A walk in the dark forest.

I’ve been writing for nearly forty years, and by my own standards, I’ve done okay even though my measure of success isn’t particularly admirable—if I can pay the bills, I’m chill. There are, of course, better ways to gauge a writer’s worth: the quality of the work itself or simply how it lands with readers.

I remember a moment long ago when someone pulled me aside to thank me. His son, who’d never picked up a book outside of school, became a reader after a friend introduced him to one of my dumber airport novels. Six months later, the kid was devouring books across different genres. I like that memory—it makes me happy. And I’d be a better person if I measured success by stuff like that. But when I started writing in the mid-1980s, my goal was simple: I gave myself five years to earn a living by telling stories. I managed that in three, thanks in part to a taste for cheap, generic brand meat pies and weekly rent that was laughably low—fifteen or twenty bucks, max. I suppose I’ve never quite shaken that lowball mindset.

There’s a trap, though. When your self-worth hinges on production metrics—like pages written or books sold—things can get dark fast. I’m talking about writing because it’s what I know, but you can apply this to almost anything. Socrates testified during his trial that “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but an overly quantified life comes with its own form of suckage.

Lately, I’ve found myself wandering, yet again, in the dark forest of procrastination. The more I focused, and eventually obsessed, on how little I was doing, the darker that forest became.

I’ve been here before, many times over the last forty years, and because it helped some of you when I talked about it previously, I’m gonna lean into the happy thought that the worth of this week’s column might be found in how it helps someone else, not what it does for me.

I’ll skip to the payoff and let you know that I have escaped the dark forest. Again. But I also know I’ll find myself back there. Again. Because we always do, don’t we?

So, what happened this time? A bunch of stuff. Some personal, some not. Seriously—and I say this with a smile—I blame Kamala Harris. I have to read a lot of news for work, and the last six months have been grim. Then suddenly, unicorns start shitting rainbows all over the timeline, and the Orange Demon King stumbled into narcissistic mortification and ego dissolution. It’s been hard to ration myself. No, that’s not true—it’s always hard to ration yourself when you’re enjoying something. But it’s not impossible. And usually, when things get tough, I still manage to push through. But not these last few weeks.

Why?

This is where we shift from the specific to the universal—from me to you. We all carry anxieties with us, buckets of fear and stress. I’ve got mine; you’ve got yours. Some of them are the same, some very different. But we’ve all got ‘em. And mine, these last few weeks, have been full-to-slopping-over.

That’s why picking up my iPad every morning and scanning the news became addictive. It was fun, and it was distracting.

Procrastination is all about distracting yourself from pain, no matter how uncomfortable that distraction eventually becomes. And it’s delightfully distracting to wake each day to some new variation on the worst people in the world getting launched by a giant trebuchet into a shark tank full of hammerheads. Not even real hammerheads. Cartoon ones. So they can get chewed up and come back to do it all over again tomorrow.

The trebuchet and cartoon sharks aren’t the point, of course. What matters are those half-dozen buckets overflowing with anxiety, just sitting there, momentarily forgotten because we were having such a good time.

It doesn’t really matter what I’m anxious about, or what you’re anxious about. What matters is how uncomfortable we feel while our anxieties gnaw away at us—and what we do to ease that discomfort.

Example. About five years ago, I was dealing with chronic back pain. A couple of discs at the base of my spine were fusing together, trapping nerves between them. It snuck up on me—a few twinges here, some stiffness there, pins and needles running down my leg. And then, one day, I realized I was in real pain and had been for weeks. Taking Nurofen helped. But only to dull the pain temporarily, not to fix the disintegration of my spinal column. A personal trainer, also a good friend, helped me address the root cause by getting me into weightlifting. Building a girdle of muscle around my core supported my backbone, and the pain went away for good.

Faffing around on the internet, making bottomless cups of tea, endlessly scrolling social media—that’s a blister pack of Nurofen for my inflamed and distressed soul. It numbs the discomfort for a while, but it doesn’t address the deeper issues gnawing away beneath the skin.

I do know how to address those issues. I’ve been honing my game for a long time. But stress and anxiety are sneaky little fuckers, and if you’re not constantly vigilant, they’ll find a way in.

This time, they snuck in through relief. Next time, it’ll be something else—and there will be a next time because there always is.

So, how did I get back to work?

First, I had to recognize what was happening and try to understand it. That meant admitting to myself that I had a lot of anxiety swirling around in those half-dozen stress buckets. Acknowledging and accepting that was the key to thinking beyond temporary pain relief. In fact, it meant understanding that the relief—procrastinating—was making things worse.

That first step, recognizing and understanding what’s going on, is necessary but not sufficient.

I also needed some practical responses.

In this case, that meant giving myself permission to fail. I’m not sure if I’ve written about this before, but giving yourself permission to fail is one of the best things you can do when you’re struggling to get started. There’s a weird mental trick that happens in the mind of a procrastinator—we take all the pain we’re feeling in other parts of our lives and project it onto the work we’re avoiding. The transference is easy because, let’s face it, the work is hard. There’s a discomfort that comes with sitting down to do it. We all know that feeling. That’s why we put it off. And if you’ve got stress in other parts of your life (and who doesn’t?), it’s like that pain gets redirected to your work, just as I used to feel the pain from my crumbling spinal discs down in my thighs and even my toes.

By giving yourself permission to fail—by telling yourself, "I’m just going to try this for 5 or 10 or 15 minutes, and if I can’t do it, if it’s just too much, then I’ll go watch some Netflix or something"—you trick your brain into easing up. Of course, those few minutes don’t kill you or even mildly inconvenience you. They just get you rolling. And once you’re rolling, suddenly it’s like sunbeams stream into that dark forest, lighting the way out.

That trick worked for me this time, but I had another one up my sleeve that I’ll share with you, just in case you need it. I call it the golden hour. When you’re at the start of your workday, project, or whatever it is you just can’t get going on, there’s often a distraction whispering in your ear, promising how much nicer it would be to toss down your tools and settle into something easier, away from your work.

Hearing that whisper, I made a deal with myself: if I managed to do even a minimal amount of work, I’d reward myself with a golden hour of luxurious, guilt-free indulgence at the end of the day. No matter how wastefully ridiculous a distraction might be, I’d let myself wallow in it then.

It was enough to trick my treacherous dopamine system into thinking it had gotten what it wanted.

I was back at work.

For now, at least.

I really hope this helps somebody.