5 Simple Ways to Stop Feeling Stuck – Step 4: Give up a Comfort Crutch

This is Part 4 in a five part series

Read Step 1: Identify and Attack Your Triggers

I’ve written before about the power of fasting to spur to spur creative growth. I’m writing another post about fasting because a) it really is super powerful and b) it’s one of the best ways I’ve found to get unstuck.

When preparing to write this post I poked around to see if there was any research on the mental benefits of purposeful deprivation. I was frustrated to find that fasting research has focused on fasting as a tool for weight loss. I find this ridiculous. The purpose of fasting is to grow not to shrink. And fasting isn’t limited to food—you can fast from social media, the internet, gossip, make up. All of these are beneficial and none of them are represented in the current literature.

For example, many studies indicate that vegetarians might be happier overall than meat eaters. Scientists have attributed this to chemicals in meat. This very well may be true. In my personal experience, the benefit of not eating meat has been entirely mental.

Since it seems very few other people are writing about the power of fasting, I will refer to my original post on the creative power of fasting:

“Fasting forces you to be present in your life. Every time you say no to something, you are reminded that you are a rational being, capable of making choices. It’s so easy to glide through our days with our heads down and never look up. My default is to ignore the big picture of my life in favor of getting through another day. Fasting reminds me of the very simple, but entirely remarkable fact that I’m alive.”

And here’s what other famous people have had to say about fasing:

“I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency.” – Plato (428-348 B.C.)

“Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if
he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Fasting is the first principle of medicine; fast and see the strength of the spirit reveal itself.” – Rumi

Fasting isn’t about weight loss. It’s about improving your mind and spirit. And it’s a great way to jolt you out of whatever rut life has tossed you in.

Steps to Effective Fasting:

1. Identify what you should give up

For a fast to be effective, you need to give up something matters to you. If you rarely drink, cutting out alcohol is not going to provide you a good growth opportunity. If you don’t care about clothes, giving up fashion won’t be a sacrifice. The key is to find something that is not bad in and of itself, but that you rely on in a potentially unhealthy way.

I call these Crutch Comforts. At the beginning of this year I made a list of Crutch Comforts and I’ve been trying to give up one a month. A few things on my list:

Sugar
Instagram
TV
Reading
TV
Internet
Reading
Eating out

Reading was actually a recent addition. I never thought of reading as something that could have harmful effects. I read a lot, but I don’t think of it as an addiction. However, because I also write a lot, reading can have the adverse effect of filling my head with other people’s ideas when I need to be generating my own.

Make your list and then choose one thing you’re willing to go without.

2. Set a time frame

Fasts can last for any period of time. If you are doing an extremely calorie restricted fast, it’s probably best to start with a short period of time. Religions often prescribe 21 or 40 day fasts. Personally, I prefer to do fasts by month. Why? It’s easy to remember for one thing. I try to give up one thing each month. Choose the time frame that makes the most sense for your life and mark it on your calendar. When I did a 21-day fast recently I blocked it out on my calendar so I would be reminded of it every time I checked my schedule.

3. Choose one thing to ADD

The Lenten season is most famous for fasting, but the spiritual practice is also supposed to involve adding something to your life.

At its core, fasting isn’t about deprivation. Fasting is about giving up something hindering you so that you can focus on what really matters to you. Think about what you want more of in your life and how what you’re giving up can make room for that.

For example, maybe you want to exercise more. If you give up TV, you can use your normal Netflix time for working out. Or if you want to be better at keeping in touch with family, give up social media and use scrolling time to call your mom.

4. Tell someone (but don’t tell everyone)

A study from Dominican University found that students who shared their goals with a friend were twice as likely to complete them as those who kept their goals to themselves. Accountability is key to success.

Choose one person in your close circle of community to share your fast with. You don’t even need to ask them to “keep you accountable” (in my experience this usually backfires) just let them know what you’re giving up and for how long. Ideally, choose someone who will notice if you go back on your word. For example, I usually tell my roommate (who also happens to be a good friend) when I’m giving something up because we spend enough time together for her to notice if I’m cheating.

So if you’re giving up a food item, tell someone who you eat a lot with. If you’re giving up movies, tell the person who’s your movie buddy. Etc.

The key thing is: tell one person, not everyone. The more people you tell, the less your fast becomes about your spiritual growth, and the more it becomes about how your fast looks to other people. As Jesus said, “when you fast, don’t make it obvious.”

Accountability is a proven way to achieve goals. However (and this is a big however) telling too many people about your goals has been shown to decrease your likelihood of achieving them. When we start telling people we’re doing something, it makes us feel like we’ve achieved something. We’re then less likely to actually do the thing we’ve been telling people we plan to do. Cue vicious cycle.

So tell one trusted friend. And then don’t tell anyone else.

5. Pay attention

Now comes the important part: the fast itself. You’ve given up your Comfort Crutch. What now? Get the most out of your fast by taking the time to pay attention. Are you really struggling with what you gave up? Why? Lean in to whatever discomfort you feel. How do you feel? What’s different? I recommend keeping a journal or typing out quick notes in your phone whenever you have a revelation.

Have you ever done an intentional fast? Got any tips? Let me know in the comments!

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Why Fasting is the Secret to Creative Growth

Today is Ash Wednesday,* the day that marks the beginning of Lent for many people of faith around the world. Lent, for those of you who are not bombarded with reminders on social media about it every year, is a religious term referring to the 40 days leading up to Easter. It’s tradition for people to fast for these 40 days in preparation for Easter Sunday.

I had no idea what Lent was until I went to college and got band-wagoned into giving up something trendy each Spring. One year it was desserts. Another, Facebook. My friends gave up coffee or alcohol or carbs. In more recent years, I became suspicious of the benefits of Lent. It seemed like the things people gave up were less about some pursuit of spiritual discipline and more about personal benefits. Lent just seemed like another excuse to diet.

But in the past year I’ve awoken to the power of deprivation to spur personal and artistic growth. I’ve given up one thing each month since last August. Sugar. Coffee. Alcohol. Cussing. The practice started on accident. I did a spending fast because (shocker) I felt like I was spending too much money, and when it was over, I realized there were a lot of other things I consumed in excess and so I just kept going.

Fasting is most commonly known as a spiritual exercise and most religions incorporate it in some way. Muslims practice Ramadan. Hindus set aside certain days every week to fast. Christians fast during Lent. Jewish people fast to celebrate Yom Kippur.

When I started giving up things for set periods of time, I wasn’t doing it for spiritual growth. I was doing it for selfish reasons. I wanted to save money so I stopped drinking alcohol. I didn’t want to get addicted to caffeine so I gave up coffee. But what I’ve come to realize is that deprivation automatically forces growth.

In his book Emotional Intelligence, Dan Coleman writes that, “There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.”

This is an especially essential skill in a first world country where delayed gratification is not a given. In America, you can go your whole life without going without. This is a blessing. But instant gratification can quickly become a burden. When we stuff ourselves with an endless stream of food, entertainment, and material goods, we starve ourselves of the opportunity to want something.

Fasting forces you to be present in your life. Every time you say no to something, you are reminded that you are a rational being, capable of making choices. It’s so easy to glide through our days with our heads down and never look up. My default is to ignore the big picture of my life in favor of getting through another day. Fasting reminds me of the very simple, but entirely remarkable fact that I’m alive.

Sugar, television, expensive clothes, alcohol—all of these things are unessential. Fasting sloughs them off.

If you are feeling stuck or in need of a creative jolt, I invite you to use Lent as an excuse to give something up. If you don’t know where to start, think of the things you do on a daily basis. What do you eat? How do you spend leisure time? Then go with the thing that sounds the most terrifying to be without.

Give up your crutch for the next 40 days. You may be surprised to learn that you are perfectly capable of standing on your own.

*it’s also Valentine’s Day, an irony that gives me endless joy

Don’t Live On Autopilot

Hey guess what? Today is a day!

It’s not a reset, it’s not a time to sleepwalk through, it’s not a dream. It’s a day.

Here are a few questions you might encounter today:

How’s it going?
How was your weekend?
How are you?

I don’t know about you but I typically answer these questions without really thinking about it.

“Well, you know, it’s Monday…so…”

“Good. Too short.”

“Living the dream.”

These answers are so boring and cliché they make me want to throw this keyboard across the room. Am I so unoriginal? Am I so out of touch with my life that I can’t even assess how it’s going? Am I really living the dream? If not, why would I joke about that?

Moral of the story: I don’t want to live my life from a script. I don’t want to live on autopilot.

I am the only one responsible for my life. There is no back up person who will take over if I choose to live like a robot.

If you didn’t wake up this morning, don’t panic, there’s still time. Wake up. Today is an actual day in your life. It’s not a freebie, you don’t get a do over. It counts.

Challenge for the week: Think about the clichés and automatic responses governing your days. Pay attention when people ask you questions and answer them honestly.

Goal for the week: My goal for the week is not to lie about my emotions. This sounds simple, but it’s actually really difficult for me. I’d prefer if no one knew I had feelings, but that’s a story for another time. I think this could be a helpful exercise for most people. When someone asks how you’re doing, don’t lie about your emotions. If your boss checks in, don’t lie about your workload. If someone says no offense, tell them if you’re offended.

Don’t lie about your feelings. Don’t live on autopilot.

Let’s be honest, not apologize for our being, and take the driver’s seat of our life this week. Make today count. It will only happen once.

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How to Actually Make Yourself Do Something (In 4 Easy Steps)

“You don’t have to believe in yourself, you just have to do the thing.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZOgr6Nhp2M/?taken-by=alikaywould

Author Holly Black said this at the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend (more on the Festival in my weekly newsletter, which you can get by signing up here) and it’s been haunting me all week.

I am lazy. My natural inclination is to do nothing, all the time. If no one interrupted me, I could probably read for at least seven years before noticing any time had passed.

I’ve spent years searching for the magical cure to my laziness. I’ve tried using SMART goals, building habits and creating detailed Calendars for Change. Nothing stuck. I’d be hyper productive for a few weeks and then drift back into my natural state of being.

I suspect I’m not alone in this.

There are tons of blogs, books, and speeches floating around in the world about how to do things. How to write a book, finish a screenplay, paint a painting. For those privileged enough to have a dream beyond mere survival, one of the great struggles of life is getting yourself to do the things you actually want to do.

This struggle is nothing new. Paul wrote about it in a letter to the Christian church in Rome in the first century.

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

(Romans 7:15 ESV)

This is the story of my life. I hate passivity and laziness, yet I often live in those states. I know what I want to do, but the gap between it and what I actually do is vast. It is exhausting, to fail at something so simple.

Ben Hardy has written, “it’s actually far more exhausting to not work than it is to work.”

This is so true. Pursuing goals take energy, yes. But not pursuing thing them takes even more.

Most of the advice I’ve seen about how to make yourself do the thing you want to do essentially boils down to: if you really want to, you will do it.

This is not true. Plenty of people want to start companies, travel the world, or direct movies. Most of them take no action toward doing these things.

I’ve always found this advice useless. I want to do so many things and I do so few.

This year, though, I’ve discovered the secret to making myself productive and achieving my goals. It’s simple: trick myself.

That’s right. The easiest way to start is to trick yourself into doing it. Once I threw away all that hogwash about chasing dreams and artistic passion and focused on what actually motivated me, I discovered that playing mind games was the best way to get myself to do the things I wanted to be doing.

Here’s a few tips for tricking yourself into doing something:

1. Figure out what motivates you

First, it’s important to identify what motivates you. I am motivated by external expectations.

I don’t bail on plans with friends and I always turn projects in on time at work. It’s meeting internal expectations that I struggle with.

You might be the opposite. Maybe it’s easy for you to finish something when it’s a personal project, but you bristle at the thought of an employer deadline or outer expectations.

Gretchen Rubin has written an entire book about the four ways people respond to expectations called The Four Tendencies. You can take the quiz to found out how you respond to expectations here.

Once you’ve identified what motivates you it’s time to figure out how work within that framework.

This is tricky for internal goals—it can feel hopeless. How on earth can I motivate myself to do something if I only do things for other people?

Simple. I turned my internal goals into external deadlines. I will not work out unless I have to. This year I started signing up for races and telling people I was running them. Now I have to train because I’ve spent money on a race. I love deadlines and so this system works really well for me.

Don’t expect yourself to magically wake up one morning feeling motivated to make all the changes you want to in your life. Identify the things that have actually motivated you in the past, and figure out a way to create a similar set of circumstances in your present.

2. Put your pride on the line

Shame is usually a negative thing, but I’m not opposed to using it to motivate myself. When I tell my roommate I’m waking up early to go on a run, I’m more likely to do it because I don’t want her to wake up before me and notice I’m still in bed.

Put your pride on the line for your work. Post publicly about what you are doing. Tell a few friends. Tattoo a deadline on your body. Whatever works for you. Higher stakes will lead to better results.

3. Build momentum

Different goal setting systems recommend different goal sizes. The SMART system suggests setting achievable goals. Others recommend wildly unachievable goals. I’ve found the best way to meet goals is to find a sweetspot between what you can realistically achieve and what you would achieve in your wildest dreams. If you start out too small, you may forget why you needed a goal in the first place. If you start out too big, you’ll grow discouraged and give up.

The trick, as always, is to find balance. If you want to run a 5k, starting with a goal of walking fifty feet a day will probably not help you. It will be so easy to achieve, you’ll wonder why you need to train for the race at all. On the other hand, if you start with a goal of running three miles on your first try, you will likely be discouraged by how hard it is. (Unless you are one of those people who can just run forever without ever trying, in which case, I hate you.)

The key word here is momentum.

Momentum is the word my friends and I use to make ourselves go out in the city. Nightlife in New York doesn’t really get started until midnight or later, which, for someone like me who is socially akin to a grandmother, is asking a lot. We use the word momentum to get us pumped.

When we leave the apartment at 10, cold and tired and thinking all our plans of dancing and “having the best night ever” were foolish, we start yelling “momentum!” It’s weird, but it works.

The real trick to doing the thing you want to do is building momentum. You don’t wake up one morning with the strength to finish something. You take one step, then another, and build a consistent work ethic.

4. Objects in motion stay in motion

Once you’ve figured out how to motivate yourself and have started building momentum, the trick is to keep moving. Operate by Newton’s first law of motion: objects in motion stay in motion.

Just because you’ve started doing the thing you want to be doing doesn’t mean you’ve earned a break. Keep working. It is much easier to keep moving than it is to start moving. You’re in motion, congratulations. Don’t stop.

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