1: It was the early 1970s, and cognitive psychologist Virginia Valian was stuck.
She “found herself so paralyzed by work anxiety that she couldn’t write a word of her PhD thesis,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
Our lives can be shaped by what it is we are trying to avoid, Oliver observes. “We talk about ‘not getting around to things’ as if it were merely a failure of organization, or of will. But often the truth is that we never get around to them.”
What makes us anxious whenever we think about it? Is it a task? A project? Perhaps an aspect of our lives?
One coping strategy is simply not to go there.
We’re “worried we might have less money in the bank than we’d assumed, so we refrain from checking our balance at all,” Oliver writes.
“Or we’re scared that a pain in our abdomen might be the sign of something serious, so we avoid seeing a doctor.
“Or we’re worried that raising a sensitive subject with our partner could lead to a blazing row—so we never do.”
Sometimes our anxiety is work-related. “Several times, I’ve caught myself avoiding checking my email,” Oliver notes, “for fear of discovering a message from someone impatient I haven’t replied to yet.”
Does this approach make sense rationally? Of course not.
“If we really do have an alarmingly low bank balance, or the pain really is something serious, confronting the situation is the only way we can begin to do something about it,” he states.
And by avoiding our inbox, we likely guarantee that someone will ultimately become frustrated that we don’t reply.
“The more we organize our lives around not addressing the things that make us anxious,” Oliver notes, “the more likely they are to develop into serious problems—and even if they don’t, the longer we fail to confront them, the more unhappy time we spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places we don’t want to go.”
It is perhaps ironic, he points out, that this behavior is called “remaining in our comfort zone,” because “there’s nothing comfortable about it,” Oliver notes.
Because we often feel an ongoing discomfort as the price for avoiding whatever it is we are trying to avoid.
2: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.
Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.
At the end of each week, we are exploring some of the life lessons Oliver shares in his wonderful book Meditations for Mortals.
Because rather than avoiding what makes us anxious, there is a better way. It’s what the Dutch Zen monk Paul Loomans calls in his book Time Surfing “going to the shed.”
The tasks or parts of our lives that we aren’t engaging with? Paul calls them “gnawing rats.”
But Paul’s strategy for dealing with our rats is not to “cowboy up” and attack them with brute force.
“The trouble is that this simply replaces one kind of adversarial relationship with our gnawing rats (‘Stay away from me!’) with another (‘I’m going to destroy you!’),” Oliver observes.
Instead, Paul suggests that we befriend them. “Turn towards our gnawing rats,” he recommends. “Forge a relationship with them.”
Which might be as simple as merely closing our eyes and imagining ourselves taking action.
We’re looking for a way to “go there,” psychologically speaking. “We begin to accept on an emotional level,” Oliver says, “that the situation in question is already a part of our reality, no matter how fervently we might wish that it weren’t.”
Envision someone with a “long-neglected shed, filled with junk, [which] is becoming a source of mounting anxiety and guilt,” Paul writes.
His advice? “Go into the shed. Don’t do anything yet, just look around. Observe and take stock. Make the space our own.”
Because “[…] the first solutions will present themselves,” he predicts. “A number of items will change hands and be donated to others.
“Other things will wait until that Saturday afternoon when we say to ourselves, ‘And now it’s time to clean out the shed.’ We actually don’t dread it any more, but are actually looking forward to it.”
This approach differs from breaking a complex task into smaller, more manageable chunks.
“When we do that,” Oliver writes, we’re “reducing the anxiety we feel by reducing the scale of the threat; it’s like separating one rat off from the rest of the pack, to more efficiently stab it to death.
“By contrast, to befriend a rat is to defuse the anxiety we feel by transforming the kind of relationship we have with it. We turn it into an unobjectionable part of our reality. Whereupon a gnawing rat, in Paul’s terminology, becomes a ‘white sheep’ – a harmless, docile, fluffy creature that follows you around until you decide to do something about it.”
3: One effective way of befriending a gnawing rat is to ask what we would be willing to do to address the challenge causing us to be anxious.
Which is what Virginia Valian, our cognitive psychologist, ended up doing when she wasn’t able to write her PhD thesis.
She started by talking about it with J, the man she was living with.
“He suggested three hours,” Virginia recalls.
“Three hours. The very thought gave me an anxiety attack.
“How about two hours?
“Two hours! The very thought …
“One hour? More reasonable, but still not possible.
“Half an hour? Getting closer but still too much.
“Fifteen minutes? Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. Now there was figure I could imagine. A nice solid amount of time, an amount of time I knew I could live through every day.”
When Virginia told other people about her fifteen-minute-a-day plan, they laughed. It sounded a bit pathetic.
“In fact, it was the opposite,” Oliver notes. “Asking ourselves what it would actually entail to befriend the gnawing rats in our lives is an act requiring real courage—more courage, perhaps, than the standard confrontational approach, which feels less like reconciling ourselves to reality and more like getting into a bar fight with it.
“Befriending our rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it,” he notes. “It’s a pragmatic way to maximize our room for maneuver, and our capacity to make progress on the work we care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether we like it or not.”
More next week!
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Reflection: Am I willing to gently acknowledge the areas in my life I usually avoid, and consider what might change if I faced them directly, even for just a few minutes?
Action: Take one worry or avoided task and spend fifteen undistracted minutes simply observing and familiarizing myself with it—no pressure to solve it, just willingness to look.
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