You can step into the pool slowly, or dive in, or jump in, or sit at the edge and splash yourself for a while—all fine. (Splashing first—my favorite.)

But if you want to go in—today, this week, this month—know that the water won’t get any warmer while you’re waiting.

From my experience as an aunt (and more distant experience as a babysitter), I recall that neither scolding nor pleading gets you very far with toddlers. Empathy, on the other hand, will nearly always steer you right.

So that’s the tack I took this week.  I looked at my to-do list.  My Inner Toddler stamped her feet. “You really, really don’t want to work on this!” said I, the Kindly Rational Grownup. Inner Toddler glared, arms folded. “You really think it’s going to be tedious and hard,” I said. She’s still glaring, lips pressed together tight. “I don’t think it’s going to be as tedious as you think. But let’s find out. We’re going to work on this project for an hour, and you can operate the yuck-o-meter. At the end, you tell me what the yuck-o-meter says.”

So she kept busy with the yuck-o-meter while I made headway on the task list. It wasn’t tedious, exactly, but there was a lot of frustration. Oh, right—it usually takes a lot more time than I hope to get past the second-guessing-every-decision phase, until I feel some momentum. No wonder she didn’t want to settle down! Yuck-o-meter reading: Medium High.

I’ve also observed that once past the first-however-many unpleasant hours of uncertainty and frustration, things start (slowly) to get easier and more interesting. The Inner Toddler has trouble with that concept, not being so skilled at delayed gratification.

But she does like running the yuck-o-meter. So she’s getting to do that all week.

Note: Predicting how difficult/satisfying a task will be, and comparing that prediction to reality, also happens to be a technique from cognitive behavioral therapy. The Inner Toddler prefers the yuck-o-meter.

Well, not so helpful. Not for me. Because sometimes, depending on the creative project, the sitting down is unpleasant, the getting started is unpleasant, and the unpleasantness continues for a good long while.

I’m often struck by how intense the anxiety is. How emotionally and physically draining. The feeling of pervasive dread. The prospect of imagined failure, never mind all the past successes. The prickliness in my arms. The tension in my neck and shoulders.

So, just get started? Pfft. Once I start, I might be looking at two hours or more of this extreme unpleasantness before I get into some kind of momentum. And by momentum, I don’t mean a satisfying flow state—I just mean that the cacophony and prickliness have settled down enough for me to produce some rough work that I can then go back and revise.

I resent this ramp-up time. I hate it. Of course I want to avoid it.

Here’s the tangle, the paradox. Overwhelming anxiety makes it impossible to focus. I really can’t think, concentrate, brainstorm, explore, create, produce, problem-solve, have interesting insights when in the grip of raging self-doubt and coursing adrenaline.

Yet the noise doesn’t die down until I’ve reached some momentum—until I have something mapped out, or written down, however unusable and imperfect, to show me that I am capable of addressing the creative problem.

So, basically, the only way to get past the anxiety is to work in the presence of anxiety. Ugh.

I’m really frustrated by this. Not only is it painful, it’s inefficient! (It also seems to make brief work sessions—like Robert Boice’s recommended 15 minutes—kind of impractical. By the time the work session ends, I haven’t even stopped spinning my wheels. What’s the point of that?) Why do other people find that just starting is enough? Why does the ramp-up time take so damn long? How can I make the pain stop?

The big shift

Last week, the marvelous Cairene MacDonald pointed out to me that this ramp-up time may be hardwired, and that wishing otherwise might be adding to my difficulty.

And it dawned on me that anxiety management is actually part of the creative process. It’s not taking time away from the work. It’s part of the work. And I need to allow time for it.

Unfortunately, how to manage anxiety is not so clear yet. But framing it this way—giving it legitimacy—helps me be less surprised and upset by the time and energy it takes up.

What might work: The how-to part

One thing that’s becoming clear as I mull over this idea, is that managing anxiety does not mean “finding a way to make it go away before I start work.” It does mean taking seriously how much kindness and support I need to give myself as I proceed into the unknown, frustration upon frustration, until the struggle gives way just a little and I start to find my pace.

Slow, calming breaths.

Standing up when I need to, i.e., every few minutes. (But without fleeing to the kitchen for sugar. Walking around the room is good.)

The compassionate-parent approach: “Wow, you’re really worried about this and not wanting to do it! It doesn’t feel good right now! And, you know you need to stay with it! Not fun! Hang in there!”

A pillow on my lap, for easy clutching.

For as long as it takes.

It could be fun to speculate about the reasons—we’re so wired we can afford to be lackadaisical? We’re such crazed multitaskers that deadline pressure is the only thing that gets our attention?

But here’s what really interested me. I’m a San Franciscan, I’ve been known to procrastinate, and I got my return in early. How’d that happen?

Interim deadlines. Financial incentives. From a smart tax preparer who didn’t want to spend the first two weeks of April camping in his office.

My tax guy has always given discounts to clients who mail their materials to him instead of making an in-person appointment. This year he added a new twist: 15% off for returning your receipts in February, 10% in March, and 5% in April. I read that memo and thought, You had me at February.

Most years, I do my scrambling at the end of March—sending him my docs after he’s made a couple of reminder calls. We end up filing just before April 15.

Not this year. He had my stuff on February 28. It’s a recession. I wanted the discount.

I know that a fake deadline, well ahead of the actual due date, is one way—theoretically—to keep a project on schedule. I also know that it’s tough to take a fake deadline seriously.

So now I’m looking around at my stalled projects and asking: Who can be my tax guy for these other deadlines? And what incentive will motivate me?