#55: Inertia and your overthinking dick brain
That positive change you need to make, which you're not making. It's because of your perfectionist anxieties, right? It's because of the intimidating hugeness of the task, because of your lack of confidence in your abilities to deal with problems along the way, because of your daddy issues and your need to maintain a work-life balance and your conscientious reluctance to commit to something you might not see through.
Sorry, pal, but that's all bollocks. Your amazing brain, which is the very reason you shine like the brilliant star you are, is tying you up in overthinking knots here. Stop wringing your hands and STFU for a second. Just make a start, and see (a lot of) your problems melt away.
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 week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, my lovely friends. Let me make a confession to you. Much as I’d love to pretend that what I’m about to share is all for your benefit and offered purely for pedagogical purposes, it’s not (although I hope it will be a bit). What I’m going to tell you is partly because I need some accountability so that I can shame myself into doing something that I’ve been meaning to get around to doing for literally years - perhaps even more than a decade. The ALCS - which stands for the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society - is a British organisation that collects and pays out royalties. You sign up, tell them what articles and other stuff you’ve written, and then they send you cheques at regular intervals. Perhaps you already know about them, and perhaps, if you’re a writer, you’re already signed up and coining it in - in which case, congratulations, and I’m in awe of your organisational skills. I’m not doing so well: I signed up around 10 years ago, but I’ve never got around to sending them a list of stuff that I’ve written, assuming that’s how it works, because I’ve never actually investigated that properly either. So, I’ve been going without money that’s owed to me for years. When I was doing my tax return last month - you know, right at the last minute, like everyone else - I was prioritising getting that done on time because I didn’t want to pay the fine for being late (at least, that’s what I’m assuming happens if you’re late, but again, I’ve never actually investigated), and it occurred to me just how daft some of my attitudes are around this stuff. You know, bending over backwards to meet the tax return deadline in order to avoid a fine while at the same time spending years losing out on significant amounts of money that I’m actually owed because I haven’t got around to filling in a form. In both cases, not doing the thing means losing money, so why do I care more about one than the other? In case part of it is about accountability - my accountant was waiting for me to send him the info about my tax return, but nobody’s waiting for me to do the ALCS admin - I’m telling you about it here, and I promise to update you in my next episode about how I’ve got on - and if I report back that I still haven’t done it, I hereby give you permission to pay me a visit and kick me in the shins.
But it’s not all about accountability, and here I get around to this episode’s topic, which is a nice follow-on from the last episode’s topic: again, I want to talk about how to make a start on the stuff you need to do when you’re overwhelmed by how much there is to get done. Because that’s what’s going on here, I think. That’s a big part of why I haven’t filled in that bloody form, and why I’m losing money as a result. You see, when I think about doing this, the first thing that occurs to me is: I’m going to have to make a list of all the articles I’ve ever written. And, because I’m a disorganised mess who you definitely shouldn’t be trying to emulate - seriously, these episodes are all about ‘do as I say, not as I do’ - I don’t actually have a list anywhere of all the stuff that I’ve written. Or rather, I do - I’ve had to compile lists like that when I’ve applied for jobs and grants and stuff like that - but I haven’t done that very recently, and certainly not since I last published something. So, I have this concern that if I try to pull that list together, it’s going to be wrong, in that it’s going to have stuff missing. Now, I know that I should just do it, that an incomplete list is better than no list, and that I can always add things later if I realise I’ve missed stuff out. Of course I know that. But still, the thought of writing a list that is going to be wrong is … well, you know exactly what I mean: we hate writing stuff that might not be perfect, right? That’s why we have such trouble writing. That’s why you’re listening to a podcast about not being a perfectionist. So, I put it off. It’s important, but it’s never urgent. I’m not letting anyone down by not doing it, except for myself, of course, and like you, I’m pretty chilled about letting myself down. (I hope you’re screaming at me that I definitely shouldn’t be chilled about that - I’d be screaming it at myself too if I weren’t busy talking to you.)
What this attitude amounts to is this: doing this thing right is an intimidating prospect, and because I think I’ll probably fail at doing it right, I’m avoiding doing it at all. I’m going to put it off. It’s too scary. It makes me feel bad. It’s better to leave things as they are than to do things wrong. Even though they’re already wrong, and doing the thing wrong is still an improvement on continuing with the haven’t-even-started wrong. This is where I am with doing that bloody ALCS paperwork. But this attitude is responsible for people getting stuck in some much more serious ruts, too. Staying in a job or relationship that you know isn’t right, where doing the work to get to somewhere that is right is a terrifying prospect - you don’t have the energy, there’s so much that could go wrong, there would be trouble and headaches and chaos along the way, and so isn’t it better to stay where you are, because although it’s very far from perfect and perhaps very far from even minimally satisfactory, it’s at least familiar. Because uncertainty is terrifying, isn’t it?
Now, in the last episode, I gave you a tip for how you can break through this kind of thinking, which is all-or-nothing thinking, really: I either stay where I am or I make things perfect and there’s nothing in between. In the last episode I suggested you start with the question: how can I make things 1% better than they are? That’s a way to push back against the all-or-nothing, and to free up space to make incremental improvements, and that’s important because most of the time incremental improvements are the only sorts of improvements it’s possible to make.
In this episode, I want to suggest something shocking. Something you’re not going to believe, at least initially, so bear with me. It’s this: I know you feel like the reason you’re procrastinating about making that positive change is because you’re scared that you won’t make a good enough (read: perfect) job of attaining the end goal - whether that’s leaving your broken relationship, resigning from your job, or filling in a form - but you’re not. You’re actually totally fine with that. I know it feels like fear, but really it’s plain old inertia. Seriously. You only think you’re being held back by fear of this ominous task because you’re overthinking it, the way you overthink everything (and I hope you know that I say that with love). Inertia, defined by Oxford Languages - yep, I just googled it - is ‘a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.’ Or, as one of my school science teachers put it: unless something happens, a body in motion tends to remain in motion, and a body at rest tends to remain at rest. The reason you haven’t yet taken action to implement that change you know you need to make isn’t really because the task is ominous. It’s not really because you don’t think you’re capable of making the change and getting it right - it’s simply because you need a nudge in the right direction. Just a little one. Like when you tap a ball very gently with the tip of your shoe and set it off rolling down the hill.
How do I know this? Why is it that I’m claiming that the problem is inertia and not something more intellectualised? Ok, well, to clear something up right at the start, and because I’m a professional pedant (also known as a philosopher) let me say this: I’m not that interested in making any deep claim about what’s really going on when you procrastinate about making a positive change, in the sense that I’m not interested in lifting the bonnet of reality and peering underneath to find out more about how it all works. I don’t think that matters. I’m not here to provide you with metaphysical insights about yourself - well, I guess I am occasionally, though not today - today I’m here to offer you helpful and constructive ways to think about yourself and your experiences. And I think that when you’re procrastinating about making a positive change, feeling overwhelmed by it, thinking that it’s better to leave things in their current not-good-enough state than to risk any potentially imperfect improvements - when you’re in the grip of all this exhausting intellectualised anxiety, it’s actually pretty helpful to have a way of meeting that that doesn’t involve yet more intellectualised stuff, because you’re already intellectualised out. It’s helpful, instead, to be able to turn to your overworked intellectualising muscle (shut up, okay, it’s science, kind of) - to turn all that off and say, calm the fuck down Karen and stop thinking of this as an extremely complex problem that requires an extremely complex solution - it’s just inertia. You’re just a chewed-up old tennis ball that some dog-walker has left lying on a hill, and all you need is for someone to give you a tiny tap with the toe of their shoe and then off you’ll go, rolling happily down the hill and sorting this stuff out like it’s nothing more than - well, kicking a ball down a hill.
I know this because time and again I’ve seen it happen in coaching sessions, and I’ve felt it myself too. That we’re dealing with inertia, rather than with something more intellectual, is revealed when we think about what we’re overwhelmed by in a particular way. Take my own procrastination over doing that paperwork for the ALCS. The idea of doing an imperfect job is stopping me from making a start. So, I’m going to ask myself this question: if I were to commit to working on this for 30 minutes, how would I expect to feel about the task at the end of it? In particular, given the choice, would I reset things back to the way they were before I made any start at all? Or would I be glad that I’d at least started, even though there would still be more to do and even though the progress I’d made so far was imperfect? And I know that the answer is: I’d be very pleased with myself for having started. The thought ‘but it’s not perfect!’ would not be figuring at all at that point. Let’s suppose that, at the end of the 30 minutes I committed to initially, I’d partially compiled a list of things I’d written. I can tell you without any doubt at all that then I’d be thinking that it’s good to have got some of it done, and that outcome is definitely better than not having made a start at all. What’s more, I probably wouldn’t leave it as an incomplete list, even though I’d be allowed to once the 30 minutes are up. I’d be motivated to make an effort to get the list as complete as I could. My 30 minutes would be up and I’d be thinking, ‘I just want to get this done so I don’t have to think about it any more’. It’s no longer an overwhelming task that needs to be put off and ignored - because who are we kidding? We’re never really ignoring these things. Once in motion - once I’ve had that tiny tap with the toe of a shoe - I’ll just keep going until it’s done. Once in motion, it’s not the completion of the task that’s off-putting - it’s the idea of stopping, of not having this ticked off the list, of still having to think about it tomorrow. Because that’s the great thing about inertia - it takes an effort to start, but once you’re properly rolling, carrying on takes care of itself.
Now, that initial question that I asked myself - which was ‘If I were to commit to working on this for 30 minutes, how would I expect to feel about the task at the end of it?’ - is going to need a bit of a tweak depending on what the ‘task’ is. What you want to capture here is a sense of how you think you’re going to feel once you’ve done that initial toe-tap to get things moving. So, let’s say that you’re in a relationship that’s making you unhappy - you want to make a fresh start, have a place of your own, breathe again, and all the rest of it. But, when you think of ending the relationship, you have a sense of overwhelm: there are going to be long, angsty discussions, possible recriminations, blame, deciding all the practical stuff like who’s going to move out and how you’re going to divide up joint financial commitments and things like that. And so you just ignore the problem and leave things as they are. But what if you were to make that first step: what might that look like? Perhaps it would involve having that conversation with your partner where you tell them that you want to end the relationship. Then the initial question might be ‘If I were to commit to having that conversation this evening, how would I feel about the task of ending the relationship tomorrow?’ And then reflect on that. How would you feel? In most cases, I think the answer is probably going to be something like: I’d be glad to have taken that first step, even knowing that there are going to be some tumultuous times ahead. In some cases, though, perhaps you might have reason to expect that, given the choice, you’d go back and erase that conversation, make it never have happened. That might be because you’re in a difficult position financially, or you don’t have a strong support network, or there are worries about custody of your kids if you have them, things like that. Or perhaps the relationship is abusive and you know you’d fear for your safety if you were to try to end it. Well, in that case, asking the question is still a useful exercise. Because if the answer to how you’d feel after making that first step is ‘I’d wish I’d left things as they were’, then you can look for ways to address that. It’s a change you want to make, after all. So, what would it take to put yourself in a state where you’d be glad to have made that first step? Perhaps you need to work on getting some financial independence, or talk to family and friends about whether it might be possible to stay with them for a bit if you need to, or confide in someone about any abuse you’re experiencing. Those sorts of things are still a start. They’re necessary parts of the process. And they’re things to which you can apply the 1% strategy that I talked about in the last episode. What can you do today to make it 1% more comfortable to take that first step? Do that, and then do it again, and again. Get the ball rolling down the hill, and the motion will soon take care of itself.
One way to summarise my message in this episode is this: your sophisticated, conscious, analytical, clever, logical, creative brain, useful as it often is, can also be a dick. It can get in the way. It can make perfectly tractable problems seem terrifying. It can make molehills look like mountains. Sometimes, you’re better off telling that side of yourself to zip it, and thinking in terms of inertia. What can I do to get the ball rolling? What does tapping it with my toe look like, in this context?
I like the way Stephen King expresses this ‘intellect is a dick’ thought in his novel, Bag of Bones. He - or rather the story’s protagonist, the writer’s block-burdened novelist Mike Noonan - says this: ‘So-called higher thought is, by and large, highly overrated. When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it’s generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That’s blue-collar labor down there, non-union guys with lots of muscles and tattoos. Instinct is their specialty, and they refer problems upstairs for actual cogitation only as a last resort’.
Maybe you could invite one of your boys - or girls - up from the basement to sit on the bench that’s usually occupied only by your inner critic. And when you find yourself struggling to make a start because you’re in the grip of perfectionist anxiety about doing it wrong or just not doing it right enough, imagine them rolling their eyes and telling you to just get on with it. What does making a start look like, according to them? It won’t hurt, I promise. It’s just a tiny toe-tap.
I’m off to take my own advice. See you next time.
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 like to 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 consider leaving 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’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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