I have serious, serious issues with avoidance. I would like some advice on how to improve, as I suspect it is significantly holding me back.
Some examples of what I mean
I will not respond to an email or an urgent letter for weeks at a time, even while it causes me serious anxiety
I will procrastinate starting work in the morning, sometimes leading to me doing nothing at all by the afternoon
I will avoid looking for jobs or other opportunities, I have very strong avoidance here, but I’m not sure why
I will make excuses to avoid meetings and social situations very often
I will (unconsciously) avoid running experiments that might falsify a hypothesis I am attached to. I have only realised this very recently, and am consciously trying to do better, but it is somewhat shocking to me that my avoidance patterns even manifest here.
Checked replies so far, no one has given you the right answer.
Whenever you don’t do something, you have a reason for not doing it. If you find yourself stuck in a cycle of intending to do, and not doing, it’s always because you’re not taking your reason for NOT doing it seriously; you’re often habitually ignoring it.
When you successfully take your reasons for not doing something seriously, either you stop wanting to do it, or you change how you’re doing it, or your reason for not doing it simply goes away.
So, what does it mean/look like to take your reason for not doing something seriously? It doesn’t look like overanalyzing it in your head—if you find yourself having an internal argument notice that you’ve tried this a million times before and it hasn’t improved things.
It feels like listening. It feels like insight, like realizing something important that you hadn’t noticed before, or had forgotten about.
If you keep pursuing strategies of forcing yourself, of the part of you that wants to do the thing coercing the part(s) that don’t, then you’ll burn out. You’re literally fighting yourself; so much of therapy boils down to ‘just stop hitting yourself bro’.
Got over my avoidance of responding to replies here after a bit :)
I’ve tried a lot of self-help flavoured stuff (atomic habits etc.) before and it hasn’t worked, and Focusing seemed quite different. I’ve given it a go and I think I’ll try and work a bit more with it. After just a short session, I feel like I gained a significant insight, that I have a crippling fear of “being in trouble” that manifests as a tightness in my lower chest, and seems to activate a lot when I think about specific things I’m avoiding. Thanks for the resources, and the new way of looking at the problem.
What helps me to overcome the initial hurdle to start doing work in the morning:
Write a list of the stuff you have to do the next day
Make it very fine-grained with single tasks (especially the first few) being basically no effort.
Tick them off one by one
Also:
Tell people what you have to do and when you are going to do it and that you have done it. Like, a colleague, or your team, or your boss.
Do stuff with other people. Either actually together, like pair programming, or closely intertwined.
I think it also helps to take something you are good at and feel good about and in that context take responsibility for something and/or interact with/present to people. Only this kind of social success will build the confidence to overcome social anxiety, but directly trying to do the social stuff you feel worst about usually backfires (at least for me).
I recommend you read at least the first chapter of Getting Things Done, and do the corresponding exercises. In particular, this one, which he uses to provide evidence his model of productivity is correct
I suggest that you write down the project or situation that is most on your mind at this moment. What most bugs you, distracts you, or interests you, or in some other way consumes a large part of your conscious attention? It may be a project or problem that is really “in your face,” something you are being pressed to handle, or a situation you feel you must deal with sooner rather than later.
Maybe you have a holiday trip coming up that you need to make some major last-minute decisions about. You just read an e-mail about a new and pressing issue in your department. Or perhaps you just inherited six million dollars and you don’t know what to do with the cash. Whatever.
Got it? Good. Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”? It could be as simple as “Take the Hawaii vacation,” “Handle situation with customer X,” “Resolve college situation with Susan,” “Clarify new divisional management structure,” “Implement new investment strategy,” or “Research options for dealing with Manuel’s reading issue.” All clear? Great.
Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now? Would you call or text someone? Write an e-mail? Take pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Surf the Web for data? Buy nails at the hardware store? Talk about it face-to-face with your partner, your assistant, your attorney, or your boss? What?
Got the answer to that? Good.
Was there any value for you in those two minutes of thinking? If you’re like the vast majority of people who complete that drill in our seminars, you’ll be experiencing at least a tiny bit of enhanced control, relaxation, and focus. You’ll also be feeling more motivated to actually do something about that situation you’ve merely been thinking about till now. Imagine that motivation magnified a thousandfold, as a way to live and work.
If anything at all positive happened for you in this little exercise, think about this: What changed? What happened to create that improved condition within your own experience? The situation itself is no further along, at least in the physical world. It’s certainly not finished yet. What probably happened is that you acquired a clearer definition of the outcome desired and the next action required. What did change is the most important element for clarity, focus, and peace of mind: how you are engaged with your world.
But what created that? Not “getting organized” or “setting priorities.” The answer is, thinking. Not a lot; just enough to solidify your commitment about a discrete pressure or opportunity and the resources required dealing with it. People think a lot, but most of that thinking is of a problem, project, or situation—not about it. If you actually did this suggested exercise, you were required to structure your thinking toward an outcome and an action, and that does not usually happen without a consciously focused effort. Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not.
Edit: this doesn’t include practical advice, but a theoretical understanding of the issues at play is often helpful in implementing practical strategies
I want to suggest a long-term approach: learning to work with the emotions behind such persistent problems. Methods like IFS, Focusing, lovingkindness meditations are the right tools.
They *can* lead to practical improvements fairly quickly—once you get the hang of them. But learning to do them even right enough takes months of effort, curiosity, support from a community or a mentor. These things are basically meditations, subject to standard difficulties like overeffort, subtle wrong mindsets etc. They also tend to focus first on whatever feels most urgent to your subconscious system—like relationship stress or background anxiety you’ve gotten used to—so the email issue might not be the first thing that shifts.
Still, this is the only thing that really worked for me. And once it started working, it *really* worked.
If you’re interested, I can send my favourite links.
The key is to approach Focusing with the mindset of relaxing, having fun, playing around and experimenting. It’s emphasised in the talks on this website: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/metta. That particular series about loving kindness is very good.
I think there’s enough material in my head about it for a whole post, so I might write one eventually.
VIsualize yourself doing the thing until you do it. Note that this comes with substantial risk towards making you avoidant/averse to visualizing yourself doing the thing until you do it; this is a recursive procedurally generated process and you should expect to need to keep on your toes in order to succeed. Aversion factoring is a good resource to start with, and Godel Escher and Bach is a good resource for appreciating the complexity required for maintenance and the inadequacy of simple strategies.
I have similar issues, severity varies over time. If I am in a bad place, things that help best: - taking care of mental health. I do CBT when i’m in worse shape, and take SSRIs. YMMV. both getting dianosed and treated are important. this also includes regular exercise and good sleep. what you have described might be (although does not have to be) related to depression, anxiety, attention disorders. - setting a timer for a short time, can be as short as 1min, and doing one of the avoided tasks for just that 1 minute. it kind if “breaks the spell” for me - journaling, helps to “debug” the problems, and in most cases leads to wring down plans / intervations / resolutuons
If this would not obviously make things worse, be more socially connected with people who have expectations of you; not necessarily friends but possibly colleagues or people who simply assume you should be working at times and get feedback about that in a natural way. It’s possible that the prospect of this is anxiety-inducing and would be awful but that it would not actually be very awful.
Recognize that you don’t need to do most things perfectly or even close to it, and as a corollary, you don’t need to be particularly ready to handle tasks even if they are important. You can handle an email or an urgent letter without priming yourself or being in the right state of mind. The vast majority of things are this way.
Sit in the start position of your task, as best as you can operationalize that (e.g, navigate to the email and open it, or hit the reply button and sit in front of it), for one minute, without taking your attention off of the task. Progress the amount of time upwards as necessary/possible. (One possible success-mode from doing this is that you get bored of being in this position or you become aware that you’re tired of the thing not being done. (You would hope your general anxiety about the task in day-to-day life would achieve this for you, but it’s not mechanically optimized enough to.) Another possible success-mode is that the immediate feelings you have about doing the task subside.)
I’ve had similar issues downstream of what I’d somehow failed to realize was a clinically-significant level of anxiety, so that’s something to maybe consider checking into.
If you haven’t already, talk to a guy! (typically a therapist but doesn’t have to be)
I have something like this but for decisions, where I will avoid making decisions for mysterious reasons (we figured out it’s because I can’t be sure it’d be pareto optimal, among other reasons).
I now notice more often when I’m doing this, and correct more gracefully.
I have serious, serious issues with avoidance. I would like some advice on how to improve, as I suspect it is significantly holding me back.
Some examples of what I mean
I will not respond to an email or an urgent letter for weeks at a time, even while it causes me serious anxiety
I will procrastinate starting work in the morning, sometimes leading to me doing nothing at all by the afternoon
I will avoid looking for jobs or other opportunities, I have very strong avoidance here, but I’m not sure why
I will make excuses to avoid meetings and social situations very often
I will (unconsciously) avoid running experiments that might falsify a hypothesis I am attached to. I have only realised this very recently, and am consciously trying to do better, but it is somewhat shocking to me that my avoidance patterns even manifest here.
Checked replies so far, no one has given you the right answer.
Whenever you don’t do something, you have a reason for not doing it.
If you find yourself stuck in a cycle of intending to do, and not doing, it’s always because you’re not taking your reason for NOT doing it seriously; you’re often habitually ignoring it.
When you successfully take your reasons for not doing something seriously, either you stop wanting to do it, or you change how you’re doing it, or your reason for not doing it simply goes away.
So, what does it mean/look like to take your reason for not doing something seriously?
It doesn’t look like overanalyzing it in your head—if you find yourself having an internal argument notice that you’ve tried this a million times before and it hasn’t improved things.
It looks like, and indeed just basically is, Focusing (I linked to a lesswrong explainer, but honestly I think Eugene Gendlin does a much better job)
It feels like listening. It feels like insight, like realizing something important that you hadn’t noticed before, or had forgotten about.
If you keep pursuing strategies of forcing yourself, of the part of you that wants to do the thing coercing the part(s) that don’t, then you’ll burn out. You’re literally fighting yourself; so much of therapy boils down to ‘just stop hitting yourself bro’.
Oh nice, stavros already got it before I posted :)
This is the path forward.
Got over my avoidance of responding to replies here after a bit :)
I’ve tried a lot of self-help flavoured stuff (atomic habits etc.) before and it hasn’t worked, and Focusing seemed quite different. I’ve given it a go and I think I’ll try and work a bit more with it. After just a short session, I feel like I gained a significant insight, that I have a crippling fear of “being in trouble” that manifests as a tightness in my lower chest, and seems to activate a lot when I think about specific things I’m avoiding. Thanks for the resources, and the new way of looking at the problem.
Ouch, you beat me to my answer, but I’m always glad to see fellow practitioners :)
I have had and solved fairly extreme versions of this in myself, and have helped people with debilitating versions of this resolve it multiple times.
You’re stuck in a loop of some part of you pushing to do the object level thing so hard that it has no sensitivity to the parts of you that are averse to it. Whenever you notice you’re spinning your wheels; stop trying to force through the object level action and let yourself actually notice the feeling of resistance with open curiosity. Let let unfold into the full message that brain fragment is trying to send, rather than overcompressed “bad”/”aversion”.
What helps me to overcome the initial hurdle to start doing work in the morning:
Write a list of the stuff you have to do the next day
Make it very fine-grained with single tasks (especially the first few) being basically no effort.
Tick them off one by one
Also:
Tell people what you have to do and when you are going to do it and that you have done it. Like, a colleague, or your team, or your boss.
Do stuff with other people. Either actually together, like pair programming, or closely intertwined.
I think it also helps to take something you are good at and feel good about and in that context take responsibility for something and/or interact with/present to people. Only this kind of social success will build the confidence to overcome social anxiety, but directly trying to do the social stuff you feel worst about usually backfires (at least for me).
Similar here:
make a to-do list (and occasionally look at it)
write down the steps that need to be done
talk to someone about it
I suspect that in my case it some kind of attention deficit disorder: lists and notes and talking help me focus again.
I recommend you read at least the first chapter of Getting Things Done, and do the corresponding exercises. In particular, this one, which he uses to provide evidence his model of productivity is correct
Read about Ugh fields on LW
Edit: this doesn’t include practical advice, but a theoretical understanding of the issues at play is often helpful in implementing practical strategies
I want to suggest a long-term approach: learning to work with the emotions behind such persistent problems. Methods like IFS, Focusing, lovingkindness meditations are the right tools.
They *can* lead to practical improvements fairly quickly—once you get the hang of them. But learning to do them even right enough takes months of effort, curiosity, support from a community or a mentor. These things are basically meditations, subject to standard difficulties like overeffort, subtle wrong mindsets etc. They also tend to focus first on whatever feels most urgent to your subconscious system—like relationship stress or background anxiety you’ve gotten used to—so the email issue might not be the first thing that shifts.
Still, this is the only thing that really worked for me. And once it started working, it *really* worked.
If you’re interested, I can send my favourite links.
I would be interested in the list of your favourite links!
part 2 of “Focusing” by Eugene Gendlin is very good to read and it helps to start.
This next article is my favourite one on all of the internet:
https://open.substack.com/pub/sashachapin/p/what-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-about?r=42y10u&utm_medium=ios
The key is to approach Focusing with the mindset of relaxing, having fun, playing around and experimenting. It’s emphasised in the talks on this website: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/metta. That particular series about loving kindness is very good.
I think there’s enough material in my head about it for a whole post, so I might write one eventually.
VIsualize yourself doing the thing until you do it. Note that this comes with substantial risk towards making you avoidant/averse to visualizing yourself doing the thing until you do it; this is a recursive procedurally generated process and you should expect to need to keep on your toes in order to succeed. Aversion factoring is a good resource to start with, and Godel Escher and Bach is a good resource for appreciating the complexity required for maintenance and the inadequacy of simple strategies.
I have similar issues, severity varies over time.
If I am in a bad place, things that help best:
- taking care of mental health. I do CBT when i’m in worse shape, and take SSRIs. YMMV. both getting dianosed and treated are important. this also includes regular exercise and good sleep. what you have described might be (although does not have to be) related to depression, anxiety, attention disorders.
- setting a timer for a short time, can be as short as 1min, and doing one of the avoided tasks for just that 1 minute. it kind if “breaks the spell” for me
- journaling, helps to “debug” the problems, and in most cases leads to wring down plans / intervations / resolutuons
See here. (Perhaps also relevant: PDA)
If this would not obviously make things worse, be more socially connected with people who have expectations of you; not necessarily friends but possibly colleagues or people who simply assume you should be working at times and get feedback about that in a natural way. It’s possible that the prospect of this is anxiety-inducing and would be awful but that it would not actually be very awful.
Recognize that you don’t need to do most things perfectly or even close to it, and as a corollary, you don’t need to be particularly ready to handle tasks even if they are important. You can handle an email or an urgent letter without priming yourself or being in the right state of mind. The vast majority of things are this way.
Sit in the start position of your task, as best as you can operationalize that (e.g, navigate to the email and open it, or hit the reply button and sit in front of it), for one minute, without taking your attention off of the task. Progress the amount of time upwards as necessary/possible. (One possible success-mode from doing this is that you get bored of being in this position or you become aware that you’re tired of the thing not being done. (You would hope your general anxiety about the task in day-to-day life would achieve this for you, but it’s not mechanically optimized enough to.) Another possible success-mode is that the immediate feelings you have about doing the task subside.)
Beta-blockers.
I’ve had similar issues downstream of what I’d somehow failed to realize was a clinically-significant level of anxiety, so that’s something to maybe consider checking into.
If you haven’t already, talk to a guy! (typically a therapist but doesn’t have to be)
I have something like this but for decisions, where I will avoid making decisions for mysterious reasons (we figured out it’s because I can’t be sure it’d be pareto optimal, among other reasons).
I now notice more often when I’m doing this, and correct more gracefully.