When I get stuck on a creative project—any project, really—it’s often because my emotions are shouting so loudly that I mistake them for objective reality.

“It FEELS like this writing assignment is impossible, therefore it IS impossible. I FEEL uncertain about how to design this workshop, therefore I will fail. I FEEL frustrated because I don’t see an answer to this creative problem, therefore there IS no answer for it.”

That’s emotional reasoning in action. I’ve been thinking about this concept since reading When in Doubt, Make Belief, about coping with obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD for short. Mental health is a continuum, and though I don’t have OCD, I’m seeing a lot of myself in this book—I can certainly get unproductively obsessive about things (when in doubt, make lists!), and I let anxiety run the show more often than I would like.

Author Jeff Bell, who has the disorder, writes about the way that compulsive, repetitive behavior provides temporary emotional relief for someone with OCD. An example might be checking the stove burners seven times in succession, then going back to check them yet again. The rational mind knows this behavior is unnecessary, even counterproductive, but the emotions aren’t buying it.

Emotional reasoning plays a large and stubborn role in my creative life. I don’t check the stove burners, but I do get swept up in the discouraging messages from the hollering emotions. It’s tempting to respond by avoiding the project that’s frustrating me, which buys me temporary relief but reinforces the power of emotions to derail me in the future.

Bell recommends mindfulness—steady, nonjudgmental awareness—as one way of coping better with emotional reasoning and the nonproductive impulses it can lead to. When you observe the anxiety instead of giving in to the obsessive (or in my case, escapist) urge—when you sit it out until the anxiety dissipates—you gradually habituate to the anxiety. Over time, the painful feelings that you would do anything to avoid become less dominant, less threatening.

Over time: there’s the rub. Often the anxiety does not dissipate soon enough for me. Often it gets worse before it gets better. I have been known to use this phenomenon as a further reason to delay action: “See? I was right not to want to get started! Who in their right mind would choose to do something that feels this awful?” But according to the cognitive therapists, seeing the awfulness as unbearable is a thinking habit that I’m mixing up with reality.

Naming the mission

Part of it has to do with how I frame the issue. That’s why having a name for it—emotional reasoning—is helpful. I’m in the habit of focusing on the goal: “How can I feel better right now?” A more useful goal (or frame) could be: “How can I practice a different way of dealing with frustration and anxiety right now? Am I willing to habituate to these feelings so they don’t bug me so much, don’t run the show?”

This second goal is more challenging. It means drawing on a different set of mental muscles, carving out a new mental groove. Hard work! But potentially healthier…and might even, potentially, lead to feeling better over the long term.

As with my coaching clients, I’m not aiming for a sudden about-face—that’s not a sustainable way to deal with a longstanding habit. But I have found that huge shifts can come out of a simple beginning: increasing the amount of time between the impulse to react in the default way, and the reaction itself. Micro-lengthening that bit of time between impulse and default reaction starts to change things in profound ways.

I think this is another way of looking at my take on the Pomodoro Technique (for me, micro-sessions of work alternating with longer rest periods) and why it’s been helping. The feelings aren’t derailing me so much; I’ve been focusing better. Now I’m examining the frame: changing the goal from “Make the feelings go away” to “Practice habituating to the feelings, so they’re less fearsome and not so much in charge.”

Behaviorally, this translates into: When the unpleasant creative-frustration-uncertainty-avoidance cluster pushes its way into consciousness, notice it. Sit with it. It would be nice to say, until it dissipates, but that may still be longer than I’m willing to tolerate. I’m starting by increasing the amount of time I sit with those feelings—pause, breathe—before running away.

One of the best things about vacation is that I get to structure my day the way I’d like to structure it at home—while free of the temptations and distractions and longstanding habits that, at home, get in the way of that ideal structure.

I’m recently back from a mini-vacation in Western Sonoma County. Ahhhh—a delightful mix of low-key busy-ness (I milked a goat! and bought cucumber-scented face cream!) and stillness (strolling the beach, sitting outside in the morning mist.)

Since I got back, I’ve been looking for ways to keep up with a morning routine that I know works for me: meditate for 15 or 20 minutes first thing, then step outside for a few minutes. Then have a light breakfast, then take a look at my intentions for the day.

When I follow this routine, it doesn’t guarantee a smooth day. But it generally makes for one that feels less fragmented.

More often, though, my daily routine goes: check email, check online forums, check Twitter, read paper, deal with more email, eat breakfast at lunchtime, deal with phone calls and (seemingly) urgent assignments, eventually squeeze in some meditating, go outside late afternoon (oh! there is a world out there!), work late into the evening.

I wouldn’t mind this pattern if it felt like a natural rhythm, but it feels more like an accidental or drifty one.

Here’s the key:

When I spend the first part of the day in front of the computer, my agenda gets set by the instruments of distraction.

To resist the computer’s siren song, I need something better than the grit-my-teeth-and-fight-it method. I need a substitute activity that’s simple and inherently rewarding.

I’ve tried combining steps 1 and 2 by meditating in a nearby park, but that brings up its own set of questions and distractions (is the noisy leaf-blower guy working today? should I put on sweats or street clothes? should I go to the dry cleaner, as long as I’m headed that way?)—until, overwhelmed, I turn to the default option and get lost online.

This past week, I’ve added a new element to the morning routine. First thing in the morning, I’ve been walking out to the back stairs of my apartment building, and sitting outside on the stairs while I meditate. It’s easier than getting myself to the park, and there are trees and birds out back, just like on vacation!

The rest of the day is going better.

Kitchen timers are the latest time-management trend. Fans of the Pomodoro Technique say to set the timer for 25 minutes, work with total focus, then take a five-minute break.

I like the idea, and I’ve tried variations on the timer technique. But when I’m on deadline, a timer adds to the stress, plus I chafe at having to sit still for long chunks. And the timer doesn’t change the coping habit that I’ve been refining over decades: encounter obstacle, get out of chair, walk to kitchen and look for food. Distract! Numb the anxiety! The timer has no power over this drive.

I’ve tried setting the timer so that it counts up instead of down. This method creates less stress and helps me educate myself about how long things actually take, which is a pleasant surprise when something goes faster than expected, but just as often an unpleasant surprise when it takes so very much longer. Unpleasant but useful to know. The counting-up method has potential but isn’t there yet.

Here’s what does work, I discovered.

Five-minute increments

Yep. Five minutes. Because that appears to be my upper limit for sitting with uncertainty, anxiety and frustration.

I tried this last week, on deadline. I was so tired I was having trouble focusing, but the project still needed major edits and was due within the next 24 hours.

I sat down to face the edits. Felt the familiar reaction: “Gahhh! Don’t know how to fix this!” Observed myself starting to get up, in search of food and escape. OK, I said, I need to be kind to myself—I’m sleep-deprived and I’ve got to get this done. Let me spend five minutes focused on the edits. Then I can forage if I need to.

About three minutes later, the foraging urge hit hard. I can focus for two more minutes, I said to myself, and believed it. I stayed with the project. A bit further in, the urge to jump up from the desk hit again. I checked my watch; seven minutes had passed since I started. OK, I’d stuck with the deal. I stood, stretched out my neck and arms, ate a piece of fruit. Was I ready to go back to work? Nope, too exhausted from lack of sleep the night before. OK, I thought, I’ll lie down and take a nap. If I have to complete this project in five-minute work sessions with half-hour breaks in between, so be it.

After resting for just 15 minutes, I felt refreshed enough to go back to my desk and work for another five minutes. Then I took a 20-minute break. After about three of these cycles, I’d built up some decent momentum and was able to work steadily for six hours. I finished the project and met my deadline.

Inefficient, you may say? It’s actually pretty efficient, compared to the usual stalling and struggling and worrying and munching.

The six-hour session that followed the ramp-up would be considered by some (like Robert Boice) to be a binge—not ideal. Later, I’ll look at how to take breaks during extended sessions without losing momentum. But first: Let’s make the five-minute increments a habit and see how that goes.

One of the things that frustrates me most about writing—or creating anything, really—is the way that you—I—never get it right the first time. Not-getting-it-right is built into the process: whatever I’m working on is continuously wrong, or gradually-and-marginally-less-wrong, until finally, near the very end, it’s right (enough), and therefore Done! NEXT!

I like being right. I hate being wrong. Creating means spending a lot of time hanging out in the not-right zone. Bleah!

It’s one of the main reasons I get immobilized. You can say all you want, “Go ahead, just write a terrible first draft” (and believe me, I always write lousy first drafts, and second and third ones too), but I find this aspect of creativity nearly intolerable. I hate committing to a choice—a word, a sentence, an organizing principle—knowing I will just have to change it later.

Yet this is how ideas get refined. I revisit them, rework them, see how they relate to each other, begin to see what’s more or less important, find new relationships, decide what’s a tangent and what’s core, eliminate the excess. Did I mention that I hate that this is how the process works? It’s excruciating to me.

After coming across the work of psychologist Carol Dweck, I’m beginning to understand my reaction a little better. Dweck has done research into the difference between performance goals (“I did great! I’m smart and talented! Reward me!”) and learning goals (“I persisted and eventually got there! Yay!”)  As the proverbial A-student, I grew up (happily) performance-focused, rewarded for consistently Getting It Right. This works fine until you hit a setback. Performance-focused A-student types never learn to manage the frustration of Getting It Wrong. Their (my) approach is: “There is a Right Way, and the goal is to get to the Right Way sooner. Wrongness is unacceptable and a big waste of time!” The kid who’s rewarded for persistence rather than performance thinks, “Oh, I love a problem! If I keep working at it, I’ll figure it out.”

“I love a problem”? This attitude is completely alien to me. In my mind, “I don’t know how” leads automatically to “Therefore, I cannot.” My progress is continually throttled by the emotional conviction that “No answer YET” equals “There IS no answer.”

And really, almost all of life is about Not Yet. The moments of “Got it!” are brief and fleeting. So it would be useful to learn tolerance and appreciation for Not Yet.

A scientist I’m acquainted with heard my description of creativity-as-successive-iterations-of-not-rightness and told me, “That’s how science works: Asking successively better questions. It’s a cumulative process.” I like the word “cumulative.” It suggests not that things are wrong-wrong-wrong-until-Bing! they’re OK, but rather that I’m building on my work so that it keeps getting better.

Tolerating not-rightness is a learned behavior, and I don’t know (yet) how to learn it. I have some ideas, though. And I’m persisting.

How’s the Early Bedtime Project going? Spotty. But positive even so. The inconsistency is not a surprise—I acknowledged that late-night work sessions are a longstanding habit, maybe even part of my identity. As expected (I even built it into the plan), I reverted to working into the night under deadline pressure. Now that I’m not under deadline, I’m finding it really hard to return to the plan. I still think it’s possible.

Even though I’m not going to bed so early these days, a few things are different, in a good way.

• I have gone to bed early a few times in the past few weeks, and slept nicely.

• I haven’t beaten myself up for working late when I needed to.

• I think of myself as someone who will resume going to bed earlier. Maybe my identity is shifting a little.

Some other things I’ve noticed:

• Although shutting the computer off by 9:00 doesn’t guarantee I’ll meet the early bedtime goal, not shutting the computer off by 9:00 does guarantee that I won’t fall asleep until much later than I want to. To put it more simply, it’s really, really, important to turn the computer off early! Even if I don’t feel finished that day!

• And I have to be careful about TV. Okay to watch some, earlyish. Watching a lot, late-ish, gets me worked up and makes it harder to fall asleep. I need to find other ways to reward myself for turning off the computer, aside from TV.

• I had planned not to be distressed when I take a long time to fall asleep on a given night, or wake up in the middle of the night. Nice theory, but when the tossing and turning and mind-racing go on for hours, mm, not so easy to let it go. I need techniques to call on when that happens. Indeed, you yourself may have been wondering, “But Janet, what are you supposed to do when you go to bed early and then lie awake? Because I [meaning of course you] do not find that kind of thing at all motivating!”

So here’s what I’ve been trying, on nights when sleep is difficult:

Mindful breathing. Middle-of-the-night Mindfulness 101: Notice what’s going through your mind, without getting involved in it . . . notice what’s happening in your body, without feeling compelled to fix it. Then bring attention to your breath, observing when your mind wanders away from the breath and gently bringing it back. I admit that switching from thinking (with mind racing) to observing (without attachment) does not come so very naturally! I’m practicing . . . Anyway, here are some ideas for doing this at bedtime. (The breathing exercises are all good. Pick the simplest one, or the first one, or close your eyes and point. Don’t get all agitated over which one to use.)

Acupressure. One night this worked! Not every night. There are lots of acupressure points that are supposed to help with insomnia. This video explains two of them very clearly. (Sorry about the brief ad. But note the video is from the lovely people at the late lamented Elephant Pharmacy!) An internet search will turn up lots more.

It’s 9:30pm (oops!) as I draft this. Turning off the computer now—will edit and post during daylight hours. See? Stopping before I’m finished. I can do it.