When Your Body Thinks That Writing Will Kill You

Writing, IFS, and Virginia Valian

My relationship with writing is complicated. It’s sort of like Gollum and the One Ring: I both love writing and hate writing, at the same time.

I love being in creative flow. When I’m in flow, I’m engaged, I'm interested, I'm energized. It feels good, mentally and physically. It feels like “the real me.”

But I'm in flow maybe 5% of the time I spend writing. The rest of the time, I'm thinking about writing—studying, fretting, brainstorming, making notes, and wishing I could just get something on the page.

If the flow state feels amazing, the blocked state is the mirror opposite. It’s my own little torture room: I feel frustrated, confused, overwhelmed. And the entire writing project seems pointless.

I've read a lot of advice on how to solve this problem. Some of it helped (like The War of Art by Steven Pressfield), while most of it was superficial and bad.

But there's one piece I keep coming back to. It’s an essay from 1977 called Learning to Work by Virginia Valian. In the piece, Valian describes her process for overcoming resistance to finish her PHD thesis.

Her system is interesting, but it's not what I’m most intrigued by. Rather, it’s the unflinching way she examines her feelings around work and productivity. Here’s one example:

I approached work usually with two sorts of feelings. One was anger and resentment that I had to work; the other was a sense of competition as a life-or-death struggle—either I would kill others or they would kill me. Winning meant killing, losing meant being killed.

I know exactly what she’s getting at. When I’m not in a flow state and I try to write, I can get this sense of full-body alarm—like I'm in danger and my system is preparing to fight.

My chest and neck feel tight and it's harder to breathe. At the same time, I get this numbing effect, where my head starts to swim and I can’t concentrate. All I want to do is escape, either surf the net or go to sleep.

It’s infuriating. I want to write. I want to be prolific and build a business around my words. But when I try to actually do it, my body shuts me down.

Recently, I’ve been using IFS to understand these reactions. When I look inward, it’s like some part thinks that sharing my ideas will open me up to harm—I'll be shunned, attacked, ridiculed. And my body wants to prevent that from happening.

It's not logical. But this “resistance part” is so narrowly, obsessively focused, it can't see the reality of the situation: that I'm not going to be exiled from the tribe or killed for sharing ideas people may not jibe with.

I'm still learning IFS, but naming what's happening helps. When I feel that familiar tightness starting, I can stop and talk to the part that's freaking out: "I know you're trying to keep me safe. Thanks for that. But we're okay right now. This is actually what we want to be doing."

It sounds absurd, but hey, it works. Not perfectly—the resistance doesn't just vanish. But it backs off enough that I can usually get some words on the page.