It’s implied that your worth and your ability to produce are somehow interchangeable, that the more that you create, the more value you have. My inbox heaves at the hinges, filled with other people’s productivity. New courses, insights, offers, compelling tales of success. Insult compounds injury when half of the courses, insights and offers orbit the theme of wringing every molecule of action out of your day.
7 tips for a more productive morning!
The thing is, the new year rung in with me in complete paralysis. We are not supposed to talk about this. I am only supposed to admit that I spent week after week frozen and incapable of doing almost anything when it is safely behind me, a ghost from the past. I am not really supposed to admit that I am only now getting out of it…and that I am, in fact, sometimes still in it.
We have ideas about laziness. About inactivity. About being unproductive. And they all revolve around the central concept that these things are choices. That if someone has a sound moral compass, they get off their ass and tow the line, and anyone who doesn’t has chosen to not participate. They just don’t want to, they just don’t care.
Sometimes lazy is just lazy. Sometimes lazy is just a foggy veiled fear. And sometimes what we understand as laziness is paralysis. And paralysis is a trauma response.
When I was a kid I got called lazy nearly as much as I got called Laura. Every report card, every parent-teacher conference, every third word out of my mother’s mouth. Despite testing smart, I was a straight C student. I spent a lot of time staring out of windows and lost inside of my own world. I was not motivated, I didn’t respond well or quickly to questions or tasks, I was kind of dull and slow.
What I understand now is that I wasn’t lazy, I was stuck in a trauma response and living in a state of overwhelm that I was incapable of navigating, so my system was stuck in “freeze”.
When we are faced with a situation that the system understands as being unsafe, we are wired to either fight or to flee. When we don’t have the option to either fight or flee, we freeze. Cue David Attenbourogh narrating the deft capture of a gazelle by a cheetah, the gazelle’s crafty instincts first impelled it to run like hell, and then once caught, when there was no longer the possibility of escaping, of fighting back, it froze. It froze, not by conscious choice, but as a biologically implemented last resort. Freeze has two functions; it anesthetizes so you don’t feel the pain of your attack, and it tricks the predator into thinking you are already dead, which thwarts their hunting instinct and gives the remote possibility that they will lose interest in this already dead thing and leave.
It’s actually quite a genius response. Many a possum has its life to thank for it.
Humans are still animals; we are still wired for tiger attacks and the like. These fight, flight, and freeze instincts are as alive in us as they are in any gazelle, but the cheetahs are our bosses, and the school bullies, and our overbearing parents.
When the gazelle’s clever nervous system failure gives the cheetah the impression that it’s already dead, and not healthy prey to chase, it leaves. The gazelle then gets up, carefully checks its surroundings to make sure that the cheetah is nowhere to be found. When it is sure that the environment is safe, it resumes its frolic. This simple act of orienting; of verifying what is happening around, is an essential one.
When we humans have a nervous system (which means involuntary) freeze response we can only move out of the response and let it go when we are able to verify that the environment is safe. And what if we can’t? What if the threat lives with us? What if the threat lives in us?
Overwhelm is an impetus of paralysis. We all know the feeling; I have so much to do that I don’t even know what the things I am supposed to do are and I have no idea where I would start. A problem that we can’t conceive of a solution for. A big emotion we don’t know how to deal with. A repeating pattern so frequent and present we can’t imagine it not being there.
These are all issues of orientation.
When freeze is our system’s default when we perceive a threat we slow down, go blank, get foggy, get tired, or just simply lose motivation. When we are incapable of orienting – like ye olde gazelle knowing for sure that the cheetah was long gone, and she was safe – our systems don’t understand that we are out of danger. They don’t understand that we can get up and move now. The unconscious imperative is stay down, stay still, and don’t let anyone see you!
So, there we are, needing to get productive. There is a deadline, a task, a demand, and the entirety of our conscious will is shrieking “There is a thing! We need to do the thing!” and simultaneously, but often beneath the radar of our perception, there is a biological freeze that pulls us in the opposite direction. And so, we scroll the stupid phone, and so we let the next episode automatically upload on Netflix, and so we don’t. We don’t do the thing we should be doing, and then, to add a little spice to the soup, in rush the guilt and the shame. The feelings of inadequacy and incapacity. The frustration with ourselves.
This year I arrived in India the way one would seventeen hours too late for their bed, two days too late for dinner. I arrived at my limit; resources depleted. I had been traveling non-stop for eight and a half months and was desperate to unpack and settle. I had let emails and whatsapps pile to critical mass, I had left tasks undone, I had edged into the realm of wildly irresponsible, because I had to attend to the immediacy of catching the train, and packing the bag, and booking the flight, and just getting through the next course, and then dealing with a series of absurd and unexpected emergencies.
The idea was that I would arrive, get to my apartment, unpack, set up my house and get on top of things again.
Except that my landlord rented my apartment to someone else. So, before I could unpack and settle, I’d have to find a new home. Except that I couldn’t. So, jet lagged and disoriented, I just walked around, looking. I found nothing that felt good, nowhere I felt safe or comfortable. I had to move to a few places and lost some of my things in the transition. I couldn’t get my trunk out of storage until I found a place to live, so I was without most of what I needed; clothes, sheets, an umbrella, a knife to cut papaya. This went on for a few weeks. Then I got the flu, then a fever, my period, I still didn’t find a place, I still couldn’t unpack…and still the unanswered emails sat there, judging me.
In retrospect I can recognize that what I needed was to orient. I needed to know where my things were (I still can’t find my favorite skirt and my sweatpants were definitively lost in the chaos of the move) and, more importantly where I was. I needed a way to lay out all the tasks that I needed to do, to understand which ones were the priorities, and to get a vague map of how long it would take me to catch up.
There was another, even more important layer – I needed to orient internally.
When I was a child, because my mother worked nights, I slept in four or five different houses every week. Different houses with different energies, different rules, different people, nothing was the same. I could never really catch up with all the different demands, find the right way to be in all the different places. I could never really orient. And, you guessed it, my arrival in India sent me right back to that place; a frozen, displaced, child who just wanted to go home, but couldn’t.
The reality is, if I were to just deal with the external situation, I still might not get out of the paralysis. We need more than a pep talk. Discipline, motivation, resolve, these things are nothing in the face of a nervous system shutdown. Sometimes the only way out is to turn our attention and our will toward the source of our paralysis.
What I needed was to recognize the enormity of the sensation in me, and to connect with these feelings running through me. I needed to face the helplessness and fear, the exhaustion, the pessimism, and the feelings of inadequacy so that I could make the correlation between this feeling and the ‘old feeling’. In truth, my system had already made the connection. My system was already operating under the assumption that this situation and the one when I was a child were the same thing.
And it was only by recognizing this that I could orient, evaluate things considering all the variables – such as, I am a grown woman and not a child with no resources or voice, that I could slowly start to come back out of the fog.
This is not easy. Remember that one of freeze’s functions is to anesthetize. When we are in freeze, we don’t feel the fear, the pain, the difficulty of our reality. When we want to get out of freeze, we first must feel these things, so that we can know that despite the presence of these factors we are ok. So that we can assess the situation and know that despite the feeling of being unsafe, we are safe. We need to let our nervous systems know that the danger has passed.
We can’t do that if we don’t understand what caused us to shut down.
Now, all that being said, sometimes laziness is, in fact, laziness and you need to push to get out of it. Sometimes laziness is some mixture of fear and rebellion. There’s a lot of cocktails that can make it up, what’s important is to look, especially when it is something that you have tried to overcome and you are not able, when it’s something that arises habitually and no amount of rationalizing or time management can get you out of it, at what’s behind it. Either way, the simple practice of orienting is a powerful tool to help know where we are, and how to move forward.