#92: Your writing-anxiety Sliding Doors moment
Remember that movie, Sliding Doors? Gwyneth Paltrow's character lost her job and then we saw how her life unfolded in dramatically different ways, depending on whether she missed her train or not. Your writing anxiety is a bit like this. The way you respond to your writing anxiety determines whether you'll find writing much easier or much harder tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. The stakes are high, but making the right choice is easier than you think. It only takes a few minutes. Get comfortable and have a listen.
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 again, friends. Here I am, surrounded by cats as usual. Grayson is lying on the desk in front of me. Madam Puff is on the floor next to me. Bramble is curled up on the sofa behind me. Lou, who is currently sleeping just outside my office, makes regular guest appearances in my episodes - he’s generally very noisy and he makes his shouty way over to me whenever I’m sitting at my desk and talking. I used to re-record the parts that he interrupted, but I don’t bother any more. I’m supposed to be modelling imperfection, after all. The production software I use tones him down but usually doesn’t manage to remove him completely. Now, if you’re a regular listener, you’ll be used to hearing me talk about my cats, but did you know that for many years I had pet rats? Hambel was my first one. She was brown and had a white tummy. I got her when I was an undergraduate. She belonged to a friend of a friend whose landlord had discovered her pet rat and insisted she got rid. Hambel was wonderful. She liked eating strawberries and tearing up paper. She had a cage, but usually the door was open so she could come out and explore. Whenever I arrived home from somewhere, she’d bound over and climb into my lap for snuggles. Towards the end of her life, I lived with an ill-advised boyfriend. Hambel was nice to everyone except him. She would chase him around nipping his feet. She stole his food. She climbed into the bookcase and wee’d all over his books, but never on mine, which was super impressive because our books were all mixed up together. (Don’t mix up your books with your partner’s books, it makes things difficult later.) She died on the day we broke up, as if she’d decided that I was finally capable of doing life without her. I met Hambel when my housemate brought her home, having initially agreed to have her stay with us just for a few days. Meeting her was my first ever close encounter with a rat. When I first approached her, I could feel my body recoiling a bit. I remember thinking to myself, ‘In this moment, I get to decide whether or not I’m afraid of rats’. I knew that whatever I did next was going to shape how I felt about rats. If I leant into that recoil and backed off and refused to get any closer, that recoil I felt would be even stronger the next time I saw Hambel, and I’d end up with a rat-phobia (‘musophobia’, apparently - I googled it). I didn’t want that to happen - musophobia would be inconvenient with a rat as a house guest, and also it would waste the opportunity to make a new furry friend. So, I pushed aside my incipient fear and got closer, let Hambel sniff my hand, offered her a snack … and within minutes she was my new pet. It’s interesting, though - that ‘sliding doors’ moment when I made that conscious choice not to be afraid of rats. You remember Sliding Doors - that movie from the 1990s where Gwyneth Paltrow gets fired from her job and then we see two parallel versions of what happens next, depending on whether or not she misses her train. My choice to push aside my recoil from Hambel led to years of having pet rats, my sister also having pet rats, making up silly songs about them, building them little houses, taking them on little holidays … right up until I bought my first home (this time with a different ill-advised boyfriend) at which point I switched to cats. (FYI Rats are better than cats while you’re renting because they’re easier to hide from landlords who don’t allow pets.) If I’d gone with that initial sense of fear and backed away from Hambel, none of that would have happened. I’d have been more likely to avoid rats in the future and that would have strengthened my fear of them, and then I suppose I’d have had to endure a lifetime of leaping up onto chairs and screaming at the mere mention of rodents - at least, that’s what they do on the telly. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently in relation to - believe it or not - writing anxiety. I’ve talked about writing anxiety many times in these episodes, and especially in episode #40: Why I took SO BLOODY LONG to write my book, where I talked about my own struggles with writing anxiety and the process of coming to understand a bit about what was going on and eventually … well, not overcoming it, exactly, but at least getting to a stage where I was able to move from that rabbit-in-the-headlights stage of freezing up whenever I tried to get any writing done, to a state where I could make a bit of progress and eventually finish my book project, which was eventually published last year and is called For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun, available from some good bookshops and perhaps some less good ones too. (That expression, ‘available from all good bookshops’, is a bit too passive aggressive for my liking - and as it happens, passive aggression and other forms of indirect communication are the focus of my next book, which I’m working on at the moment.) Ah, yes. That next book. I’ve been working on it for a while, and it’s been an opportunity to reflect on my relationship with writing, and to compare my progress this time round with the last one. In the process, I’m finding that my understanding of my anxieties around writing is progressing too. I understand more now about my issues around writing than I did when I made that episode I just mentioned. So much so that I’ve decided a new writing anxiety episode is in order. As I’ve said before, it took a lot of work and self-reflection to get to a point where I was able to identify my writing problems with anxiety. Before I worked out that it was anxiety, I didn’t know what it was, although if I had to guess I’d have gone with laziness or lack of discipline or some other character failing. But mostly it just struck me as utterly mysterious. I was at a loss for how to explain it. Here’s how I described the experience of trying to work on my book back in episode #40: I said, quote, ‘whenever I sat down at the laptop and thought about making a dent in the project, I was gripped by a mysterious force that made literally any activity other than working on the book seem irresistibly enticing. It felt a bit like when you try to push the wrong ends of two magnets together. I couldn’t get near it.’ I know that there are lots of you out there who struggle with something similar. One of you messaged me a few days ago - hello! - and I said to look out for this episode. I understand that feeling of being unable to get near a writing project - of feeling almost physically pushed away from it - a lot better now than I used to. I don’t feel it anywhere as strongly now as I did back then, but I definitely notice anxiety beginning to ramp up when I try to work on my current book project, in a way that doesn’t happen with other writing projects, including creating episodes for this podcast. My coming to understand this anxiety better has - as often happens in such cases - led to my being able to develop a strategy to help minimise, manage, and overcome it. It works, so I’d like to share this with you, in the hope that you might find it helpful. That feeling of being mysteriously pushed away from a writing project tends to happen with projects that - surprise surprise - have plenty of scope for anxiety. It might be something that people you know are going to read. It might be something linked to your identity - the sort of thing that makes you think, ‘This is what I do, and if I can’t manage to do this, then who even am I?’ It might be something on which an important outcome depends - like it needs to be good enough to ensure you get a qualification or tenure or a particular job or a publishing contract. It might be all of those. To be honest, you don’t need to have any great insight into what makes you anxious in order to work out whether your writing project is making you anxious: as a rule, if you procrastinate over it in a way that you’re worried about, then there’s anxiety there. And remember, anxiety doesn’t always feel the way you expect it to feel. It’s not always hyperventilation and a racing heart and sweating palms. Sometimes the avoidance is the anxiety. If you’re avoiding your writing project, then you have writing anxiety to some degree. Now, one important thing to note here is that anxiety around writing isn’t necessarily a problem. Sometimes it’s just the flip side of being a conscientious person, someone who cares about doing a good enough job, which is a good quality to have. It’s hard to care about doing a good enough job without worrying at least a little bit about failing to do a good enough job. You wouldn’t be listening to this episode if you weren’t someone who cares about the quality of what you write … unless, I suppose, you’re here for the stories about my pets, which is completely understandable. Anyway, my point is that if you’re a writer of any description, some level of writing anxiety is normal. What you don’t want, though, is for your writing anxiety to become a problem – something that upsets you or holds you back, or both. So, how can you prevent it from becoming a problem? And what can you do if it already is a problem? The first step is to notice that a particular writing project or activity is becoming – or already is – a source of anxiety for you. How can you tell? Well, the key here is whether you’re avoiding doing the thing. That’s what we’re interested in. And I’m not talking about avoiding it because you already have your hands full with other stuff and this thing just isn’t yet a high enough priority to justify your making room for it - I’m talking about avoiding it even though you think you should be working on it, and feeling stressed a bout the fact that you’re avoiding it. Ok, so you’ve recognised that you’ve becoming worryingly motivated to avoid doing a particular thing. A writing project, a job application, whatever. Next time you feel yourself motivated to avoid that thing, consider that your sliding doors moment. Because the way you respond to that urge to avoid it is going to shape your future relationship to it. By avoiding something that makes us anxious, we make ourselves even more anxious about it next time. By avoiding it, we’re teaching ourselves that it’s a threat. I think that’s what was going on with my last book, and my sense that there was a mysterious force pushing me away from it whenever I decided to have a go at working on it. I’d created that problem myself. It made me anxious, so I avoided it, and that made me even more anxious about it, more anxious than really made sense. I ended up, in a way, phobic about my own writing project. And when I say ‘I’d created that problem myself’, I’m not talking about blame. There’s no blame here, because there’s no wrongdoing. There’s nothing immoral about underproductivity. It’s about understanding the cause and effect. So, you’ve noticed that your writing project (or whatever it is) is making you anxious and that makes you want to avoid it, and here I am telling you not to give in to that urge to avoid it. Wow, great insight, Rebecca, why didn’t I think of that? Right? If only it were that simple. Understandably, you’re going to be wondering what you’re supposed to do instead, in that moment where you feel like not working on your writing project. Well, what do you normally say to yourself in that moment? I’m going to guess, based on my own experience and the things that people have told me about in coaching sessions, that – with the best of intentions – you tell yourself a load of stuff that piles the pressure on and makes the anxiety around your writing even worse. Things like, ‘I’ll never manage to finish this’ and ‘Other people just get on with their work, what’s wrong with me?’ and ‘I’m lazy’ and ‘Maybe I’m just not cut out for this’ and ‘Ok now I’m going to have to work even harder tomorrow to catch up’. What you need, in that moment, is an escape from your anxiety, but instead you’re making yourself even more anxious, and not because you’re trying to make things worse for yourself but because you’re feeling stressed and emotional and also because you’re confused about what the problem is and why you can’t just get on with the bloody thing. What I want you to try instead is to shift your focus. Instead of telling yourself that you really need to get over yourself and get this thing done, focus instead on the fact that the way you respond to your urge to avoid your writing project is going to shape how you feel about it tomorrow. Avoid it, and your anxiety is worse tomorrow. Beat yourself up about avoiding it, and your anxiety is worse tomorrow. Instead, see if you can bring yourself to work on it for a short amount of time. A few minutes. Just enough to teach yourself that it’s not that scary. It’s like exposure therapy: that strategy where psychologists help people overcome their fear of snakes or rats or germs of whatever by exposing them a bit at a time and building up. If you approach your writing anxiety in this way, you don’t jump right to the last therapy session and try to force yourself to toil away at it for hours on end to make up for all the time you’ve wasted up until now. You start with something very small. And your focus, at this stage, isn’t completing the project. It’s managing the anxiety. This is important. You’re working on the project for a short amount of time in order to manage the anxiety and ensure it’s not even more debilitating tomorrow. As it happens, working on the project for a short amount of time does more than just manage the anxiety. It also helps you make progress with the project, because even a few minutes a day is more progress than nothing. And it helps keep the project turning over in your mind. When you avoid writing, not only does that make your anxiety about it worse the next day, it also makes the writing project less fresh in your mind, and even a few minutes working on it help with this. I love Joli Jensen’s advice here in her wonderful little book, Write No Matter What, which you should definitely read if you’re an academic. She advises working on your writing project for 15 minutes every day (I’ve chosen to understand this to mean every week day, and let’s not be perfectionists about the ‘every’ either), but if you really can’t bring yourself to work on your writing for those 15 minutes, you use that time instead to journal about what the problem is. That way, you’re spending 15 minutes every day either keeping your writing project fresh in your mind, or if you can’t do that, working through your writing anxiety. If at this point you’re thinking, ‘I can’t possibly finish this project in just 15 minutes a day!’, fair point. There are plenty of times when we need to knuckle down and do more than the minimum. But it’s much easier to write for longer if we’re coming from a baseline of keeping the project fresh in our minds and well-managed anxiety levels than from a baseline of stress, panic, and a head-in-the-sand approach to writing. And besides, by working on the project (and your anxiety around it) little and often, you’ll be making steady progress that will build up over time and result in your having less of a need for those extended mad-panic writing sessions later. Here’s how I suggest you put this into practice. Next time you want to avoid your writing, don’t kid yourself that it will be easier tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Acknowledge that it definitely won’t be. Instead, say to yourself, ‘I really don’t want to do this thing, but I know that avoiding it is going to mean that next time I’ll want to avoid it even more.’ And then ask yourself, ‘What’s one thing I’m willing to do right now that will make it less scary tomorrow?’ And then do whatever that thing is. It might be working on it for 15 minutes, as Joli Jensen suggests. It might be simply locating and opening the right Word document, which is what the philosopher Quill Kukla advises their writing-anxious students to do. Or it could be something else. Remember, your objective is to tackle your anxiety, not to be productive. Tackling your writing anxiety, through exposing yourself to manageable levels of it, is a much more tractable problem than simply ‘be productive’. I can hear your heart rate increasing just hearing the words ‘be productive’. Feeling like you’d rather do anything other than write is your Sliding Doors moment, and what you do in the 15 minutes after you notice that feeling is enough to choose the version of your life where you feel a little bit less anxious about it tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, rather than the version where you spend the next 7 years apologising to your editor for the fact that your book is years overdue and where your agent threatens to die before it’s published and where you end up making multiple podcast episodes about the mysterious forces that were keeping you away from being productive so that hopefully other people can learn from your mistakes and do better. Oh, and if someone introduces you to their rat, pet it. Catch you later!
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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