Draining Your Brain

There is such a thing as working too hard. When we spend too much time and energy on one task, we eventually exhaust ourselves, and this leads to frustration and inertia. And when you are frustrated and stuck, the ego tends to step in and start that dialogue in your brain that is telling you that you are going to fail.

When I was learning to play the piano, I used to practice so much that I would eventually begin to sound worse at the end of a practice than I did at the beginning. My wise instructor could sense what was going on and one day told me that I was wearing myself out. It was true–I would practiced until my eyes and fingers and brain were tired, and I inevitably would start to make very basic mistakes that I had worked years to overcome.

This same principle applies to our writing. When we work very hard on writing something, we can eventually reach a point where we burn ourselves out and start writing garbage. And because we are exhausted, we don't even have the critical thinking skills intact to recognize that what we are doing is actually counter-productive. I learned this important lesson as a child, but I took many years to develop the skill of recognizing when my body and brain were telling me that enough was enough. We need to learn how to recognize this breaking point and allow ourselves the time and space away from the project that is draining our intellectual and emotional resources. If you’ve left yourself enough time, you can always come back to it another day with a fresh mind.