Have you ever noticed that if you force yourself to do something you don’t want to do, it works the first time, but the second time your body rebels much harder? It feels bizarre, like you’re not in control of your own body.

But think about it this way. If someone else forced you to do something painful for no immediate reward, you wouldn’t want to do it again either, and you’d probably rebel against them. That’s exactly what’s happening when you force yourself.

Your higher and lower self

Roughly speaking, there are two parts of your brain, and they have different priorities. Your prefrontal cortex is your higher self, it’s rational and can look far into the future to see what’s best for you. The older, more impulsive parts of your brain are your lower self, your lizard (🦎) brain, and they only care about keeping you comfortable right now.

Both are working as intended, and when they’re balanced they keep you feeling well while still moving you towards long-term success. Problems start when the higher self oversteps and tries to force the lower self into a project it sees no benefit in. The lower self doesn’t care that sitting in front of a screen for 4 hours a day figuring out an anatomy diagram might pay off big in a year, it just sees that right now it’s a pain. So it rebels, and that’s what we call burnout or artist block.

Don’t force it, manipulate it

Manipulation sounds evil if you’re doing it to someone else, but here it just means using your higher self to set up an environment where your lower self will naturally react in the right direction. You need to make the work appealing to it.

The extreme version is turning off all your devices and locking yourself in an empty room with just a pencil and a sketchbook for a couple of hours. I’ve tried it once, and after staring at the ceiling for an hour, I couldn’t help but start sketching out the outline of the book. I guess another option is to take a nap, but imagine you don’t want to sleep.

The relaxed version (the one I use now) is blocking all the fun websites until a certain time of day. If you start your day with YouTube or Twitter, everything else will feel boring in comparison, especially working on a complicated drawing.

Try this today

  1. Install a website blocker on all your devices. A browser extension works (I use StayFocusd), or use a custom DNS server (like NextDNS), it blocks the internet traffic itself, so you don’t have to fiddle around with browser extensions. I have it on my phone.
  2. Block your distracting sites for most of the day and pick a window where they’re allowed. Mine is 5pm to 10pm, so I get more than half a day of focus and can still do whatever I want for 5 hours.
  3. Give yourself permission not to work. This is the most important part. If your lower self feels threatened it’ll rebel again, especially if you’re already burnt out. Don’t sit yourself down to spin your wheels for hours, just set up the environment and let it do its thing.

That’s how I finally got back to working on the book. I accepted that I don’t actually have to work on it if I don’t want to, and I removed everything that was more fun than it. It even fixed my sleep. A week ago I stayed up quite late because my blocker wasn’t covering anything after 10pm, and now it does.

Every time I burn out or start resenting the work, the reason is some variation of having a more fun activity to do but still forcing myself to work. So every time I successfully resolved it, it was by making my first half of the day more boring in some way! The system won’t maintain itself though, make sure to close the gaps that you find, like my 10pm gap.

So, stop forcing yourself, and set things up so the work becomes attractive.