Balancing Mental Health And Productivity When You Are Your Own Boss
“It’s exhilarating to come closer and closer to self-discipline. You make your body go and everything hurts; then you look back in awe at the self, at what you’ve done, it just blows your mind. It leads to ecstasy, to self-fulfillment. If you win these battles enough, that battle against yourself, at least for a moment, it becomes easier to win the battles in the world.”
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow (p. 40).
Productivity in an individual is achieved by maintaining a rhythmic routine. Well, my rhythm went for a toss in the recent past. All it took was one heavy project dangling deep in the hole of planning fallacy. That pushed my other projects to the deeper dark.
Notwithstanding, whenever I did manage to find time for my delayed projects, I hit another unforeseen hurdle called creative burnout. With the WFH culture allowing clients to find time to collaborate, there was consistent work with tight deadlines. It was enjoyable and rhythmic. I was on a steady state of flow until the track (record) started to creak. It was hard for me to focus on a single task to its completion. There was this constant desire to just swirl into the alternative worlds of Netflix and Amazon Prime. Limited motivation. Imaginative states of productivity that never became a reality. Along with the incessant struggle to even think or act. It was drag. Slow, painful drag.
The uptick in this emotional roller coaster was that I was trying. I was constantly making attempts to change the unproductive state of things. I decluttered. Reorganised my folders. Rearranged my productivity tools, from Trello, Notes to One Note. They helped. But did not transform my mental state.
When all my productivity hacks failed to sustain into a habit, I had an epiphany.
That I LACKED DISCIPLINE.
My tasks were mounting. I was overwhelmed and mentally exhausted. I felt helpless. I deliberately avoided reading productivity articles or watching willpower videos. Because I was aware of them, I have tried them and I have not seen results. Because, I couldn’t reestablish my routine rhythm. The problem I was facing was to do with me, my brain.
It was painful to realise this. But it was a fact. And a needed first step to find the light at the end of this tunnel. When I reflect, the primary reasons that I was unable to maintain discipline was because:
- The tasks were my personal initiatives. Neither there were teams to stay accountable to, nor were the tasks strictly time bound. So they were easy to stall.
- By stalling and slowing down progress I never allowed myself to feel the reward of successful completion. That checking off the list feeling! I aspired for it, of course. But never allowed myself to reach that point in time.
This made me anxious and overwhelmed, spiralling me into a reinforcing loop of anxiety feeding into low focus feeding into finding alternative getaways feeding into low productivity.
It is important to process and reflect on this behavioural spiral. Because, anyone of us could be or become a victim of these behaviours. Moving on from information age the world is now pulsating with the age of knowledge sharing and knowledge gaining. And making money with that! Multi-potentialism is acknowledged and encouraged. Companies and employees alike look for opportunities that allow personal project explorations. Pursuing these pet peeves and building quality knowledge thus, requires enormous amount of discipline leading to a rhythmic routine. But unfortunately unlike the previous eras, aspirations in the present are entangled in the web with social media and social streaming. Wherein our brain is incessantly misguiding us to thinking that these digital alternative worlds are rewarding enough. We deserve them now for all the anticipated efforts we need to put in to materialise our innovative thoughts and ideas. While reality awaits.
So what do we do if we get stuck in this quicksand?
Well I am still figuring out. But I am noticing a few strategies that have shown immense improvement in my mental health and my productivity:
1. GET TO KNOW ENDORPHINS
Every time I got out of a media / video binge, I felt drained and unmotivated. When immersed in binging and infinite scrolls, we feel pleasure. This pleasure is literally akin to hitting a recreational drug. However too much consumption of anything exhausts our mental processors. This triggers our internal clock to strike boredom. Now, boredom is our brain’s way to notify us to switch activities. To those that will reduce over stimulation and take us to a state of bliss. Those that will secrete endorphins.
Physical pain or emotional pain both trigger the same centres of the brain. Meaning, our experience of both these categories of pain are literally the same. And the pain killers/respective emotional regulators release endorphins. Endorphins help alleviate pain and improve our moods. To remind you of what it feels like when endorphins are released, think of the last time you felt good helping someone. Felt a sense of relief and joy when you donate money, clothes or things to charity? That good feeling right there is all thanks to endorphins. In fact endorphins release even when we binge because, it is pleasurable.
Then to not get manipulated by endorphins and improve productivity, we need to:
a) Respond to our internal clock of boredom. Deliberate response if we feel lazy.
b) Find another activity that will alleviate the boredom and uplift our mood. Basically find an activity that will release endorphins. It could be getting artistic, playing, taking a stroll, finishing up a sentence with a full stop or screaming out our frustrations. Literally anything other than the present activity that will help release the endorphins.
c) Repeat — Respond to boredom. Find the next activity to release endorphins. This time, maybe an activity that would help with completing our work?
2. DEEPDIVE INTO D.O.S.E.
D — Dopamine: The hormone that wakes us up, as opposed to melatonin the puts us to sleep. But it is also the hormone of desire — wanting. When we set goals or inevitably have a to-do list, we desire to achieve them. Under the right conditions dopamine helps achieve our desires by providing us with the necessary focus and attention.
O — Oxytocin: The love hormone. That rush when we hug someone or reach orgasm. Beyond being the potion of love, oxytocin release is akin to purring in cats. Cats purr when they are happy and when in distress, to make them feel better. Similarly oxytocin releases when we bond socially, when we trust, or empathize. And they also release to regulate when in stress.
S — Serotonin: Another mood stabilizer that drives sleep, appetite and more importantly, our self-esteem.
E — Endorphins: The pleasure hormone.
What do these happiness hormones have to do with our productivity? It is simple: Shun the anxiety driven negative reinforcing loop mentioned before. And replace it with a positive reinforcing loop that will help discipline ourselves:
Being in this loop allows us to constantly be in a state of flow.
3. RECOGNIZE AND SUSTAIN THE STATE OF FLOW
State of flow is the jargon to describe when you are completely immersed in the task at hand. It is when the mind and body sync into a continuum. When we are fully focussed, most productive and find what we are doing at that moment implicitly rewarding. This state of mind can be achieved even in mundane tasks such as brushing our teeth or sweeping the floor. As long as we are D.O.S.E (d).
4. BUILD SUPPORT SYSTEMS TO STAY D.O.S.E (d)
This list is not exhaustive. However these helped me:
a) Uninstall social media apps, including email. Enough have been discussed about how we get hooked inside apps. Just like how it was once found that people googled Facebook whenever they feel bored, we tend to zip between apps when we are bored. Only to get hooked into them. Realise when this habit becomes toxic. And uninstall those apps that distract productivity. Once uninstalled the desire to reach out to the phone when bored is thwarted.
b) Forget streaming passwords. So that every time we try to stream we have to expend an additional effort to remember and type the password. This anticipated effort has helped my stop myself from instinctively streaming when bored during work hours.
c) Breakdown the todo list to smaller and easily achievable tasks.
d) On the broken down list of tasks, concentrate on finishing the first one. Check it off.
e) Now move to the second task in the list. Complete and check it off.
We want to complete tasks and put them behind us. Not get overwhelmed by them. When projects get broken down to smaller tasks. Or bigger tasks, say such as finishing an online course gets broken down to ‘completing 2 videos of that course’, it becomes more achievable. Achievable goals are less challenging and pleasurable to do (endorphins alert!). When we achieve the smaller goal, we progress one step ahead (dopamine alert!). Once we get into this rhythm of achieving smaller goals, rest is history. Therefore it is important that the todo list is well thought out and written in the order of priority.
f) Don’t worry about how much time it takes to complete a task from the list. Just focus on that one ‘small’ task and complete it.
g) Set a timer for mundane/repetitive tasks and challenge self to complete the same task faster the next time. For example sending an email — maybe including blog writing, eating, playing with pet, video watching, reading, etc. Deliberately pacing up tasks such as these has helped me get rid of the drag and check off the list faster (more dopamine and endorphins!).
h) Be in the present. Easier said than done, but essential to achieve the state of flow. The secret method is: convincing self that we have nowhere else to be. Anxiety, and thereby loose focus is often instigated by thinking about future. Shun that. Be it any activity. Say you are cooking. The way to be in the present and do your best is by convincing yourself that,
“At this moment in time in this universe I have to be no where else other than here. I have to do nothing else other than this. Doing my ‘work’ work is for the next hour. For this hour, at this second, cooking is all I need to be doing.”
Thus, be in the present for every task at hand.
5. LIMITS TO PRODUCTIVITY — FIND THE BALANCE
Over-exploitation, over-population, over-stimulation, over-consumption. Anything exceeding the threshold destabilizes the balance and leads to negative impact. In systems thinking terms, they are negatively reinforcing loops highlighting the ‘limits to growth’. Similarly incessant striving for productivity will test our brain’s limits. Sometimes, nothingness is good.
The aim is not to be a high-efficient 24*7 operating machine. The aim is to have a rhythmic course of Being Productive versus Nothingness. State of flow can be achieved in both cases. There lies the balance.
6. STALLING VERSUS DELAYING — KNOW THE DIFFERENCE
Latest findings have nurtured this thought that being an innovator or a creative, it is ok that to procrastinate. In fact, the time not spent in action is not procrastination. It is ‘incubation’ of ideas and thoughts. And when one’s arse is on fire with the closing in of the deadline, the output thus is the most innovative and original. As the output is an outcome of long, divergent and emergent incubation process.
Now, it may be true that during the initial days of delaying we are mentally playing all the cards to see which is working best. The task at hand is active inside the head. But there will come a point when it is time to put those thoughts down on to paper / workspace. When that action is being delayed, then it is stalling. Reflect into self. If there is a sense of resistance to act and a false complacence in holding the thoughts in the head. Red alert! You are stalling!
