Let’s be honest about something: The fact that writing is hard has nothing to do with how talented you are, how many ideas you have, or how much you want to complete your novel. Writing is hard because your human brain, which has been running and updating biological human survival software for about 200,000 years, is actually convinced that putting words to a page can kill you.
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This is not a metaphor.
Every time you sit down to write, you are doing something that your brain perceives as socially risky. Translating private thoughts into language means exposing oneself to judgment, and for most of human history, judgment was not only inconvenient, but also dangerous. Research by Naomi I. Eisenberger In 2004 it was discovered how our brains evolved to fear social pain. Being rejected by the group means you don’t eat the food. Being humiliated in front of the clan meant you would not be able to survive the winter.
Your nervous system still remembers it all as you try to write your next chapter. The brain’s job is to keep you alive, so it does what it does best: it detects danger and moves you away from it.
That’s why, the moment you sit down to write a difficult scene, you suddenly realize you need to re-organize your sock drawer, or walk the dog, or change your windshield wipers. Anything but write.
Undirected mental energy can (ideally) be a source of creativity, but left to its own devices, the mind does not naturally move toward gratitude and wonder. It moves towards danger.
Now consider that sitting down to write requires a lot of concentration, so you’re also working against your brain’s natural tendency to daydream, ruminate, and wander. The areas of the brain involved in this type of mental disturbance are called default mode networka term coined by marcus raichel. For writers, undirected mental energy can (ideally) be a source of creativity, but left to its own devices, the mind does not naturally move toward gratitude and wonder. It moves towards danger. Which leads us to another biological reality that makes writing difficult: negativity bias.
Your brain is specifically wired to give more weight to bad things than good things. Social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister talked about this in his paper.bad is stronger than good” An ancestor who forgot about the beautiful flowers growing by the lake? Okay. An ancestor who forgot about the lion by the lake? Well, they’re probably not ancestors, because they probably didn’t live long enough to reproduce. Focusing our attention on potentially painful or deadly things has helped us, as a species, survive as long as we have.
Moreover, it is not just external negative factors that our brain depends on. We have an amazing ability to remember and relive emotional pain. A A 2008 study by Zhansheng Chen Showed that social pain is remembered more intensely than physical pain. This explains why you can remember the time you had a broken arm and never really felt relief from that throbbing discomfort, but if you remember a broken heart, tears may still come. All this leads us to the reality that our brain perceives writing as silently dangerous.
So here we all sit, writing with brains that are actively scanning for danger, and are absolutely sure that the sentence we just typed is terrible, and absolutely sure it will be the end of us.
None of these are pathologies. It’s all just part of being human.
Here’s the good news: Once you understand why your brain responds to writing, you can train your brain to work with you, not against you. With a little practice you can learn to recognize your subconscious reactions to perceived threats, consciously remind yourself that you can do hard things, then start writing. So how do we do that?
As a writing coach, the practice I invite all of my clients to try is called Insight Meditation, and before you dismiss it as tempting and walk away, hear me out. This is a super simple exercise and it will make a world of difference to your writing life. All you have to do is sit comfortably, close your eyes if you want, and choose something to relax your focus on (your breathing, sounds in the room, a mental countdown from ten to zero). We call this anchor. Then you notice when your mind wanders, which it will continue to wander. When you realize it has strayed, you let go of the thought and return to its place. That’s it. This is the whole tradition. (If you want some help trying this out, you can check out this free collection of meditations I created just for writers ScribblingBuddha.com.)
Every time you dismiss a distraction and return to your anchor, You’re building the mental “muscle” of focus. Scientists are still researching the specific relationship between focus and creative flow, but anecdotally, nurturing focus appears to be the first step to getting into that wonderful, coveted mental state where words come easily, hours disappear, and your inner critic is silenced. Although it may sometimes feel like magic, flow is a predictable response to the right circumstances. This is science.
In 1990, Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience In which he talked about his research on the experience of “flow”. He used that term precisely because it came up again and again when he talked to artists, athletes, and others engaged in demanding, creative work. They found that flow occurs when a person’s skill level is perfectly balanced with the difficulty of the task at hand. When artists or athletes focused too much on facing a challenge, time seemed to drag on. They reported that they knew exactly what to do next at any given time and that they felt a great sense of peace and ease, even when doing something that was obviously difficult.
In his continuing research, and particularly in his work with Gene Nakamura in 2002, Csikszentmihalyi theorized that the human brain has a limited processing power of about 120 bits per second. It’s literally about a million times slower than the computer you’re reading this on. And your puny human processing power quickly becomes exhausted. You use about half of it just listening to someone.
Mindfulness doesn’t eliminate fear or self-doubt, I want to be honest about that. It changes your relationship with those experiences.
Now consider that focusing on a challenging task (like writing) aggressively drains processing power, and as that happens, your brain doesn’t have the ability to do all the things it normally does behind the scenes. One of the first things is to keep track of time. Your brain knows it’s not that urgent, so as the extra processing power diminishes, your internal clock stops for a while. Soon after, your neural processing power is exhausted to keep up with the internal screaming of your inner critic. Focus enough and the part of your brain that is responsible for keeping track of the boundaries of your physical body begins to shrink, creating a feeling of expansion and connection. This degradation of more complex brain functions is what neuroscientists call transient hypofrontality, a phrase coined by Dr. Arne Dietrich. (you can see him TEDx talks about it here.)
You may have experienced momentary hypofrontality through the use of a drug such as LSD or psilocybin. The chemical can cause the brain to slam into a momentary hypofrontality, rendering you useless for anything except staring at the stars in awe. But a less invasive plunge into this mental state (for example, through the practice of meditation), can take you to a more gentle (and instantly reversible) altered state of mind, in which most of the activity of the prefrontal cortex is temporarily offline, but you can still follow a thought. In this state, you experience the benefits of less self-criticism and increased creativity (aka flow).
The best part? You can train yourself to develop this state of mind and get into a state of creative flow at will. Not occasionally, not when circumstances permit, but reliably, intentionally, every time you sit down to write. It’s as simple as sitting still for 10 minutes just before you start your writing.
When you practice mindfulness meditation before writing, then move your attention directly to your work, you carry that heightened state of focus straight to the page. Bad thoughts will still arise (laundry, email, the certainty that your opening scene is a disaster) but in the conscious state, those thoughts are worth noticing. You can notice them, recognize them for what they are (your brain is doing its overprotective thing), and let them go. Then keep writing.
Over time, this practice undergoes some fundamental changes. Mindfulness doesn’t eliminate fear or self-doubt, I want to be honest about that. It changes your relationship with those experiences. The desire to leave your work starts to feel less like a command and more like background noise. The inner critic becomes less like an authority figure and more like that coworker who sends a lot of emails. You don’t need to answer.
I can’t promise that this practice will make writing effortless, but I can definitely say that if you establish a regular meditation practice, you’ll write more and suffer less.
You’ll start to see that you can feel the doubt and keep writing. You can feel insecure and keep writing. You can feel the fear and keep writing. The goal isn’t to reach some mythical place where you’re above it all. I know every serious writer has to deal with resistance from time to time, but when can you accept resistance as normal, as a completely normal human reaction to doing something challenging, and still write? Well, this changes everything.
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Sit Here and Write: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less As of April, Davila is available from St. Martin’s Essentials, a division of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, Macmillan.
