The best self-help book I've read
Just in time for Christmas!
It was only a few short months ago, not long after the birth of our second child, that I had the vain – and, in hindsight, very funny – hope that I could continue writing this newsletter during her early infancy.
As it turned out, I could not.
Or perhaps I could have. I dunno. Other writers seem to manage! What I do know is that while I've had a whirlwind and often quite wonderful few months taking care of a beautiful new baby, I've also never felt more behind on, well, everything.
I might have felt this way when our previous child was this age. Unfortunately, I can't remember, because sleep deprivation.
(I'd also meant to keep a journal during this time so I'd actually have some memories of it, but my curious aversion to journal-keeping keeps getting in the way.) Anyway, in all honesty, November would have been a hellmonth even if we didn't have a new arrival. We had family over to stay, which isn't something we could enjoy when the first kid was born because of that whole global pandemic malarkey. That wasn't the hellish bit; it was lovely to have them over. The problem was that we began the month by contracting Covid, all together, as a family. Hm. It's almost like the pandemic isn't quite over, isn't it? Someone should look into that.
It was nasty. I feel like I'd have managed the virus better if I'd been able to nurse the thumping headache and weird fatigue by staying in bed and drinking chicken soup, rather than looking after ill children. No sooner were we testing negative than the first tranche of family came to stay, which was (as mentioned) wonderful and life-affirming but didn't afford any time for recuperation. And once they'd flown the coop I came down with the most vicious, uncompromising strep throat thing I've had in living memory. I ran fevers, and a mild inability to climb stairs faster than several minutes at a time, for two days before a dose of antibiotics killed whatever was trying to kill me.
As of the last week or so I'm much better, and the baby (who for the purposes of this newsletter I will name Pandora) is sleeping better. I think one may be linked to the other in some way. That sense of behind-ness, though – it's never been worse. My work suffered, especially given I'd only just come off paternity leave when I got sick, and I'd just picked up fresh responsibilities in my job. The yard was overwhelmed by waist high grass, the garden got taken over by a Triffid-like mint infestation, the other undone tasks became even undone-er. It did not spark joy. In fact, I kept hearing this unhappy little ditty play in my head:
After some weeks of frantic effort coupled with the rest of the country slowing down somewhat for Christmas, it's all starting to relent slightly. I feel like I've just caught a breath after being held down by crashing waves.
(In what is probably not a coincidence, my wife started reading How To Keep House While Drowning on audiobook around a week ago. A few people here have recommended it so I'm going to pick it up too, and listen to it while I wear the infant around the house like an inconveniently heavy, uncomfortably warm, and incomprehensibly precious jacket. )
With the recap recapped, I want to talk about something that helped pull me out of this especially funky funk.
It is, of course, a self-help book.
I've shouted out John Birmhingham, author of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, a few times in the Cynic's Guide. He's long been a favourite writer of mine, since I discovered his oeuvre leafing guiltily through the problematic Ralph magazines I bought in my late teens. I may have purchased them for the pictures, but I did end up reading the articles! Of late, Birmo has written frankly of his own battles with procrastination viz online time-wasting. After this touched a chord with readers of his newsletter, he decided to write an honest-to-god self-help book, which he made free to subscribers for a couple of days as both a kind gift and a clever way to juice Amazon reviews.
And the book, which rejoices in the search-engine-optimised title of "THE COMPLETE BUT LITTLE BOOK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION: A SELF-HELP GUIDE TO BREAKING FREE OF YOUR BS"?
It is fucking great.
AUTHORS
JB has managed to do what no-other self-help author ever has, in my quite extensive experience: keep it short. The book is a blessed 51 pages long, and it is relatable. If the following passage doesn't resonate with you, you are reading the wrong newsletter:
You have a problem, but it’s not laziness. [Procrastination] is a human problem. It messes with people no matter their gender, their class, their culture, whatever. We procrastinate about household chores. We put off important personal decisions. We leave our taxes too late. We sit, staring at the blank page, the empty screen, our stomachs churning, our spirits low.
It also hits you – or at least me – right in the fear feels. Procrastinate as we might, there's an ultimate deadline there's no getting away from, and after my recent bout of illness this one rang a knell:
I didn’t grow out of it. If you’re reading this, chances are, neither did you. Lying in that bed, a bunch of tubes punched through my ribcage, I suffered the horrifying realisation that comes to all procrastinators in the end. It really was the end. I’d left it too late. There’d be no wriggling out of this.
Drawing on contemporary psychology and techniques like cognitive behavioural therapy, and working with rather than against the fact that his target audience is incredibly likely to put his book down due to a sudden urge to browse the Wikipedia entry on alpacas, Birmingham goes straight for the jugular of procrastination. What is most off-putting about putting things off is that you know it's illogical and that it will come back to bite you, and the reason for that — Birmingham writes, with plenty of science to back him up – is that procrastination is the all-but-inevitable outcome of emotional dysregulation.
It's about discomfort.
Imagine I have a big project due in a week. I know I should start, but instead, I find myself cleaning the house, checking emails, or plating up my fourth rewatch of Justified. What the fuck, JB? When I thought about my daunting task, my brain did not get that immediate dopamine kick. In fact, thinking about all that hard work possibly even turned off my dopamine tap and crashed me into a trough—making me feel even less motivated. To escape this uncomfortable feeling, my treacherous brain starts seeking out something, anything, to provide a quick dopamine fix. And here comes my old friend the donut, the doomscroll, the infinite void of streaming TV. Anything feels better than sitting in the discomfort of the work.
The only drawback – and this is not Birmingham's fault, it's your neurobiology's – is that working with the discomfort that gives rise to procrastination is obviously uncomfortable. He offers an admittedly cornball acronym, as is traditional in CBT, to help remember the required steps before tackling a given incidence of procrastination. I am reproducing it here not to try and dick over JB's book sales but because writing things down is about the only way I remember them.
RULER: Recognise, Understand, Label, Express, Respond.
The way I've put this into practice, when facing a potentially delay-able task like "my excellent and usefully bill-paying job" or "writing a catastrophically late newsletter for inexplicably patient subscribers" is to open up a blank, plain-text document and dump whatever mess of emotions I am experiencing in there.
This is all kinds of yuck. Seeing what you're feeling on the page – often, in my case, self-loathing and shame and anxiety expressed in what can be quite worrying terms – is confronting. The good news is that writing these things down before starting a job feels a bit like procrastination, which is a helpful little hack. And then once I'm done recognising, understanding, labelling, and expressing, I delete the document and it all goes away. Then I respond, by actually doing whatever task my emotional maelstrom was sucking me away from.
It is of course not necessary to do this exercise via the written word: you can do it all in your head. Or perhaps, if you work alone or don't mind looking like you're rehearsing a role in Glengarry Glen Ross, you could say it aloud. As with any other self-improvement exercise – say it with me, I've written it enough times here – YMMV. Your Mileage May Vary. I suppose I should add the caveat that because everyone is different this method may not work for you at all, but I suspect that it might, and I am very happy because at this point in time it does work for me.
Despite only being 51 pages long, this isn't all that's in the book. TCBLBAPASHGTBFOYBS is a dense little nugget, the neutron star of self-help texts. There are plenty more tips and tricks that are only to be deployed once you've accepted the inconvenient truth that fixing procrastination very likely requires addressing some emotional dysfunction. But it's eminently doable, and it's helped me enormously.
It might do the same for you. It's worth a punt: the book costs less than the coffee you were probably planning on buying. And if you're (somehow, in this economy) feeling flush, why not kick in here too? I want my writing here to be free forever, but your contributions really do help keep the server lights on.
Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope to be back sooner than a three-month unplanned hiatus: the New Year is upon us, and it's like catnip to the self-improvement-obsessed. I have something coming up to mark the occasion that I think you'll like. In the meantime, feel free to say gidday in the comments, it's been a hot minute but I'd love to hear from you.
To close, here are are some wise words from my four-year-old who got interested in the laptop while I was writing this.
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So there you are. Stop, go. And a very Merry Christmas to you all.
