Stop overthinking everything

Years and years ago, my therapist told me that I overthink things. I still wonder what she meant.

This article buzzed around Facebook today and I found it useful because actually, yes, I do overthink. And it is a problem.

We all do our best to stay positive, but occasionally we can slip into negative thinking patterns that can wreak havoc on our lives. We might worry about our past mistakes or current stresses, and how these could lead to negative outcomes in the future. We might obsess about or over-analyze regular experiences and interactions, reading into them things that aren’t actually there. We might find that as soon as one bad thing happens, we associate it with all the other bad things that have happened in our lives and begin to feel miserable. We might feel anxious in the present, having a hard time getting out of our own heads as we worry and obsess about the things that could go wrong.

If you find yourself in this place frequently, you are what psychologists call a ruminator, or, an over-thinker, and this way of thinking can be harmful to your health. Psychologists have found that over-thinking can be detrimental to human performance, and can lead to anxiety and depression, especially in women, who are much more likely than men to ruminate on stress and disappointments than men.

8 Ways to Stop Over-Thinking and Find Peace in the Present Moment – Dr Kelly Neff, The Mind Unleashed (9 September 2014)

I find it helpful enough to just have my head explained there but the full piece includes the eight helpful suggestions of the title and they are good. Even the one that explains bloody walking is good for you. What is it with that today?

Ignore people, ignore now, just keep working

I think that’s advice we can all take in our writing. When you start writing, you get asked when your novel is coming. When you’ve a novel, you’re asked when the film is coming. On and on it goes. But just keep writing. When it comes, it comes.

None of which features in the new BusinessWeek interview with Apple’s Tim Cook but all of it features in there. Apple’s been knocked a lot for a lack of innovation and all the way time it’s been working on a watch. You might not like it, you might very well not be interested in it, but you know that every other smartwatch that comes out is going to borrow from Apple’s design.

The piece interested me anyway but in a small way it reminded me of writing. The way that a Doctor Who release comes out a year after I write it so I have the weird thing of people asking me about my new one and I have to think which one they mean and what I can say. I told you it was a small way. But it’s there.

Read BusinessWeek’s full piece.

What a productivity app developer does when not productive

Take a read of this on Reddit. Those very words – actually, that very word
Reddit – should tell that it won’t be an easy read. Not because of anything actually harsh or hard in the piece, but because it’s on Reddit. Looks very ugly but it’s worth it for pieces like this:

Lately, I’ve been stressed out and find myself caught in a bad, unproductive cycle: I’m tired so I can’t work. But I’m stressed out so I can’t sleep. I wake up tired, only to realize I’m going to waste another day. This has been going on for some x weeks — maybe more.

This isn’t normal for me: I write productivity apps, and I (like to think) I really know my stuff. If you ask me about a common problem about productivity, I probably know how to solve it because I’ve probably suffered from it in the past.

I’m writing this down because I need to follow my own advice. Maybe you need to hear it too. If you don’t need this now, that’s fine. We go through phases in life. I probably didn’t need to hear this 6 months ago.

If you’re stressed out and got caught in a unproductive cycle, here’s something that might help. (self.productivity) – Reddit (20 September 2014)

Read the short but full piece on Reddit.

Yeah, yeah, anyone can be creative

Wall Street Journal, noted bastion of the arts and rumoured to be the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, has done one of those How to Be Creative articles. It’s called How to Be Creative:

The image of the ‘creative type’ is a myth. Jonah Lehrer on why anyone can innovate—and why a hot shower, a cold beer or a trip to your colleague’s desk might be the key to your next big idea.

How to Be Creative – Jonah Lehrer, Wall Street Journal (12 March 2012)

Another tug of the forelock, this time for 99U. Anybody can be creative, but they’re not. Says I. Lehrer, not so much:

…creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is.

The full feature goes on to list exactly what you have to do in order to be creative. Please follow the instructions and let me know when your symphony is read.

I’m minded of Community, the comedy. In one episode, there’s a mobile phone app that you use to rate everyone else. Rather than stars or ticks, these ratings are called meowmeowbeenz. And Abed, an Aspergers’ character says at one point:

Meowmeowbeenz takes everything subjective and unspoken about human interaction and reduces it to explicit, objective numbers. I’ve never felt more alive.

Go read the full piece and let me know if you rate it two or more meowmeowbeenz.

Nobody knows how to make a can of Coke either

The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.

What Coke Contains – Kevin Ashton, Medium (27 February 2013)

I would recommend the full piece to you regardless because it is a very interesting read. But I think there is a thought here that applies to us as writers.

Nobody knows how to make drama. The number of individuals who know how to make a TV series is zero. We all have to work together and it uses all of everything we know.

I’m serious but you’re looking at me like I’m trying to contort a metaphor. I’m not saying you’re right, but go on, go read the full feature instead. And as you go along, take a guess how many cans of Coke are made every day.

Tug of the cap to The Loop for covering this.

Ideas have their time

I’m working toward various BBC Radio proposals – you get to submit them via producers in what’s called the offers round at certain times of the year – and I’ve done this a lot. The proposals. A lot. I mean, a lot. Quite often an idea will go very far through the process before it becomes clear it isn’t going to fly.

That’s not for any bad reason, it would often enough be that the BBC released notes on what they specifically didn’t want this time around and an idea or two of mine might be exactly one of those. Even then, the usual reason BBC Radio doesn’t want a certain type of idea is that they’ve just done too many of them. But like anything else you do a lot of, you keep doing a lot of them because they work. So sooner or later, they’ll be asking for exactly that type again.

But.

Usually when it’s been suggested that I bump an idea back to next time, whenever next time is, I’ve mentally regarded that as a rejection. I’m not being pessimistic or self-immolating about it, I think it’s factual. Because ideas go stale.

You have a finite time in which the idea is viable and exciting to you. After that, you’re at least struggling to get back the passion or you’re not even struggling, you’re just pretending.

Plus, I think that even the producer who says – and means – to bring it back next time will often not use it then for much the same reason. They’ve got their plate full of new ideas, one from last time will just seem stale.

There are exceptions. I’m involved in one right now. We’ll see how it goes but I’m into it with a passion.

But. Presume that this isn’t going to happen to you, so that you can the better enjoy it when it does. If you have an idea you want to write, write it while you still want to.

Or to put it another way, get on with it.