How To Stop Procrastinating
Image by Mario Azzi
We all know about Fight and Flight responses, but what about their powerful cousin, Freeze? A freeze response can feel debilitating and create a sense of stuckness that might seem impossible to crawl out of. Sometimes we’re frozen to a point where we think giving up on our goal is the best, or only, option. The freeze response is a driving force behind experiences such as performance anxiety, as illustrated in Eminem’s Lose Yourself:
“He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready to drop bombs
But he keeps on forgetting what he wrote down, the whole crowd goes so loud
He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out
He’s choking now, everybody’s joking now
The clock’s run out, time’s up, over, blaow!”
It’s an especially common experience for artists and creatives. We’re visionaries, frequently receiving creative downloads and finding multiple sources of intrigue and inspiration throughout the day. When too much information is coming in, we can slow down, and our progress significantly delays or even comes to a halt.
Feeling “stuck” is a freeze response that you experience in your body.
When we feel stuck, we proceed to cloak ourself in numbness in order to avoid pain (this is just how our brain tries to keep us safe, and we’re all wired the same way). This can be experienced as apathy, shutting down, disassociated, or mentally/emotionally removed from a situation.
This is happening because our nervous system is flooded with too much information and our brain goes, “Fight! No, wait, freeze! Both at the same time!”. Since its impossible to do it all at once, we shut down!
Getting out of this “stuckness” is successfully executed with small, gentle steps, and for the quickest way out of freeze, the smaller the better. Through these small actions, we’re signaling to our brain that it is now safe to move forward, and our nervous system starts to calm down and find it’s balance.
I really want to emphasize taking gentle steps because we don’t want to get in the mindset of “punishing” ourselves for not being productive, taking action, moving the plan along, etc. We are human beings living the human experience, and therefore we must learn to master our human brain reactions as we go along. Our brain is just doing it’s job, and we want to recognize that there is nothing intrinsically “wrong” with how we are operating under certain conditions.
If you’re a writer, a gentle step looks like writing one paragraph of your novel vs. punishing yourself by trying to write the next three chapters. Ease back into your flow vs crashing into it, which is the formula for a long-term and sustainable creative process. EASE & GRACE.
Once our system calms down, we can start thinking creatively again (moving from our “reptile brain” and into our consciousness and mindful brain), and get back on track with what we are trying to do!
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