We want writers to live happy and productive lives, for several reasons. Among these, it’s just good to be happy and engaged with writing. But also, it means more writing for us to edit! This is why we keep sharing tips on how to stay productive.
There are loads of good productivity techniques out there. Today we’ll share one of the more counterintuitive ones, because sometimes productivity advice is too product-oriented and oversimplifies the process. Trying really counterintuitive things drops us into the reality of the process very effectively.
The “Ugh” Phenomenon
Everyone faces moments (or hours, or days, or weeks) of “ugh”: that shapeless, powerful, unaccountable resistance to doing the thing. We’ve talked about it in several ways—overwhelm, akrasia, boredom, the doldrums—but we think that “ugh” is the most evocative way to put it.
The conventional wisdom for dealing with “ugh” is to break it down, feel it, name it, think it through so that it gets a shape. Once it takes on a shape, we can get a foothold and apply the techniques. This is good advice, and usually works. But sometimes the usual approach only makes it worse. Sometimes trying to bypass the shapeless, uncomfortable “ugh” feeling makes it more persistent. It’s as if it wants us to appreciate, at the embodied level, the difficult place we’re in. Our minds and bodies are complicated!
In this situation, we need to find a way to zag when our mind-body system expects us to zig. We need to break familiar patterns and find something counterintuitive. Here’s our modest contribution.
Make it Worse
It nothing else works, try to make the “ugh” worse. We can do this in two ways.
First, we can brainstorm ways to actively make it worse. Maybe we need to drink some caffeine, or erase everything we’ve written, or get angry at ourselves for feeling unmotivated, or fly into a panic about the deadlines that are coming, or catastrophize this situation. There’s lots of room for creative “solutions” here.
Second, we can try to feel the “ugh” more intensely and then react nonverbally in ways we know makes it worse. Try to make the “ugh” feel more shapeless, more uncomfortable, more chaotic, more foggy, more negative. Bring out all your tricks!
These two ways work together: from that place of intense “ugh”, you may find that new and “better” ideas for how to make it worse appear. Or more ideas make you feel worse. Roll with it.
Speeding through the Stuckness
Why would anyone do this? Three reasons.
First, when “ugh-“ing, we resist recalling the natural solutions that have worked for us in the past, but it’s easy to think of ways to make it worse. The neat thing is that once you’ve brainstormed ways of making it worse, it’s easy to modify them into strategies for moving in the opposite direction. For example, if drinking coffee makes it worse, then maybe drinking some water is the better way. Or if getting angry at ourselves is worse, maybe taking a deep breath, or feeling sadness, is the better way.
Second, when the “ugh” is more intense, it’s paradoxically easier to give it more shape. Most “ugh” feelings disguise themselves in the vagueness and fog of the overall feeling. If the feeling gets more energetic, then we’re more likely to pick up on patterns we can work with.
Third, doing this exercise is pretty ridiculous, which brings in a much-needed element of humour to what typically feels like a super-serious, high-stakes situation. Remember, humour is a healthy coping mechanism!
Consciously trying to make “ugh” worse doesn’t work very well, which ironically makes it pretty safe! Remember, this feeling is mostly driven by unconscious processes, and consciousness doesn’t really add all that much to it. Go figure.
The Wisdom of Stuckness
The stuckness of “ugh” is usually an opening into the ways of getting unstuck. The only problem is, we need to actually feel what we’re feeling before we can remember our solutions. Making it worse actually makes the mind-body process the message of the “ugh”. Sometimes we just can’t skip that step.
So the next time you’re very stuck, try making it worse. It may not work all the time, but its effectiveness might surprise you.