When your mind won’t engage

Some days, try as you might, your might just won’t engage with whatever it is that you think it should be doing. Or maybe it’s something that you want to do, or feel that you need to do, but … those brain cells just aren’t firing.

Depending on what’s going on with you – inside and outside – there can be a lot of different reasons for this lack of engagement. The only way to find out what it is, is to ask yourself. Is it something that you actually want to be doing? Is there something else that you’d prefer to be doing? Are you sick or exhausted? Are there things that you’re allowing to distract you? Did you spend 30 minutes cruising Facebook instead of writing a blog post? I hope that you see where I’m going here.

If you can figure out why your brain won’t engage in a particular task, you can try to re-engage. Often, though, I can’t understand why I’m distracted. In those cases, I’ll often try to distract my brain with something entirely different. For example, if I’m trying to write a blog post that just isn’t happening, I might go and play the piano, or cook dinner, or spin some yarn – something that takes a very different type of focus. If the thing I’m trying to do is writing – blogs or coursework – I will sometimes sit down at the computer and start a train of thought document … words that I think go right onto the screen. Sometimes this helps, but at other times, I end up working out something that’s been bothering me.

And there are times when you just accept that there’s something going on and that you’re not going to get it done. Whatever “it” is – it’s not going to happen now. Maybe later. For these times, I keep a to-do list. It’ll go down on the list to be addressed later. And if it never gets addressed, maybe it wasn’t that important after all.