The Paralysis Was the Point

Why the productivity-hack industry has it backwards

I haven’t published anything in a while. Not because I didn’t have ideas. I have outlines. I have three of them open right now, in fact, sitting in various stages of half-formed thought, some at full-formed thought (an Alzheimer’s disease biomarker agitation, breakthroughs in neuropathic pain research, and others). I had the time, technically. What I didn’t have was the ability to make my fingers type. I’d sit down, open the document, and feel something close to physical resistance. Not block or burnout, but something more specific than that.

I kept calling it productivity paralysis, because it sounded diagnostic and let me feel like I understood what was happening. I tried the just write one sentence trick. I tried the lower your standards trick. I tried the write badly on purpose trick. None of it worked and I started to wonder if I lost it, which is the natural next thought when your usual tricks stop working.

Then, somewhere around week three or four of this, I heard a voice in my head. Like an actual sentence formed in my head, with a smidgeon of scolding.

“Why the hell are you constantly sprinting?”

Understanding what was happening in my life during this stretch matters. I was a reviewer on an NIH study section, which, for me, is likely the intellectually most challenging part of being a professor. I had grants due to keep my lab afloat. I was running big experiments in said lab that needed actual presence and attention, not distracted half-presence. New lab members starting, some leaving. My daughter had just turned one. My son had just turned four. A month apart. There were birthday parties. There were ER visits (this happens with small kids). There were friends and family who hadn’t seen us in a while and wanted to (and I wanted to see them). There were the ordinary obligations of being a person with a job and a household and two small humans who depend on you for basically everything.

And I was trying to publish articles on top of all of that, because I’d built a habit…or a schedule.

The voice was right. I was sprinting. I had been sprinting for months. And somewhere in my brain, a system I don’t have full conscious access to had done the math and concluded that adding write a thoughtful article that meets your standards to the current load was not going to produce a thoughtful article that met my standards. It was going to produce slop. And then I would publish the slop, because I’d already paid the cognitive cost, and the sunk-cost machinery would take over, and I would have added one more piece of mediocre writing to a world that already has too much of it.

The paralysis was the solution and I’ve had some time to think about this; I’m convinced we are thinking about it wrong.

The dominant cultural narrative around not being able to do the thing you want to do is that it’s a failure of discipline, motivation, or systems. You need better routines. You need to lower the activation energy. You need to “ship”. You need to “embrace the suck”. There’s a whole industry built on the premise that the resistance is the enemy and your job is to beat it.

But sometimes the resistance is correct. Sometimes the part of your brain that’s saying don’t is the part that’s been keeping track of things the conscious, ambitious, deadline-driven part of you has been ignoring. Things like: you’ve slept poorly for a year. Things like: your one-year-old is now on the move and you have approximately eighteen months before rocking her to sleep is not really a thing anymore. Things like: the article you’re trying to force out would be the fourth-best version of itself, and you know it, and publishing it would be worse than not publishing at all because you’ve built a small audience that expects something specific from you.

The paralysis is a working brain doing its job. It’s the only part of the system that has the authority to say no when every other part has been saying yes for too long.

I wrote a rant a while back about lazy science communicators publishing AI-generated content without checking it. I stand by every word, but writing that rant put me in a corner. I’d publicly committed to a standard, and the standard is high, and now every time I sit down to write something I’m not just writing it, I’m writing it against the version of me that wrote the rant (that virtue-signaling, sometimes obnoxious version of me). The energy required to produce something I won’t be embarrassed by has gone up. And during a stretch where my cognitive resources were already allocated to study section reviews, grant aims, experimental design, and remembering which “wacky-dress day” it is at my four-year-olds school an hour before drop-off left me with nothing to draw from to start typing.

The laziest people in science communication

My brain knew this before I did. It refused to spend resources it didn’t have on a task that would have produced output I’d regret. I suppose it’s what executive function is supposed to do. The fact that it manifested as lack of motivation rather than as a clear thought is just how the system communicates. It sends feelings that you then translate to I don’t want to or I can’t right now or not today, and we interpret those signals as moral failings instead of as the system telling us something true.

I’m writing this now because something shifted. The study section finished. Grants went in. Papers submitted to peer-review. The birthdays happened, both of them, and I was actually mentally present for them.

I’m not writing this as a call to honor your paralysis or trust your gut or any of the usual nonsense. Sometimes it’s avoidance of a thing you need to do and your job is to do it anyway. Sometimes the paralysis is depression and you need help. The signal is not always trustworthy. But it is sometimes trustworthy, and we’ve gotten so good at overriding it that we’ve forgotten it’s there for a reason. The part of your brain that pumps the brakes is not your enemy. It’s not even particularly mysterious. It’s an integration of all the inputs you’re not consciously tracking, returning a verdict about whether the next thing is worth the cost.

When my brain said not now, what it actually meant was the people in this house and the science in your lab and the grant on your desk need you more than your audience needs another article this week. It was right. The article could wait. The kids could not.

So this is the article I wrote when the paralysis finally broke, or, rather it had finished doing its job.

I’m sorry I disappeared for a stretch. I’ll probably do it again. That’s life, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. Probably a course. Probably with a funnel. Probably built around the idea that they’ve cracked the code on consistent output, and for only $297 you too can learn to ignore every signal your brain is sending you about what you can actually sustain.

Don’t listen to those people. They are the hacks. Your brain, in most cases, knows what it’s doing. It has more information than you do about what you can handle in any given week. When it says not now, the productivity influencers will tell you to push through, optimize your morning routine, batch your tasks, eat the frog, build the system, drink this supplement. What they won’t tell you is that they’re burning out, also faking it.

What I can tell you is this: there’s a lot of new science coming out right now that I’m genuinely excited to write about. Cancer immunology is doing things I didn’t think we’d see this year. The GLP-1 literature keeps getting weirder in ways I want to dig into. There are papers sitting in my queue that I’m going to enjoy taking apart. I’m back, for now, until I’m not again, and then I’ll be back after that too. That’s the deal. I’d rather give you that honestly than promise a schedule I can’t keep.

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Stay Curious,

Andrew