#108: Your writing warm-up
Do you know how writing is supposed to feel when it's going well? If you're anything like I was a few years ago, you have some pretty bizarre ideas here, involving things like hours on end of laser-sharp flow, iron-clad willpower to resist distractions, and a mind that is drawn towards lofty ideas instead of flighty nonsense. The fact that my actual experiences with writing didn't remotely resemble this fantasy was, in my mind, due to my many shameful shortcomings. I'm not like that now, and my writing goes a lot better as a result. In large part, that's because I better understand what writing is really like. And in this episode I want to talk about an aspect of that: the writing warm-up.
When you're done with this episode, why not go and listen to Bethany Wilinski interview me on her podcast, Sabbatical 101?
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi everyone! How are you doing? Do you know, I’ve been thinking recently about how incredibly helpful doing this podcast has been with helping me battle my perfectionism-related demons. Seriously. When I think back to how fraught and frozen the writing process was for me 5 years ago compared to now, there’s a world of difference. I actually get writing done these days, without too much procrastination. I don’t mean I’m effortlessly churning out thousands of perfect words every day, or that I sit at my desk and type away for hours on end without a break, lost in a glorious state of flow, or any of the other things that I used to view as the only acceptable way to work. But even so, I’m getting down modest bits of writing most days, and it all adds up. Consistency beats intensity, as they say. Perhaps it strikes you as obvious that spending several years podcasting about how to dump perfectionism would result in my having a healthier attitude towards my own efforts. Perhaps it is obvious, in which case I’m probably a bit slow, because it’s been somewhat unexpected. I tend to think of myself as very bad at taking my own advice. There’s often a big difference between what I know I should be doing or thinking and what I actually do or think. I mean, that’s part of rejecting perfectionism. But, as I’ve said to a few people over the years, I think of myself as being very bad with the old growth mindset. You know, the idea that just because you can’t do something now doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to do it, and that instead of saying ‘I can’t do X’ you should train yourself to say ‘I can’t do X yet’. Whenever I’ve realised that I can’t do something that I want to be able to do, I’ve always been very pessimistic about the potential for improvement. I know other people can improve. But, I’m not other people. And yet, here I am, undeniably in a better place than I was a few years ago. And as I record this episode, I find myself in the unsettling situation of possibly being on course to finish something early. Imagine! I honestly can’t remember the last time that happened.
Anyway. There hasn’t been an identifiable moment when everything snapped into place, and in any case it’s not as if I’m now a productivity powerhouse - I’m just someone who gets most of her important stuff done, and who accepts the way she works, including its many imperfect aspects. (If you’re one of the people who’s emailed me in the last few months and is still waiting for a reply, then congratulations, you’re experiencing one of those imperfect aspects first-hand - and I’m really sorry, I really do plan to get round to it eventually, please don’t hate me.) There’s not one weird trick that I can point to and say, that’s what fixed me! It’s more that, over time, slowly and incrementally, through exposure to sensible ideas even when I was quite sceptical about them, I’ve got to a more wholesome place.
Now, a lot of the things I talk about on this podcast are ideas that I know - with my rational hat on - are sensible, but which emotionally I have a hard time inhabiting. And I know a lot of you are like that too. In coaching sessions, I’ve seen the sceptical faces when I say things like, ‘But seriously, you’ll do better if you start being nicer to yourself, here’s the research to prove it’. I know how that scepticism feels because I’ve felt it myself. It’s interesting how we can come, eventually, to embrace certain ideas even while it feels like we are absolutely confident that they’re complete rubbish. Self-compassion is a fantastic way to enhance your productivity, as well as a fantastic way to make life more pleasant for yourself - and if your reaction to that is to think ‘yeah RIGHT’ then trust me - mull it over even though it strikes you as nonsense. Sometimes our helpful beliefs and attitudes arrive and eventually embed even though they have been rejected by our rational selves - and in any case, the plot twist is that what you think of as your ‘rational self’ is probably your inner critic in disguise.
But. I digress. Helpful beliefs that strike us initially as implausible aren’t what I want to talk about here. What I want to talk about is an idea that, when I encountered it, immediately struck me as ground-breakingly plausible and helpful and sensible, and which has been a big part of what’s helped me to develop a more positive relationship with my writing. Believe it or not, I tend not to talk much about those sorts of ideas in this podcast - you know, the ideas that I can get behind right from the start. The reason is that after I’ve got over that initial ‘Wow!’ reaction, ideas like that start to strike me as extremely obvious, things that I ought to have known, and then I feel a bit embarrassed about how mind-blowing I found them, which means that I’m definitely not then going to make a podcast episode in which I announce to the world that I’ve only just learned this thing that everyone else has always known. It would be a bit like making a podcast episode called something like, ‘OMG I’ve just discovered that 10+1=11! MIND BLOWN!!!!!’ But, after my recent reflections about how much progress I’ve made with writing, it occurred to me that maybe I should make episodes about things like this. They’re things that helped me, after all, so perhaps they’ll help other people too. And maybe my account of what it felt like to absorb these ideas might be helpful too. My topic for this episode falls into this category. I want to talk about something that blew my mind and helped me level up my writing despite being brain-numbingly bloody obvious. And it’s this: it turns out, based on irrefutable scientific evidence, that 10+1=11. Just kidding. That’s not the thing I want to talk about.
Here’s the thing I want to talk about. Are you ready? I promise you, it’s both earth shattering and completely mundane at the same time. It’s this: if you want to write, you need to do a warm-up first. The same way that if you want to do a workout, you need to do a warm-up first. You know I love writing/exercise metaphor, and I’m indebted for this particular framing to Professor Chris Rea in my interview with him and Professor Tom Mullaney in episode #101. But before that, I was introduced to the idea that it’s completely normal for there to be a bit of a lag when you sit down to write, before you can focus properly on the task you want to do, by an episode of the Huberman Lab podcast. There, it was framed as a fact about the brain. When you sit down to write, or to do anything other task that’s relatively demanding on your attention and your focus, it’s going to take you about 15 minutes of struggle and resistance before you can get into it. And that 15 minute lag is because your brain needs to adjust - it can’t just snap into focus mode instantaneously. This idea blew my mind because of how morally neutral it is. It’s just how the brain works. Your brain needs to warm up. That’s the explanation for the resistance and distraction and frustration I’d feel when I sat down to work - it had nothing to do with my being lazy or stupid or weak-willed, or any of the other moral failings I used to knee-jerk ascribe to myself when I wasn’t performing the way I thought I ought to perform. Wow. This was a stunning insight, to me. And yet, after 5 minutes of reflecting on it, I could see that it should have been obvious.
So, why did this ‘revelation’ have such an impact on me? I think there are two reasons. The first is that, as I said, it gave me an explanation for my difficulty with writing that didn’t relate to my own moral failings. Honestly, it hadn’t even occurred to me that there could be a completely neutral explanation that didn’t reflect on my personal shortcomings. It often happens - not just in my own case, but with a lot of the people I’ve spoken to in coaching sessions - that when we’re preoccupied with how inadequate we are, we’re quick to assume that our own failings explain every difficulty we encounter. Despite being smart people who are trained and employed to consider and evaluate alternative explanations for what we encounter, the blinkers go on when it comes to explaining our own experiences. So, in large part, this ‘warm up’ idea was a big deal for me because it was a reassurance that it was normal to feel this way, that it wasn’t evidence that something was wrong.
And then the second lesson I took was that the initial discomfort is temporary. How long it lasts depends on which study you look at - go and google ‘how long does it take to focus’ and you’ll find various answers. But somewhere between 15 minutes and 23 minutes. You just need to grit your teeth and get through that, and then you’ll ease into the task and there won’t be that sense of friction. This was big news to me, because I was assuming that the warm-up was the writing. So, the discomfort I felt was going to last for however long I was going to spend writing, which, ideally, if I was to have any claim to be an acceptable human, was going to be hours and hours. Which is actually really odd, because my experience has always been in line with this apparently new insight: that the resistance is temporary, that I get into it after a while. But, somehow I managed to dismiss this. Maybe it was easier that other time because the work was easier, because there was less at stake, because I didn’t have a smartphone back then, or whatever. In other words, I was, again, so focused on my own shortcomings that I wasn’t managing to think sensibly about this.
So while, on the one hand, it’s sort of obvious that it takes a while to warm up to a cognitively demanding task like writing, it’s easy to lose sight of that and focus on the anxiety instead. If you’re already someone who struggles to accept that they’re up to the job, any sign that you’re failing can look like confirmation of that. Instead of thinking, ‘Wow, these first 15 minutes are hard work’, we end up thinking, ‘Yet more evidence that I can’t write’. By failing to recognise that there’s this completely normal warm-up period that we have to go through before we can get on with our writing, we end up making really unhelpful and misleading comparisons: we compare ourselves at the warm-up stage with earlier versions of ourselves when we were in a flow state which leads us to think ‘I used to be able to write and now I can’t’, or we compare ourselves at the warm-up stage to other people who are mid-writing session, and we think ‘I can’t bring myself to focus on this for longer than 10 seconds but my colleague has been working all morning without a distraction’. I’ve done both of those, many times, and misery and inadequacy has resulted.
When we make the mistake of thinking that the first 15 minutes of writing is what the entire process is going to be like, we make our problems even worse. In my own case, that first 15 minutes was such a struggle that I often gave up before I reached the end of it, which meant I didn’t make it past the warm-up stage. And that meant that I amassed this horrible library of writing memories in which it was always or mostly unpleasant and unrewarding and infused with thoughts about how bad I was at this, which just made me want to avoid it even more next time, and then that avoidance itself ended up teaching me that sitting down to write was something to be feared. I never got to enjoy the relative ease of what came after the warm-up period, or at least my experiences of it became so few and far between that they struck me as complete flukes, which it would be a mistake to expect because most of the time writing was horrible. And the result of that was I didn’t make the progress I wanted to make, so I attacked myself, felt like I couldn’t do it, all of which became confirmed even more strongly the next time I sat down to write and struggled to focus. It’s little wonder that I came to view my relationship with writing as akin to a phobia. What compounded this was my reluctance to share with anyone else what it was like for me. I was too ashamed. So I felt completely alone. I’ve since realised that lots of people have comparable experiences, so if all this strikes a chord for you, I hope you can find some comfort in my story and take away some helpful ideas about how to move forward.
Ah, yes. Helpful ideas. Let’s talk about those, shall we? What can you do if you find yourself in this horrible situation? The most important thing, I think, is to make an effort to form realistic ideas about what writing is going to feel like. I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’re never going to be someone whose normal writing day involves 8 hours of laser sharp focus following which they have a final draft paper which editors of the fanciest journals are vying to accept even before the final full stop has been added to brilliantchapterV1.doc. I mean, maybe some weird people can do that, but if so, they probably don’t listen to this podcast. Instead, recognise that when you sit down to write, even on your best and most productive and satisfying days, it’s just unrealistic to aim for an experience of completely homogenous flow that begins, already dialled up to 11, the second you sit down at your desk and continues at full throttle until you decide to call it a day. That shouldn’t need saying, and I’m only saying it because I wish someone had said it to Past Rebecca. What actually happens is, as I’ve said, there will be a warm-up period during which you’ll struggle to focus, you’ll want to do something else, you might not know how to start or what to do, and in general you’ll feel like you’re having to drag yourself through the process. It will get easier. However. Don’t go expecting that the post-warm-up period is going to be wall-to-wall effortless flow. It might involve fits and starts of productivity. There might be moments of uncertainty, needing to look things up, pauses to think and reflect, realisations that you’ve made a mistake and need to backtrack and try again - recognise that all of these things fall under the umbrella of ‘writing’ and ‘focusing’. They don’t happen because you’re doing it wrong. They’re things that happen when you’re doing it right.
It’s helpful to return to the workout analogy here, I think. Both writing and workouts involve a warm-up. But just as what follows the writing warm-up isn’t necessarily going to be a uniformly strong, consistent effort, you don’t usually get that with a workout either. Sometimes you can, with a workout, especially if you’re doing a short workout that’s well within your capabilities. But if you’re doing a challenging workout, then things are different. You’ll get tired. You’ll get wobbly. You’ll lose focus. You’ll be slower and possibly in pain. And - this bit is key - when it comes to writing, the sort of writing that people tend to struggle with is the challenging sort. Most people who will admit to struggling with writing aren’t talking about writing emails or Facebook posts or shopping lists - all things which are well within their capabilities, equivalent to an undemanding workout. The sort of writing they struggle with is the original research that they’re trying to get published somewhere impressive, or the grant application that they’re hoping to get funded - difficult, tiring, outside-the-comfort-zone stuff. What productivity looks like when you’re doing that sort of writing is patchy and frustrating even if you’re doing everything right. It’s the equivalent of marathon day for the athlete. Even if you haven’t skipped a training day, even if you’ve followed the nutrition plan and got enough sleep and taken your rest days seriously, your experience of the marathon isn’t going to be one of nice, easeful running from start to finish. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, it just means that the task itself is challenging. What you can do to help yourself here is to avoid viewing the hard, challenging parts as evidence that it’s not going well.
Here’s something else that’s really important. You need to recognise when a writing session is coming to an end, and be sensible about it, which means not beating yourself up when your focus starts to dwindle. Because focus is finite. Again, the exact numbers vary depending on what you read, but the gist is that you can sustain focus on a challenging task for a relatively short period - somewhere between 15 and 90 minutes - before you need to stop or take a break. Learn to recognise the signs that you need a break so that you can take it and come back later. For me, these days if I start thinking things like, ‘Let me just look up the name of that actor from that thing I’m watching on Netflix’ and ‘I wonder which is the best sort of yoga mat to buy, I’d better find some review articles’ then I view these as signs that I’ve probably stretched my focus as far as it’s going to go in this session. Sometimes I might be able to bring it back, but if I struggle, I’ve learnt to call it a day. What I used to do in the bad old days was try to force myself back to the task, fail, view the entire thing as yet more evidence that I’m lazy and inept, and I’d be glum for the rest of the day as I pottered unproductively about thinking of all the people who were sitting there in their blissful flow states, writing while I was failing.
I know, I know, you don’t want to let yourself off the hook. I used to be the same. I used to think that I had no excuse for not writing solidly for 8 hours a day. The result would be that on most days I got literally no writing done - I’m really not exaggerating here - and I’d feel terrible about it. That was me, on the hook. These days, if I can get half an hour of writing in, I call it a good day. My old self is screaming and stamping her feet with rage about how it’s just not good enough to write for that little time and be satisfied with it. But the result is the situation I described at the start of this episode: I’m getting far more writing these days than I used to.
Writing is hard, even when it’s going well. I hope that you can take something from this episode that will help you make your experience of writing a little easier. Is there one idea that I’ve described here that you can implement next time you sit down to write?
Oh, before I go, I was recently interviewed by Bethany Wilinski on her podcast, Sabbatical 101. Bethany is an academic and a sabbatical coach. I’ll put a link to the interview in the notes for this episode, so do check it out if you’re not too sick of hearing from me. And, I have plans to have Bethany on this podcast too! If you’re lucky enough to be on sabbatical, or if you’re looking forward to one, then you’re going to enjoy hearing Bethany’s insights about how you can get the most out of that precious time.
Next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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