Whether we admit it or not, we’ve all dealt with mental resistance. My favorite way of having resistance is productive procrastination. In case you don’t know what that is: it’s when you do something else that appears productive in order to avoid doing the thing that really needs to be done. Think of the writer who is compelled to clean out the fridge rather than write on their manuscript and you have a time of productive procrastination. But I’m getting ahead of myself, first let’s talk about what mental resistance is.
What is Mental Resistance?
If you’ve read Stephen Pressfield’s book “The War of Art,” you have already come across the concept of Resistance. Resistance is, according to him, the force working against all human creativity. It is the feeling/thing which wants to make sure you do not produce. I break down capital “R” Resistance into mental and physical. Physical resistance is when your body is in rebellion against your ability to produce. Think things like carpal tunnel. Your body is physically making it hard for you to produce. Physical resistance is much easier to recognize than mental resistance. Mental resistance is when your mind comes up with reasons why or how not to do the thing that you want to do. As I said previously, my favorite form of mental resistance is Productive Procrastination.
Productive Procrastination is the doing of another minor thing in order to avoid doing the major thing. Right now, I’m supposed to be writing a couple blog posts a day and working on a novel. However, more often than not, I find myself staring into space and day dreaming about the novel when I should be writing the blog posts or doing some other menial task when I should be writing my book. I’m not being unproductive because I am doing something that needs doing, but I am, however, not doing the primary thing.
Fighting Your Own Mind
So how do you fight your way through things like productive procrastination? I mean, it’s honest to say the minor thing needs to be done, but the major thing truthfully needs to be done more. My primary tactics when facing down my own mind is to give myself an out. I only have to work on this for a little while, like 10 minutes. After 10 minutes if the other thing is still nagging me hard-core then I will get up and go do the thing that is nagging at me.
Another tactic for fighting mental resistance is to do all the minor things. I do this fairly frequently as well. I make a list of all the minor things and then I do them so that I don’t have them hanging over my head. The house is clean. The laundry is done. Food has been consumed. All done so that I don’t have any further excuses not to sit down and do the actual work.
How do you fight the things that keep you from getting the real work done? Let me know in the comments. I’m not above learning new tricks.
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