At the age of 22, one fine spring day at the Apple Store I worked at in college in San Diego, I began to feel a small scratch at the back of my throat. 

I tried for a few months to ignore it, but as it gradually grew worse – eventually turning into a searing pain throughout my neck and an inability to control my voice – I started seeing a series of doctors and specialists to identify the cause.

I tried anti-reflux medication, changing my diet, quitting coffee, anti-allergy pills, massage, voice therapy, and eventually, a powerful anti-seizure medication that gave me temporary relief but at the cost of whole body numbing and crippling memory loss. 

Why am I sharing this story with you?

Because this unexpected condition forced me onto a new path, and that path taught me incredibly valuable lessons – about psychosomatic pain and its sources, about the relationship between body and mind and how it can go wrong, and ultimately, about how to heal from the disconnection from myself that lay at the heart of it all.

In this essay, I’ll share with you what I’ve discovered in the hope it might help you too.

A descent into despair

At no point in my medical odyssey did I receive so much as a diagnosis – no MRI scan or neurological test or laboratory diagnostic could detect even the slightest thing wrong with me. 

I found that I was always treated as a collection of symptoms, and when a specialist couldn’t find the source of my problem in their assigned body part, they quickly passed me off to someone else.

After 7 years of this fruitless search, during which I saw more than a dozen doctors in four countries, I had made no progress, and the pain and tension I felt was worse than ever. It felt as if an area the size of a ping-pong ball at the back-right of my throat had lost all sensation, like when the dentist injects novocaine into your gums. This numbness inflamed all the surrounding areas as they struggled to compensate for the loss of function. This irritated other, even more distant muscles and ligaments in turn, like a slowly spreading wildfire of burning tension. 

Yet the physical pain was actually the least of my worries. It was really the social and psychological effects that sent me spiraling into despair.

When I opened my mouth to speak, I didn’t know what would come out. I might feel deep conviction in a business meeting, but my dysfunctional speech would come out weak and halting. I’d want to convey warmth and support to a friend, only to hear my words sounding monotone and strained. My words often had the opposite effect I intended, as if a demon had possessed me and was clutching me by the throat, distorting and undermining every word I spoke.

I can distinctly remember being at a house party in Oakland in 2014, and wanting to make a good impression. It was hosted by my then-girlfriend Lauren’s friends, and I wanted to fit in and be liked. I met someone who had also served in the Peace Corps, and was elated at the chance to connect in an environment full of strangers. But as I opened my mouth to speak, my voice was so tight and strained I couldn’t make myself heard at all, despite the relatively quiet surroundings. I might as well have been mute.

I left the party early, and as I walked home through the dark streets of downtown Oakland, a terrifying thought arose in my mind: “Life is not worth living if I have to live it this way.” I’m an inveterate optimist, and had never felt this depth of hopelessness. It felt like the end of the road, the lowest of lows. And I knew in that moment I needed to try something new.

Discovering relief by looking inside

Shortly thereafter, I attended my first Vipassana meditation retreat, mostly in the hope of learning to accept and make peace with my condition. 

Instead, on the final day of the retreat, something remarkable happened: My attention had sharpened to a fine point after days of silent meditation, and I moved that mental scalpel to the place in my throat that had caused me so much suffering. To my amazement, it came alive! 

Like the circuit breaker in a house being flipped to full power, the entire area around the back of my throat instantly lit up with full sensation. For the first time I could remember, I swallowed normally, feeling the sublime joy of all the muscles in my throat and neck working in beautiful synchrony. 

Sitting quietly in a room and looking inside of myself had accomplished what tens of thousands of dollars and years of medical appointments couldn’t touch: total, instantaneous relief. That was the moment I knew I’d found a new way, a new path, and a new world. I found such relief a second time when I tried LSD at Burning Man. And a third time, when I did anger work at a week-long course called Groundbreakers. I was hooked.

What all these experiences had in common was that they were pattern interrupters. They temporarily shifted how my body and nervous system were operating, and by doing so, reestablished an internal connection that I had disconnected as a child to survive painful experiences.

An exploration of psychosomatic illness

These brief flirtations with relief set me on a new course – to research and study the underlying mechanisms of what was happening to me in these situations, with the goal of replicating them permanently.

The most compelling explanation I found was in the book The Divided Mind, by Dr. John Sarno. 

In his book, Sarno describes his years of experience treating psychosomatic disorders, most of all, debilitating back pain. I had long resisted the idea that my condition was psychosomatic. It was so visceral that I couldn’t accept that it was “only in my mind.” But Dr. Sarno’s work makes a crucial distinction: while the source of the pain may be in a person’s mind, that doesn’t mean the pain isn’t completely real.

I was struck by how closely his description of the illnesses he treats matched my own (in bold): “The patient may experience a wide variety of highly debilitating maladies, including muscle weakness or paralysis, feelings of numbness or tingling, total absence of sensation, blindness, inability to use their vocal cords, and many others, all without any physical abnormalities in the body to account for such symptoms.” This seemed to describe my situation exactly.

As I kept reading, I was further startled to see his explanation of the cause: “…the cause is to be found in the unconscious regions of the mind…its purpose is to deliberately distract the conscious mind.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading. He seemed to be suggesting that the body creates physical symptoms as a protective measure, to distract or shield the conscious mind from thoughts and feelings that are too threatening or painful to bear.

I kept reading, and in his extensive descriptions of his typical patient profile, I saw myself clearly reflected:

• Sarno notes that “…rage in the unconscious mind is central to understanding virtually all psychosomatic reactions.” I knew that repressed anger was one of my most deeply ingrained emotional patterns.
• He says that anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often coincide with the apparent physical symptoms, which I’d also experienced.
• Perfectionism and other “repressive” behaviors are ubiquitous among psychosomatic pain sufferers, with patients often describing themselves as “hardworking, conscientious, responsible, driven, success-oriented, perpetual seekers of new challenges, sensitive to criticism, and their own severest critics,” which the subconscious mind interprets as a form of control or pressure and is thus enraged by.
• Many patients are the caretaker type and are always worrying about their family, friends, and relatives; at the same time, they’ve often experienced emotional abuse, including harsh or excessive discipline, absence or unavailability, temper, or unreasonable expectations from those same family members, creating another source of internal tension.
• A majority have come from families with hardworking, loving parents who conveyed overly high expectations and hopes for their children, families not characterized by any particularly unusual dynamics that would stand out in today’s society.

Ultimately, Dr. Sarno recommends the following treatment for his patients: that they directly face and bring to their conscious awareness the anger, emotional pain, and sadness brewing in their subconscious mind. He recommends a detailed step-by-step plan for how to do so, including reading his book and related materials, journaling and reflective writing exercises exploring possible sources of emotional pain, and cataloging situations that create suppressed rage. 

The emphasis throughout this process is on allowing the inner child to express their rage at all the responsibilities, pressures, disappointments, problems, and unfair expectations they’ve faced, and most of all, their self-imposed demands to achieve, take care of others, or be good. It’s about freeing yourself from needing other people’s recognition, and learning to care for yourself in a kinder, gentler, more forgiving way than perhaps you were raised. In other words, you are learning to be more compassionate with yourself.

In effect, the purpose of Dr. Sarno’s treatment is to “blow the cover” on the covert operation your body is running to keep you from thinking about the reservoir of rage within you. Once the big secret is out, there’s no sense in continuing the pain, and thus it ceases.

Healing through learning

Sarno finds the unavoidable conclusion of his work almost too good to be true: not only can physical pain be psychosomatic, but you can stop it by learning about it! 

And that is exactly what I found: the more I read and learned about Sarno’s work, the more the pain and tension in my throat dissipated, often in real time as the words entered my brain and my awareness of what was happening inside of me grew.

Another casual observation in Sarno’s book astounded me, and explained so much of my journey: “We know from experience that the theoretical wall, the barrier separating the conscious from the unconscious mind, cannot be breached from below—that is, the rage will not break through into consciousness—but there is nothing to stop us from intellectually breaching the barrier from above.” 

This explained why my personal journey had started with the mind and the intellect, as I read books and took courses on various aspects of personal development. I used my mind to create the “breach” that allowed my awareness to begin looking inside instead of outside for answers. Only then was I able to begin exploring the world of the heart and the emotions.

While intellectual understanding and self-study are crucial, Sarno also points out that it isn’t necessary to fully “figure out” or change repressed emotions. It is only necessary to acknowledge that they exist, and that they’re a normal part of life. He has found that truly accepting our genuine self, who feels many things, including feelings that might be unpleasant or painful, is what leads to relief.

The cause of psychogenic voice disorders

I discovered a 2008 paper called The role of psychogenic and psychosocial factors in the development of functional voice disorders. It examined a range of prior studies and concluded that psychogenic voice disorders “may develop in response to negative emotions following stressful life events,” and especially “situations where there was a strong challenge to speak out and yet a marked constraint against doing so.”

One thing I had never understood is why I would have the apparent symptoms of trauma when my childhood seemed relatively idyllic. This paper suggested an answer, indicating that “traumatic incidents and serious situations involving death, loss, separation and threat to personal or family security were reported infrequently” in patients with psychogenic voice disorders. 

Instead, the researchers found such disorders occurred more frequently in people who had “interpersonal problems with close partners or family members.” This included “difficulties with the expression of negative emotions related to repressed hostility, discomfort over sexual feelings and rebellion towards authority figures (Barton, 1960).” 

This seemed to fit my situation much more closely than the “acute” trauma caused by sexual assault, natural disasters, or extreme abuse. In my case, subtle, internalized forms of emotional repression led to subtle, internal symptoms of trauma. The suppression of anger in my family – the sweeping under the rug of any brewing conflict – might seem like it would have led to a peaceful household. In reality, it only turned the chaos inward where it was unleashed to do a different kind of damage.

Other common factors in the development of psychogenic voice disorders seemed to fit my situation closely as well. The patient data showed “a trend towards education and helping professions, and recent prevalence studies indicate teachers are more at risk for functional voice disorders than any other occupational group.” I had been a natural teacher almost my entire life.

The same paper proposed a possible explanation for the specific symptoms I’d faced: when emotions (such as anger, in my case) cannot be expressed, they are “reverted” to physiological symptoms associated with fight-or-flight. This reaction “is thought to prepare the organism for increased physical work, by fixing the upper extremities to the thoracic cage for combat, requiring firm adduction of the vocal folds and wide abduction to facilitate an increased volume and flow of oxygen in order to meet the body’s increased metabolic demands.”

In other words, when we repress emotions and don’t allow them to be expressed, the body reacts to this with a fight-or-flight response. In order to prepare for the increased physical exertion of fighting or fleeing, the body stabilizes the upper parts of the body (like the arms and shoulders) against the ribcage to create a solid foundation for movement. As part of that preparation, the vocal folds (or vocal cords) are brought together tightly to control the breath and then are spread apart to increase oxygen intake. 

This was the most precise description of what I experienced in my vocal cords I had yet encountered: a combination of too much tightness and tension, and somehow at the same time, too much looseness and lack of control. It was like reading the user’s manual for my body, specifically the troubleshooting section, where my seemingly unexplainable problem was described in precise detail.

Studying the vagus nerve

All my research was pointing to the vagus nerve, which I came to understand was the central actor in my story.

The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body, running from the diaphragm all the way up the torso, through the neck to the brain. It is like the “main information highway” of the body, connecting together and coordinating the parasympathetic nervous system in the heart, lungs, and digestive tract, and governing such functions as sucking, swallowing, facial expression, and the sounds produced by the larynx.

I began to study the vagus nerve intensely, filling my notes with anatomical diagrams and cross-sections of the throat from every direction. I found that right at the point it passes up through the right side of the neck, there is a “choke point.” If the nerve senses too much pain coming up through the nerves from the body, this is the last place it can shut itself off and thus prevent those signals from reaching the brain. Like a circuit breaker flipping off when it detects a dangerous surge of energy, the vagus nerve does the same for the body.

It was another book, The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, that helped me understand why the vagus nerve seemed so central to my symptoms.

He calls this complex of nerves our “social-engagement system.” When it’s functioning properly, “…we smile when others smile at us, we nod our heads when we agree, and we frown when friends tell us of their misfortunes.” It also sends signals down to our heart and lungs, slowing down our heart rate and increasing the depth of our breathing, making us feel calm and relaxed, centered, or pleasurably aroused. 

Dr. Van Der Kolk explains that any threat to our safety or social connections triggers changes in the vagus nerve. When something distressing happens, we automatically signal our upset in our facial expressions and tone of voice, which are meant to beckon others to come to our assistance. Our throat gets dry, our voice tense, our heart beats faster, and our respiration becomes more rapid and shallow. In other words, our bodies purposefully signal to others when we are distressed, effectively reaching out to the people who care about us for help.

And here I was desperately trying to hide my symptoms, doing everything I could think of to prevent anyone, even my closest family and friends, from realizing anything was amiss. As I saw what was happening, and clearly saw the war raging within myself that I was by definition always losing, I felt the edifice of my total self-reliance begin to collapse. I couldn’t do it all myself. I couldn’t carry it all myself. Not when I was a child, innocently looking for a way to express my rage. And not even as an adult, trying to achieve and succeed and improve all on my own. 

It was slowly becoming clear that anything that stimulated or awakened my vagus nerve immediately improved my throat symptoms. Both major emotional releases and psychedelic experiences, but also simpler things like breath holding, cool wind in my face, and playing with animals or children. I could often feel in real time my throat muscles tensing or releasing based on what I was doing moment to moment.

With time, I’ve come to see my vagus nerve’s sensitivity and tendency to shut down as a wonderful gift. I’ve realized it is akin to having a real-time barometer of how connected I am to my body and my heart at any given moment. It represents my inner child, prone to hide or run away at the first sign of something scary, but also the source of my deepest innocence and joy. 

When I abandon and dissociate from myself – by overworking, drinking too much coffee, distracting myself with social media, or not saying what I’m feeling – I can feel my throat closing down soon after. It is as if my vagus nerve switches off, protecting me from the pain emanating from my body but also throwing off my intuition, my self-awareness, and most concretely, my ability to speak, swallow, sing, or laugh. 

As soon as I find the courage to reconnect with my body, to bring my feelings back online, it always turns on again, and I have my voice back. It is the greatest blessing to receive such clear and unmistakable communication from my body – I would rather be stopped in my tracks as soon as I fall out of alignment with my authentic self, than spend years in disconnection and look back on my life with regret.

If my story resonated with you, and you’d like to learn about and explore psychosomatic pain and its resolution for yourself, here’s what I recommend:

• Read Dr. John Sarno’s book Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection
• Check out the Psychophysiologic Disorders Association and their self-assessment quiz
• Enroll in Jonny Miller’s cohort-based online program Nervous System Mastery

I recently came across a Substack post by Venkatesh Rao called Oozy Intelligence in Slow Time that was one of the most insightful I’ve ever read for understanding the nature of Artificial Intelligence.

We tend to think of Artificial Intelligence as being in an arms race with Human Intelligence. Which one is smarter? When will AI surpass us?

But there is a hidden assumption buried in that comparison: that intelligence is best measured by its peak moments – the flash of brilliance, the sudden epiphany, the intellectual breakthrough.

Rao suggests that we look instead at a completely different aspect of intelligence: how much it costs.

Human intelligence is tremendously costly. Most of our time is spent simply maintaining this high-performance machine we call our body. Eating, drinking, sleeping, grooming, socializing, resting, etc. can all be seen as “overhead costs” needed to merely keep us alive.

Because it costs so much just to function each day, every minute of focused attention we spend requires a certain return-on-investment to be justified. We are constantly making choices to maximize that “return” on our attention: Do I spend the next 30 minutes working out, or cleaning the kitchen? Do I spend today working on this project, or that project?

Activities that don’t meet our threshold for “required return” don’t get our attention, plain and simple. This can be understood as a kind of “minimum wage” that our brain must earn, otherwise it refuses to work. 

We make this calculation fairly seamlessly any time we consider engaging in an activity:

• We might be willing to spend 10 minutes reading an interesting article, but not if it takes 30 minutes (“too long, didn’t read”).
• We might be willing to drive 20 minutes to eat at an exciting new restaurant, but not if it takes an hour.
• If you buy an appliance for your home that costs $20, but you spent 2 hours reading reviews and evaluating the options, the return on that purchase is lower than if you had instead received and acted on a trusted recommendation from a friend

This is part of what makes learning anything new so challenging: you have to spend lots and lots of time, with little return on that investment, in order to gain some future reward that isn’t even guaranteed. It’s akin to investing a lot of money into something without knowing if it will ever pay you back.

Another way of defining the “minimum wage threshold” for our brains is patience.

Rao asks: “How often are you in the mood to do boring, tedious, bureaucratic tasks (such as filling out forms, doing your taxes, or opening postal mail)?”

His answer, and mine, is: not often. It’s not that I don’t have the time for such tasks. It’s not that I’m not smart enough or don’t know how to complete them. The problem is that they require too much patience (i.e. they fail to meet my brain’s minimum wage threshold). I thus “can’t afford” to spend my attention on them, and instead tend to put them off for as long as humanly possible, usually until some catastrophic consequence becomes threatening enough that I have no choice.

If you think about it, there are many such tasks that would produce immense benefits for us, if we just had the patience to do them:

• Spending hundreds of hours learning a new language or how to code
• Reviewing every note you’ve taken over the last few years for buried ideas or insights
• Organizing all your personal contacts in a searchable Notion database

These kinds of tasks involving collecting, organizing, summarizing, formatting, and reviewing information would be tremendously valuable if we did them, but often fall into the “requires too much patience” category for most people.

This is where AI becomes so powerful. AI effectively lowers the patience threshold to almost nothing. There is no task that is too boring, too mundane, too repetitive, or “beneath its dignity.” Unlike us, grinding away on such tasks doesn’t annoy it, ruin its motivation, give it a bad attitude, or make it angry at us. It is a dutiful employee requiring a minimum wage of virtually zero.

This is a very different way of understanding AI’s value. It’s not AI’s superintelligence or blazing speed that make it valuable to us: it’s AI’s patience in completing an endless series of tedious tasks that are too far below our patience threshold for us to justify doing at all.

Our attention is expensive, and thus can only be spent on activities with a clear outcome that can be achieved in a predictable amount of time. Whereas AI has an almost infinite amount of attention that is so cheap it can be spent lavishly, even wastefully, on activities that would never be worth our time. We can afford to spend this newly abundant form of intelligence on tasks that are below the minimum wage our brains are willing to work for.

The two components of patience

If we stopped here, this would mean that the main use for AI is completing our boring to-do lists for us. But there’s a level deeper to consider, because patience has two components that can be separated: time and detail.

As you toil away filing your taxes, for example, there are two factors that determine how much patience it takes: the level of detail that you’re required to process and the time it takes to do so. It is the combination of many complex details you have to process over a long span of time that makes taxes so excruciating.

The crucial thing to understand is that we have a minimum AND maximum threshold for BOTH the time we’re willing to spend and the number of details we’re willing to process:

• If it takes too much time, we get impatient and opt out (think of a movie where not enough is happening to hold your attention)
• If it doesn’t take enough time, we get overwhelmed and opt out (think of a short-form video that is so fast it’s aggravating to watch)
• If it presents too much detail, we get frustrated and opt out (think of a book going way too deep into a technical topic you don’t understand)
• If it presents not enough detail, we get bored and opt out (think of a children’s book with not enough complexity to be interesting to us)

In other words, as humans, we have a clearly defined “window of attention” that limits what we’re able to pay attention to for long periods. Our attention span is an actual span with clear limits. Anything outside of that – that either moves too slowly or too quickly, that demands too much of our brains or too little – is tremendously expensive for us to attend to.

When you say “I don’t have patience for that,” you’re not saying you don’t have enough time. You’re really saying “That is below the level of detail I can sustainably process at the required rate.”

Thomas Carlyle once said, “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.” The word “pain” is informative in this sense – it is actually painful for us to stay outside our window of attention for long. The brain has a “focal length” it is comfortable with, like our eyes, and that attention span evolved for chasing and hunting down an animal about our own size, or picking fruit from trees; anything outside of that feels unnatural and painful for us.

This might seem like a discouraging and even fatalistic view of human potential: there are just some things we can pay attention to, and some we can’t.

But there’s another detail that Rao highlights here: that time and detail interact and influence each other. They are not independent variables: changing one actually changes the other.

Consider that looking at a raindrop with your naked eye might be boring, but if you zoom in with a microscope, you’ll see millions of microorganisms blooming and buzzing in stunning diversity. The classic example of “watching paint dry” would be terribly exciting if you could zoom in to the molecular level and watch the symphony of chemical reactions playing out.

In other words, the more you zoom in, the faster things are happening. The rate at which time passes for you depends partially on how much information you can take in. It’s not that time is actually speeding up or slowing down – your perception of time is speeding up or slowing down, and that perception is strongly influenced by how much detail and complexity you can take in and process.

Considering this idea, perhaps it is not people’s intelligence that limits what they can pay attention to and learn: it is their patience. And what limits their patience is not some stoic quality of their character, but their ability to zoom in and take in enough detail that reality feels interesting.

This also changes our view of what exceptionally patient people are doing. It’s not that they have some inner reserve of steely endurance – it’s that they’re better at operating at a level of detail where things happen faster.

The gardener absorbed in the intricacies of trimming a bonsai tree, or the basketball player shooting hundreds of free throws in one practice session, or the chess grandmaster playing through dozens of alternatives of a match – maybe these people aren’t abnormally patient; they’re just better at zooming in to a level of detail in their craft that the full bandwidth of their attention can be occupied.

We tend to think of patience as primarily a moral virtue, alongside work ethic, honesty, integrity, and empathy. What if instead we removed the moral framing, and thought of it instead as a side effect of the way we consume information?

AI could be used to tweak and tune information with the goal of fitting it into our preferred window of attention. Instead of treating the content we consume as one-size-fits-all, we could use AI to modify that content so that it’s at the right speed and the right level of detail such that it feels captivating and enlivening for us to pay attention to.

If a piece of content is too detailed, we can ask AI to summarize and distill it for us in ways that a novice can understand. If a piece of content is not detailed enough, we can ask AI to elaborate and add more sources and examples.

If a piece of content is coming at you too fast, you can ask AI to slow it down, break it into chunks, and give it to you one piece at a time. If it’s coming too slowly, you can ask it to move faster and progress to more advanced topics sooner.

I can foresee a future in which we rarely consume a given piece of content without changing it to suit our preferred window of attention. A future in which we run all our content through an AI curator who refines and modifies it to fit how our brains work. Not doing so will feel like buying a pair of shoes without trying them on for size.

In that future, patience won’t be considered a moral virtue – it will be considered a failure to properly utilize the tools at our disposal to customize our experience according to our needs.

If you’d like to read the Substack post by Venkatesh Rao called Oozy Intelligence in Slow Time yourself, click here. I can also recommend Matt Webb’s article Intelligence Too Cheap to Meter on this topic.

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Creativity is often described as an elusive, even magical, phenomenon. In reality, it’s a skill – and there are many ways to prime your brain to be more creative. 

Surprisingly, one of them is procrastination. We generally think of procrastination as a bad habit, a mental hurdle we need to overcome. But research shows that delaying and postponing tasks can actually stimulate creative thinking — provided the conditions are just right. 

Let’s look at the techniques that can turn procrastination into one of your most creative habits.

An honest look at procrastination

Procrastination stems from our urge to flee the discomfort of an unwanted task. In the brain, this plays out as a war between our logical prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making — and our hasty, pleasure-seeking limbic system. When the limbic system wins, we rebel against the undesirable task and choose the temporary dopamine hit of procrastination instead. 

Some of us are better equipped than others to fend off the urge to procrastinate. The volume of the amygdala — part of the brain’s limbic system and responsible for processing our motivations, fears, senses, and emotions — influences our likelihood to procrastinate, and its size comes down to genetics. 

However, it is possible to escape an inherited tendency to procrastinate: studies show that cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation can change the size of the amygdala over time. But what if you didn’t need to eliminate procrastination, and you could harness its creative benefits instead? 

Procrastination and creativity: different sides of the same equation

To create anything meaningful, we need to allow our minds to wander freely. As multi-award-winning director Aaron Sorkin once quipped: “You call it procrastinating, I call it thinking.”

We may achieve our biggest creative breakthroughs when we throw off the mental constraints of a preordained task and follow our inner curiosity, but we can’t leave procrastination unchecked. If we do, the tasks we’re avoiding will still be waiting for us, accompanied by the guilt and the pressure of lost time.  For chronic procrastinators, it’s even worse: they have higher levels of stress and illness, and produce lower-quality work. 

Moderation is crucial. Researchers primed three groups of volunteers for different levels of procrastination and found that those who procrastinated moderately — delaying an assigned task for an average of 25% of their allotted time to complete it — generated higher-quality creative ideas. However, volunteers with high or low levels of procrastination (respectively, procrastinating for averages of 40% and 4% of their time) didn’t reap the same benefits. 

How do we hit this sweet spot? Through active procrastination, which means installing guardrails and optimizing the conditions for creativity.

How to stimulate creativity through active procrastination

Time-boxing, setting intentions, and choosing a procrastination activity can help you reap the full creative benefits of procrastination. Here’s how…

1. REFRAME HOW YOU THINK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION 

Shame is a common emotion when people procrastinate, but self-blame can sap your ability to be creative. Instead, build the habit of being compassionate to yourself when you procrastinate. The process of resetting how you think about procrastination takes time and effort, as you’re attempting to form new neural pathways — but by continually refocusing your thoughts on compassion, blame will cease to be the default emotion. 

When you feel the itch to abandon a task, observe the warring forces in your brain. You’re starting to procrastinate, and that’s OK because you’re about to maximize the benefits through active procrastination.  

2. ELIMINATE PASSIVE PROCRASTINATION BY REMOVING DISTRACTIONS

Distractions are common triggers for procrastination, as they give us an excuse to leap between multiple tasks without fully engaging in any of them. This is passive procrastination, and it’s the antithesis of procrastinating creatively. 

Rather than letting your mind play, you’re being controlled by inbound stimuli like emails and Slack notifications. The urge to respond to these cues can be hard to resist — and the rush of dopamine when we give in can trap us in a neverending reactivity loop.

To fend off passive procrastination, you need to make a conscious decision about what you’re consuming. Escape the reactivity loop by changing your response: instead of instantly consuming content presented to you by others, cut the loop by saving the content for later. For example, if it’s email that usually sends you into reactivity mode, a tool like SaneBox can help you remove distractions: you can snooze emails for later or consign them to the SaneBlackHole (a folder that you can train over time to collect your unwanted email). 

3. STRUCTURE YOUR PROCRASTINATION

If you have multiple projects, you can delay one by working on the other. Philosopher John Perry calls this structured procrastination, and it allows you to give in to the delicious feeling of avoiding your intended task while you make progress on something else. You might even find unexpected touchpoints: switching between different projects, aka “slow-motion multitasking,” is how some of the world’s greatest innovators sharpened their multidisciplinary ideas. 

4. CULTIVATE A PROCRASTINATION ACTIVITY

Building a habit when your mind starts to wander — like journaling, online puzzles, or an art project — can be an incredible way to get you “unstuck” from your current project by engaging different parts of your brain. Scientists speculate that switching to a second task forces you to clear your brain of information, allowing you to approach the first task from a fresh perspective when you return to it.

Whatever your chosen procrastination activity, time-boxing can ensure you keep within the limits of moderate procrastination. Give yourself 15 minutes, or even an hour, to explore wherever your restless brain is trying to take you. 

Time limits are especially important if your procrastination activity is browsing online, otherwise, you can slip back into the reactivity loop — see the next step for ways to interrupt the cycle.

5. CAPTURE IDEAS FOR LATER

If procrastination leads you to engrossing Reddit threads or you risk descending into a YouTube spiral, you need to be able to stop when your time is up. It’s easier to cut yourself off if you use a capture tool to add content to a read-later app (we recommend Reader by Readwise), so you can consume it at a different time. 

Later on, if you find the content useful but don’t quite know what to do with it (yet), you can use the PARA Method to add it into your knowledge management system, aka your Second brain (here’s how to choose a suitable app). This way, you can let your ideas simmer and mentally set aside your procrastination material for when you’re ready to return to it. In the meantime, you can go back to your original task with a newly playful and creative brain.

With these techniques, procrastination can transform from a time-wasting hindrance into a game-changing creative tool. Understand the neuroscience behind this common habit, reframe your mindset, and implement procrastination strategies — you’ll see your creativity flourish in unexpected ways.

This article is a guest post from our friends at SaneBox. 

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