. Because they might not actually be as important as you think they are. Maybe there are some you don’t have to do at all.

Sit with this and breathe. You don’t have to try to clear your mind, just make sure it knows that right now you are wasting time intentionally because you don’t like feeling stressed out about all the things it’s saying you have to do. Wait until your mind settles on something you actually want to do – it could be getting back to work (often it is, you’d be surprised), or watching some TV, or more sitting, maybe out in the sun. Then do that thing. Most of the time it’s not the activities themselves that create anxiety in our lives, but the pressure we put on ourselves to get them done. If you keep up this practice, gradually your life will not only feel more in your control, and thus less stressful, but you’ll find more value in what you’re doing because you’ll be doing more of what you want to do. And you’ll probably find that many of the things you thought you had to get done…well, you don’t have to do them at all. This practice has genuinely changed my life to the point that I rarely feel task-related stress anymore, which is incredible, when you think about it. When I do start to feel that stress, I just sit down and start to waste time.