#130: The bonkers mental gymnastics of your writing anxiety
We all know how hard you have to work to sit down and write. You'll do pretty much anything to avoid it. Have you ever noticed, though, that avoiding your writing is no less exhausting than just bloody doing it? Weird, right? Well, actually, not weird - at least, not when you understand how hard your poor, anxious brain is having to work to trick you into getting your words down. You care deeply about your writing - that's why you're so worried about getting it right. Yet, lots of the most well-known writing advice focuses on convincing you not to care so much about it. So, there you are, doing your best, trying to believe both that your writing is very important and that it's not important at all. Maybe that strategy is working for you, in which case, I am cheering for you. But if it's not, hit play and let your imperfect friend hand-hold you through what to try instead.
Episode transcript:
Your attitudes to your writing need a spring clean.
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 in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Is it really new episode time again? Looks like it, doesn’t it? How time flies when my teaching has finished and I can finally relax. Just as soon as I get through all my essay marking, anyway. And catch up on the writing I’ve neglected over the past few months. And catch up on that grant application I’ve been working on. By which time, exam time will be upon us. Don’t worry, I’m not going to use this episode as an opportunity to complain about how put-upon I am. I’m just a bit insecure about all those non-academic friends and family who equate the end of the teaching term to being on holiday.
Anyway, with my focus turning from teaching to writing, and with my students’ essay-writing anxieties still fresh in my mind, I’ve been finding some thoughts about writing coalescing into something vaguely podcast-episode-shaped. We all know that writing can be really hard. In a very frustrating way, actually. Because, on the one hand, those of us who get paid to do it feel fortunate that it’s part of our jobs, that there’s someone willing to pay us to explore and develop issues that interest us and that we care deeply about and think important. That goes for PhD students too - maybe there’s nobody paying for your PhD, but even so, at least some of the time you’re happy that this is your 9-5, the thing that you’re supposed to be doing with your days. Lucky us, eh? Having said that, even while we’re thinking about how great it is that we get to write all day - well, some of the day, on some days, when there aren’t other demands on our time - for many of us, writing is an absolute mess of anxiety, and that leads us to avoid doing it - to avoid, in other words, doing the very thing that we feel fortunate and happy to have the opportunity to do. I see this all the time in coaching sessions. ‘I love my research, I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else, I’d be devastated if I couldn’t do it, but at the same time I will do literally anything else to avoid doing it’. It’s a familiar refrain, and it’s a recipe for feeling guilt and shame. It’s also exhausting. A day set aside for writing in which you end up doing no writing at all but instead devote all your energy to avoiding writing can leave you as wrung-out and tired as a full day of being respectably productive - and that’s its own kind of horrible because you end up feeling tired but not entitled to be tired because all you’ve done is look at cat memes. You get the worst of both worlds that way. If you’d actually worked, you’d have something to show for it. And if you’d decided at the outset to do nothing, at least you might feel refreshed and be able to do better tomorrow.
I want to talk, in this episode, about what’s going on here - or at least, what’s going on with some of us who end up in this sort of pickle. A big part of it is the anxiety, of course. We want what we write to be good, we’re afraid of being judged or letting people down, and all that piles on the pressure, makes us anxious, which in turn exhausts us and leads us to avoid writing. Wherever there’s anxiety, there’s avoidance and exhaustion, basically. But when it comes to writing, that’s not all that’s going on. If you’re someone who has a problem with anxiety and avoidance when it comes to writing, the chances are that, in order to try to solve this problem and get the writing done, you’re engaging in a special kind of mental gymnastics, and that’s exhausting too. You might not even realise that what you’re doing is so demanding, and if that’s the case, then you’re definitely not giving yourself credit for the effort you’re making just to get yourself to your desk. In essence, those mental gymnastics come down to this: lots of us are trying to convince ourselves, simultaneously, that our writing is hugely important and that it’s also extremely unimportant. Let me explain what I mean.
If you’re a student, or an academic, or any other kind of person who writes and needs to ensure that their writing is of a certain standard, then you will have no problem understanding why your writing is important. Of course it is. Perhaps you’re a student, in which case whether you get the degree you’re working towards is going to depend on the quality of your writing. You might also be working towards getting some journal publications - you PhD students are so busy these days - in which case, your success with that is also going to depend on the quality of your writing. If you’re an academic, the same applies: your success with publications, grants, jobs, and so on requires a certain standard of writing. I don’t mean that the quality of your writing is the only variable here, of course - decisions about degrees, publications, grants, jobs, and other things can also depend on luck, who’s getting to decide, who you know, and all sorts of other things that would probably be better out of the equation. But that hardly matters. How good your writing is matters too. You probably overestimate how much it matters, come to think of it - think of how tempting it can be to view failures and disappointments in things like jobs and grants and publications as reflecting our own inadequacies, rather than things like luck. All of which is to say that it’s pretty much impossible to be an academic, or aspire to be one, without caring deeply about doing a good job of writing.
Ok. Hopefully that all makes sense so far. You care about your writing. So why, then, did I also say that you’re trying to get yourself to believe that your writing is extremely unimportant? What am I on about here?
What I’m on about is the fact that the most widely-given advice about how we can best overcome our anxiety about writing and get those words down amounts to encouraging us to find ways to convince ourselves that writing isn’t actually very important. You know the sort of thing. Done is better than perfect. Embrace the shitty first draft. Write now, worry about the quality later. Give yourself permission to make mistakes. And so on. I’m not saying that this is bad advice - on the contrary. It is absolutely solid advice. If the importance you’re placing on your writing has made you too intimidated to do it, then finding ways to make it less important is crucial if there’s to be any progress at all. But the fact that this is good, important advice doesn’t mean it’s easy or relaxing to implement. Because: think about how it feels to implement that advice. You place such huge, paralysing importance on writing well that you need to pretend it’s absolutely fine to write any old rubbish. Let’s say you manage this, and you get some words done as a result. Brilliant. Well done, you. You’ve made progress. But you needed to hoodwink yourself in order to do it. You needed to believe that it’s important to write well and also that it’s not important to write well - and you managed it. It worked, but you’re exhausted, because believing that your writing is unimportant doesn’t come naturally to you.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. There’s an obvious sense in which those two contradictory beliefs aren’t really contradictory at all. It’s not both true and not true that your writing needs to be good. It’s only the final draft that needs to be good - all the earlier drafts can be rubbish, although hopefully they’ll get progressively better. So there’s no need at all to get yourself to believe something contradictory, and I’m making it all seem unnecessarily dramatic by suggesting otherwise.
If that’s indeed what you’re thinking, I completely agree. A bit of nuance clears it all up - who’d have thought? Care deeply about the quality of the final draft; care much less about the quality of anything you write along the way. If you can do that, life will be much easier for you. The problem is that it’s actually very very difficult to do that. At least, this is what I’ve come to realise after talking to dozens and dozens of people who are struggling to get themselves to write. Rationally, they have no problem accepting that it’s only the final draft that needs to be good. But emotionally, things are much more complicated. And when it comes to putting this advice into action, those recalcitrant emotions are a big problem - remember episode #112: David Hume and the battle between reason and passion? There are plenty of you out there - plenty of us, rather, because this is something I struggle with too - who know that we don’t need to fret about the quality of anything but our final-draft writing. Go on, ask us. So, why do we still struggle with it? Given that belief, working on our early drafts really ought not to be any more anxiety-inducing than writing an email to a friend, or responding to someone’s social media post, or commenting thoughtfully on a news story, or any of the other zillion forms of writing that we have absolutely no difficulty with. But when we struggle in this way, the fact that we know that the early drafts don’t matter makes things worse for us, in an important way. We’ve gone to the trouble of convincing ourselves that our early drafts don’t matter, and yet we’re still feeling anxious about them, so maybe we’re thinking about them wrong, maybe we need to convince ourselves a bit harder, or maybe we should just kind of force ourselves to get on with them and try to gaslight ourselves into believing that we’re not actually struggling, or that we don’t actually care, or both. And the more we do care about our writing, the harder we have to work to convince ourselves not to care about it, just to get it done, and when it doesn’t all flow nicely, the way it does for all those other, more competent people, we find it hard to resist the conclusion that not only are we at risk of writing something crappy, which would be awful, but also we can’t even get ourselves to think about writing in the right sort of way. Our inner critic is hard at work here, of course - but our inner illusionist is working even harder, desperately waving a magic wand over that thing you care so deeply about and trying to turn it into something you could not care less about. The more you care, the harder you’re working not to care. What an absolute mess. And, what happened to that important nuance we were talking about? Good luck rescuing that from the shipwreck of your attitudes towards your writing.
If you’re shaking your head listening to this and saying to yourself, ‘What is she on about? I have no trouble with my early drafts! Once I realised I only needed to care about the final product, it was all plain sailing, and the words just flowed effortlessly whenever I sat down to write’, then you can hit eject, my friend. (Yes, let’s all pretend that I’m releasing my episodes on cassette tape, shall we? It reminds me of my teenage years.) If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re wasting your time on this episode - time you could better spend enjoying one of the millions of other amazing podcast episodes out there. I’m not here to tell anyone whose writing strategies are working well for them that they’re wrong. I’m here to throw a lifeline for the rest of you, the stubborn few who are still listening, and whose I-care-but-I-don’t-care mental contortionism have got them tied up in knots. So, what about those people?
Here’s something important I’ve learned from coaching people who struggle in the way I’ve described. You really do know that the early drafts don’t matter. But that’s irrelevant. Because, what’s causing problems for you isn’t a mistaken belief that any substandard writing you do is somehow going to come back to bite you. More likely, what’s causing problems for you is the significance you attach to those early drafts. You view them as tests of your worth, which means they have the potential to make you anxious even if you plan to delete them, because you’re using your writing sessions as a way to monitor your progress and decide whether you’re good enough. Sure, it’s only the final draft that needs to be good to be shown to the world at large - but even so, you want some reassurance along the way that you’re making progress towards being able to write that good final draft, and you’re looking to your earlier drafts for that reassurance. So, when you end up thinking that those earlier drafts are no good, you feel bad. You want to see progress, and you’re not seeing it.
If that resonates with you, then I have good news for you. This problem is actually not hard to fix. Well, maybe ‘fix’ is too strong - it suggests something easy and instantaneous, like changing a lightbulb. Progress on this issue is more gradual than that. But, actually, identifying the issue is a big part of the solution - it means that you have an answer to your questions about why the writing advice you’ve been trying to implement isn’t working for you, or at least isn’t working as dramatically as you hoped it would. There’s nothing wrong with that advice, or with you - it’s just that that advice is targeting a different challenge to the one you’re experiencing. Your problem is that you want to see progress, and you’re not seeing it. But we can fix that. You just need to track your progress. Currently, you’re not doing that. What’s needed here is detail about how your writing sessions are going, tracked over time.
Let’s consider an analogy here. Suppose you’re into running, and you want to improve your 5k time. You set yourself the goal of running a 30-minute 5k a year from now. You go out running a few times a week. Suppose you wanted to track your progress towards your goal: how would you go about that? Well, a good place to start would be to time how long it takes you to run 5k at various intervals over the coming year. You could buy a running watch, which will open up a range of other variables to obsess over: after every run you can look at your heart rate zones, your maximum heart rate, your VO2 max. You can open the app that comes with the watch and look at the graphs it makes for you, showing how these things are changing - and hopefully improving - over time. For those wanting to track their progress towards a running goal, we’re spoilt for choice.
Now imagine a different scenario. You set your sights on running a 30-minute 5k a year from now, but you don’t have a running watch, and you don’t even bother to time yourself running between now and then. Occasionally you go out for a run, and you feel like you’re lumbering along not particularly quickly, and so you feel disheartened and struggle to motivate yourself to go out for another run for a while. When you do, maybe you feel better about it, maybe you don’t. You’re certain that you’re nowhere near fast enough for that 30-minute 5k, and that makes you feel bad. You tell yourself that you shouldn’t feel bad - after all, there’s still plenty of time to reach your goal - but that doesn’t really help. You just can’t shake the feeling that you’re not moving in the right direction.
If you knew someone who was behaving like that, I’m sure you know what sort of advice you’d give them. You might say things like: don’t get disheartened by one sluggish run, everyone has off days! By the way, if you’re so worried about your progress, why don’t you time yourself occasionally? You might not make positive progress every time you go out for a run, but over the weeks and months, if you’re consistent, and if you don’t hurt yourself, you’re sure to see your time improve.
You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? If you’re the sort of writer I’ve talked about, who struggles with anxiety around writing because they’re lacking reassurance that they’re moving in the right direction, you’re rather like the second kind of runner I described, the one who isn’t bothering to track their progress or assess it based on anything other than vibes, and who ends up disheartened and convinced that they’re rubbish.
Your next step needs to be taking seriously your need for reassurance about your progress. You’re allowed to want that, and it’s actually straightforward to get it. That means tracking your progress regularly and rigorously, so that you can build up a record of how you’re getting on that you can look back over for reassurance whenever you feel a wobble. So, go out and treat yourself to one of those new writing watches, and familiarise yourself with the data it generates about how clever, focused, insightful, original, and articulate you are. Just kidding, of course. Sadly, there is no such thing as a writing watch. Or, maybe it’s not sad. Can you imagine what we’d be like if we all had one of those? We’d be obsessed. So many new things to worry about. So many new ways for us to compare ourselves unfavourably to others. So much data for our employers to analyse. But anyway. You don’t have a special watch to track your writing progress, so you can do it yourself, in a good old fashioned analogue way. Start by noting down a few things about each writing session: what you set out to do, what you did, what went well, what went less well, how you feel about it. Importantly, after each session, make a note of something you’ve learned from that session. Something you know now that you didn’t know before. Something you’ve accomplished that you wouldn’t have accomplished had you not completed the session. I’m not talking about Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs here, although if you make one of those, be sure to write it down. Maybe, during the session, you’ve made sense of an idea that you were struggling with before. Maybe you’ve familiarised yourself with a new angle in the debate you’re feeling your way into. Your ‘win’ for the session might even be the sort of thing that, if you’re not paying attention, you might view as step backwards, rather than forwards. So, maybe all you achieve in the session is to delete the paragraph that you painstakingly produced in the previous session, in which case, your backwards progress on the word count disguises an important progress in insight: today, you see clearly something that you previously struggled to articulate. Record these things every session, and expect to do a bit of dialling-in as you learn about what sort of information is going to be most useful to you. After a while, you might consider organising your entries by week, or by month, so that you can look back at the end of a chunk of time and see what you’ve accomplished.
I think that doing this is important for a few reasons. One is that just recognising that it’s a useful thing to do goes some way towards unpacking and simplifying your complicated feelings about your writing. You can stop working so hard to convince yourself that you believe things you don’t believe, or that you feel things you don’t feel, or that you’re wrong for the things you do believe or feel. What you want is reassurance about your progress, and resolving to record things that are directly relevant to your progress respects and addresses that need.
Another way that this strategy is useful is that, I hope, it can take some of the anxious heat out of your writing sessions. You might have been approaching your writing sessions not even realising that you’ve been using them as a progress temperature-check, and the way you end up feeling about the session is your only record - albeit a fleeting and impressionistic one - of how you’re doing. Of course that’s going to make you anxious, because it means that you can’t just allow yourself to feel what you need to feel during the session - every feeling takes on an ominous significance. I’m feeling frustrated - that means the entire project is doomed. I’m feeling annoyed that I’ve spent weeks grappling with an idea that turns out not even to be relevant to my project - that means I’m an incompetent time-waster who isn’t ever going to produce something worthwhile. But if, on the other hand, you know that there’s a bit of time set aside at the end of the session for you to reflect on how it all went, you don’t need to get caught up in those feelings and their significance as they unfold. You’re going to do all that later. Write now, analyse your progress later. Trying to do it all at once is exhausting and distracting, and means you can’t do justice to either task.
Another useful thing here is that I’ve encouraged you to add detail to your reflections. You don’t end your writing session, turn to your writing diary, and write ‘Ugh!’ Instead, you break it down. What happened, exactly? How do I record this in enough detail that when I come back to it a month from now, it will be useful and informative? Perhaps that ‘Ugh!’ reflects your frustration with an aspect of the project that you’re going to have to continue to work on. But perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps, instead, it just expresses a sense that it all feels harder than you’d like it to feel, or that it’s going slower than you thought it would. In that case, there isn’t necessarily a problem at all. Perhaps it’s just an off day. Perhaps it will be brought into context tomorrow, or next week, when you surprise yourself with a satisfying breakthrough.
That context brings us to another important aspect of this exercise. After you’ve been recording your sessions for a few days, and especially after a few weeks or more, you can start to notice patterns. The record you’re building can become an important resource for you. Perhaps you’ll notice that, although your impression of the past month is one of experiencing one dead end after another, when you look back over what you’ve recorded you’ll find that there were some important insights in there too and that you really did make progress. Perhaps you’ll notice that you actually have fewer off days than you’d thought. And the next time you’re having an off day - or an off week or a n off month - you can look to your record for consolation, because you’ve had days and weeks and months like that before, and yet not only have you come out the other side, but you’ve done so further along the path than you started.
If you decide to give this a go and start keeping a record of your writing sessions, I’d love to hear how it goes, and whether you think it’s helping. Importantly, though, remember that this is hard. The fact that you struggle doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, or that you’re thinking about it wrong. Keep at it friends. Until next time.
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 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 leave 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 can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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