A strategy for getting unstuck
(Photo by Uday Mittal from Unsplash).
Stuck in the shallows
Earlier this Summer, our family was at Browns Bay beach when we noticed a big commotion in the shallows. An SUV with a trailer had backed down to the shoreline to fetch a speedboat from the water. But the sand was water-bogged and weak, and the SUV was seriously stuck. Wheels spinning, going nowhere.
About 20 people tried to help - pushing the car, lifting the trailer, connecting the SUV to another SUV and trying to winch it out. No luck. Finally, after about an hour and with the rising tide nearly in the doors of the SUV, a person with a powerful car, a strong rope and a tactical ‘drive at 45 degrees’ strategy managed to winch the SUV and the boat out of the water. About 100 people on the beach whooped and cheered - it was a heart-warming little moment of community.
Stuck in our heads
I think we can all relate to that SUV - and that awful feeling of being stuck, wheels spinning, going nowhere. But our stuck-ness usually emanates from our minds, as we weigh up all the different options and get analysis paralysis.
I felt this strongly myself, just today. I was in a cafe and pondering an issue related to Thrive Lab, when I wrote this in my notebook:
“I feel all this self-judgement because I’m going around and around with to-do lists and plans, and not getting any traction, or doing any doing.”
The act of writing that out triggered the little behavioural science bells in my brain. Because analysis paralysis is a clear sign that your Rider is in charge, not your Elephant.
Elephants and emotions help us to get unstuck
In their wonderful book ‘Switch: How to change things when change is hard’, Chip and Dan Heath use the analogy of an elephant and a rider to distinguish between our powerful emotional brain (the elephant) and our rational brain (the rider). We only make progress when the two are aligned - when the rider points out where to go, and the elephant wants to go there.
But sometimes the rider tries to operate alone - and they spin out. The rational rider can think of a good story for anything, making them masters of ‘on the one hand, and on the other hand’.
There’s actually a famous case study about this, from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s book, “Descarte’s Error”. Damasio had a patient named Elliot who had a frontal lobe tumour which robbed him of his emotions, but left him with his intellect. Though Elliot was still really intelligent, he became paralysed by every single decision. For instance, when he was at work, “he might spend an entire afternoon trying to figure out how to categorize his documents: Should it be by date, pertinence to the case he’s working on, the size of the document, or some other metric?” (source).
Thanks to Elliot and a handful of other comparable cases, Damasio figured out that decision making doesn’t exclude the emotions, as Descartes implied with his famous quote, “Cogito, ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am”. Decision making requires emotion. I feel, therefore I think, therefore I am.
The way this works in practice is really fascinating - look up ‘somatic marker hypothesis’ if you want to dig into it more. But in essence, when your brain imagines different scenarios, your body responds at a physiological level - maybe your heart rate increases, or your muscles relax, or you find yourself smiling. Those physical signals act as ‘somatic markers’ - they feed back to your brain and give you an idea of which scenarios appeal, and which don’t. Helping you to overcome analysis paralysis, and move forward.
Sometimes ‘doing nothing’ is the most productive thing
I think one of the reasons we don’t ‘listen for our emotions’ more is that it doesn’t feel very productive. Sitting, and imagining scenarios, and noticing how your body feels, might all seem a bit woo-woo – and our culture values people who are busy and getting on with things. But if you’re not clear on your direction, you get movement without momentum. Planning without progress.
So next time you’re wheel-spinning in your mind, maybe try a left-field, non-linear, 45 degree approach. Rather than doubling down on the analysis, you could check in with your body for a few minutes, and go from there. At worst you’ve had a peaceful few minutes. At best, you’ve got a way forward.
x Renee from Thrive Lab