Can't Get Yourself to Sit Down at Your Computer?

Cultivating the art of avoidance

I love to write. Putting an idea down on virtual paper, framing a story, even editing my own words all give me a sense of well-being. But recently I was listening to an audiobook  mystery with my husband, and one of the characters said something that made me envious. And yes, I know, it’s fiction, and this one was bad fiction, but even so… The character, a writer working on a book, said, “One of the most important things I got from my job at the newspaper was learning to sit down at my computer and write 2,000 words a day, whether I want to or not.”

Two thousand words is about seven pages, double-spaced. I’d love to be able to write that much a day, but some days I’m lucky if I get 200 words written. And some days I can’t even get myself to sit down in front of my computer at all.

When I can’t get myself to write, I sometimes do something I actually hate to do

I don’t like cleaning, straightening, sweeping, mopping, or putting things away, but in those moments when I can’t get myself to write, I sometimes find myself doing some hated task. Anything to avoid sitting down at the computer and writing.

I was thinking about this irony the other day when I was trying to do something else I hate – cleaning out my garage. I was motivated by an upcoming visit from my son and grandson, since I knew I had, somewhere in the morass of items stored in unlabeled boxes and bins, some of my son’s toys from when he was my grandson’s age. Amazingly, given what I think of as the chaos of my storage system, I found them easily. They were in surprisingly good shape, other than lots of dust. I plopped them all in the bathtub and began scrubbing.

But I realized that I had taken on too much. I could not easily get all of the toys washed and clean – sparkling clean, as I wanted them – and do everything else I wanted to do. Including writing this post.

You don't have to do it all

And I had a moment of sadness and then a moment of flashing insight. “I don’t have to get them all washed,” some part of my brain said. “It’s okay to give him some now and some another time. And if he’s outgrown them before the next time, it’s okay to give them away.”

Wow. That was not a voice I recognized. It certainly didn’t come from my past, which was focused on accomplishment, achievement, and, much as I hate to admit it, a drive toward that impossible goal of perfection. My analyst had worked hard to help me let go of my perfectionism, with a fair amount of success, I think. My husband, too, is a voice of reason when it comes to overachieving. And with my clients I’m hyper aware of the way that impossible goals can be self-defeating. Like my own analyst, I work hard to help clients put that expectation to rest. But I’m not always so good at saying the same words to myself.

I was thinking about the voice in my head over the past few weeks, during which several different clients talked about their concern that they were playing “stupid games” on their computers. Only one spoke of a fear of being addicted to their phones, but all of them talked about being embarrassed by how the games seemed to suck them in. “You get to one level, and you just need to keep going to the next one,” one young man told me.

Is playing computer games the same as sitting down at your computer?

Lots has been written about the amount of money the companies that sell these games spend on designers whose job it is to make the playing experience irresistible, to make you want to keep going. But there’s also a fair amount of evidence that in this crazy, overworked, and anxiety-filled world of ours, digital games are a relatively innocent and non-harmful way of taking your brain out of gear, letting yourself relax, and simply vegging in a fun way. I am hoping to have a post about this up soon on my Psychology Today blog.

The important point is that the voice telling me I didn’t need to clean all the toys perfectly is also the voice that will let you off the hook if you’re playing games on your phone or if you’re playing hooky from work you need to do on your computer!

Finding a balance

But there’s a problem with this way of thinking, too. As we get older, we sometimes walk a fine line between being too demanding of ourselves and cutting ourselves too much slack. This is one of the blank areas on the map we’re creating for our own Third Age. Where do we place our expectations? How do we find a sense of satisfaction in what we can do? And how do we know when to push ourselves a little harder, not to give up, or give in to our age?

A yoga teacher recently commented that she had started doing something again that she once did easily, and she was distressed by how hard it was to do it, but she was pleased when she discovered that some of the skills came back to her after a little practice. As we get older, there are some things that we simply can’t do anymore. Just a few for instances – my friends and I complain to one another that we can’t walk as fast or as far as we used to, can’t stand on our heads or do somersaults (which some of used to do even as adults), and can’t pick up our grandchildren, great nieces and nephews, or beloved pets without hurting ourselves.

I think finding a place of acceptance for those things we can no longer do so well is one of the markers on this map we’re drawing. I’ll be writing more about the complicated task of finding a way to move forward while acknowledging lost abilities in an upcoming post. But for the moment, let’s focus on the importance of simply recognizing the voice that says, “Let it go.” Listening to that voice is an important step forward. Sometimes when you don’t want to sit down at the computer, it’s just fine to decide that you don’t need to do it. Spend time doing something else that you’d like to do. Don’t feel guilty. And eventually, you’ll probably come back to face that screen.

Or maybe not. And that will be okay, too.

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