Around the Writer's Block

by Rosanne Bane

  Exercise actually stresses the brain and the rest of the body, but without flooding the body with cortisol and other harmful stress hormones. This reverses the negative effects of excessive stress and inoculates you from those negative effects in the future. Stress is like Goldilocks’s porridge: too much causes damage, but too little leads to atrophy. Exercise followed by a recovery period provides that “just right” amount of stress that breaks down muscle and neurons slightly and causes them to return even stronger and more resilient after resting.13

  For many reasons, including the fact that exercise helps regulate the essential neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, exercise improves mood and can be as effective as medication in relieving depression and anxiety disorders.14,15 In addition to improving mood, higher-than-average dopamine levels are associated with “creativity, the ability to imagine visual scenes in one’s head, and the tendency to ask ‘what if’ questions.”16

  Exercise causes the heart to release ANP (atrial natriuretic peptide), which inhibits the amygdala’s role in anxiety and thus calms the brain.17 People who are physically active are also more likely to be socially active, which in turns has a positive influence on mood.18

  Since dopamine and norepinephrine are crucial to our ability to focus and pay attention, exercise, especially exercise that includes complex motor skills, improves this cognitive ability as well. (The full significance of this will be highlighted in the upcoming sections on attention.)

  WRITER’S APPLICATION: WHAT KIND AND HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

  Fortunately, you can get the benefits of exercise even if you haven’t moved off the couch and out of your office chair for years, and you keep those benefits as long as you keep moving. Individuals vary in their need and desire for exercise, but in general, just about everyone will see positive results from thirty minutes of aerobic exercise two to three times a week. Some benefits (like improving mood and attention) are significantly increased when the frequency is increased to four or five days a week.19, 20

  The gains of aerobic exercise are multiplied when you combine them with activities that require more complex motor skills that challenge and expand synaptic networks.21 This could include any of the martial arts, figure skating, gymnastics, rock climbing, mountain biking, skateboarding, dance—tango in particular has been noted for positive cognitive and physical effects, in part because the dance is both complex and variable. My personal favorites are geocaching (hiking in different areas using a GPS to find clues and treasure boxes) and dog agility, where the obstacle courses are always different, so that I and my dog get both a mental and a physical workout.

  Although an intense workout, defined as 75 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate (MHR), will significantly increase creative thinking after the workout, it will inhibit learning during the workout.22 On the other hand, a great deal of anecdotal evidence describes creative breakthroughs occurring while walking, which can be low-intensity (55 to 65 percent of your MHR) or moderate (65 to 75 percent of your MHR), depending on how briskly you walk. So you can probably catch up on your research/reading and even get some interesting new ideas while on the treadmill or elliptical during a moderate or low-intensity workout, but don’t plan on retaining much of what you read on the days when you’re challenging yourself to hit high-intensity levels.

  The brain and body get different benefits from different intensity levels of aerobic exercise; for example, your heart releases ANP only when it’s working at moderate or high intensity. To maximize the health and functioning of your brain and the rest of your body, you need to mix moderate and low-intensity activity with occasional high-intensity sprints. Start with the intensity and duration that just challenges your ability to carry on a conversation. As you get more and more fit, you’ll need to increase the intensity and/or the length of time to maintain or increase the challenge.

  You may also want to vary where you exercise. Some research suggests that exercising outdoors can do more to improve your mood, self-esteem and sense of being rejuvenated and reenergized than the same kind of exercise done inside.23 Variety in the company you keep during your workouts can also help. Sometimes it’s great to be alone with your thoughts, but the “buddy effect” will tend to keep you motivated, and social interaction boosts exercise’s ability to promote the growth of new neurons. So consider classes and other ways to be active with others.

  Like any of the recommended practices, you’ll want to start small and build on your successes. The most important thing is to start moving.

  TIME TO FOCUS

  Writers at Work—Attention Required

  When we put pen to paper or fingers on keyboard to draft or revise, our state of consciousness shifts to a hypnagogic state, a kind of waking, lucid dreaming. We don’t lose consciousness of what’s happening in the world, but we are so focused on the reality we’re creating with words that our awareness of physical reality fades into the background.

  “It’s a funny state,” writes Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Olen Butler in From Where You Dream. “It’s not as if you’re falling asleep at your computer, but neither are you brainstorming. You’re dreamstorming, inviting the images of moment-to-moment experience through your unconscious. It’s very much like an intensive daydream, but a daydream that you are and are not controlling.”24

  John Barth shares Butler’s impression of the writer’s trance, as do many other writers. In Writers Dreaming, Barth says, “Like every writer’s professional life, mine is spent doing a kind of dreaming—from the time I sit down at the desk and pick up my faithful fountain pen until the time I put the stuff on the Macintosh—which is a kind of waking up. . . . So much of what we do in those hours when we’re actually making sentences, inventing characters and feeling our way through the threads of plot, is hunch and feel—half unconscious and somewhat autohypnotic. Those rituals of getting ready to write seem to conduce a kind of trance state.”25

  Some days we can enter the writer’s trance more easily and deeply than others. Easy or difficult, some shift in consciousness is always required to write well. And we can’t get there if we are constantly interrupting ourselves with trivia, especially electronic trivia. As writers, we need focus. We are particularly vulnerable to and negatively affected by our culture of distraction.

  In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Maggie Jackson warns that frequent interruptions decrease creativity and increase stress and frustration. “When you’re scattered and diffuse, you’re less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it’s hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking. These are the problems of attention in our new world. Gadgets and technologies give us extraordinary opportunities, the potential to connect and to learn. At the same time, we’ve created a culture, and are making choices, that undermine our powers of attention.”26

  Jackson quotes Arthur Jersild, a developmental psychologist who has researched multitasking. “It is essential for conceptual thought,” Jersild says, “that a person give himself time to size up a situation, check the immediate impulse to act, and take in what’s there. Listening is part of it, but contemplation and reflection would go deeper.”27

  Writing worth reading must come from the contemplation and reflection of conceptual thought combined with emotional and sensory awareness. As writers we have a responsibility to both think and feel before we blurt. With that responsibility, we must claim our right to have time to think and to sustain our thinking on one topic for more than a few minutes. To restore our splintered attention, we need to refuse to play the distraction game.

  INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: THE MULTITASKING MYTH

  If you think doing two or three things at once will save you time, think again. Oh sure, your cerebellum can keep you walking, talking, and chewing gum at the same time, but only because you have practiced these physical activities so much that they are autom
atic. But when it comes to doing things that require your conscious attention, multitasking is a complete myth and a huge waste of time.

  The entire brain system (cortex, limbic system, cerebellum and the rest of the brain stem) may be comparable to a parallel processor. The cerebellum can keep you upright and coordinate the movement of your legs, arms and jaw while your cortex is focused on something else, like which route to take or how to get character A to plot point D.

  But the cortex on its own is a sequential processor: it does one task, then shifts attention to do the second task, then shifts attention back to the first, and so on. The cortex can focus on only one thing at a time. Activities that require the cortex’s focused attention cannot be done simultaneously.28

  When you think you’re multitasking during your morning commute by driving, putting on your makeup or shaving, changing the radio station, eating breakfast and talking on your cell, you’re really shifting your attention from task to task. When you reach for your bagel and remind yourself not to spill cream cheese on yourself, you momentarily lose track of the phone conversation, which means you have to ask the person on the other end of the call to repeat what he or she just said or hope you don’t get busted for not paying attention. Meanwhile, your limbic system is about to kick you into panic mode to bring your attention back to the fact that the idiot in front of you has just slammed on the brakes and you just missed your exit.

  Every time your cortex shifts attention from one task to another, which it does every couple of seconds, you lose processing speed, accuracy and grace. Trying to multitask takes more time—as much as 50 percent more time in some of the research studies collected by John Medina, author of Brain Rules—than to focus on and complete one task before starting another. Add the fact that you’re as much as 50 percent more likely to make an error and that some multitasking-induced errors can be serious, even life-threatening, and you start to understand the true cost of the multitasking myth.29, 30

  Not only do attempts to multitask take more time and reduce accuracy, but the more often you try to multitask, the worse it gets. If you are a so-called “frequent multitasker”—that is, you frequently splinter your attention between multiple activities—you’re significantly poorer at filtering out irrelevant information, possibly because you’re training your brain to try to pay attention to everything. And when tested for their speed of task switching, people who multitask often are slower than those who tend to avoid multitasking.31

  There are times when multitasking has less severe drawbacks, like when you’re multitasking among significantly different activities. The more similar the tasks you’re trying to multitask, the more time it takes to shift between them. But different types of tasks, like walking while talking or manipulating clay while reading, require different parts of the brain and don’t require the cortex to shift attention between tasks. Thus, these tasks can be done simultaneously with little or no loss of effectiveness in either task.

  Different types of tasks don’t compete for the same cognitive resources. In fact, they often complement one another, which explains why it helps to give your hands something to do, like play with clay or knit or doodle, when you’re struggling to figure out how to word a complex passage.

  But for the most part, avoiding multitasking whenever possible is the best strategy. Research shows that the distraction and fractured focus caused by multitasking continues even when you stop multitasking.32 So multitasking at any time of the day will impair your ability to focus on your writing for the rest of the day.

  It is physiologically impossible to give your writing the focused attention it requires while also attempting to check your email, tweet, check your blog stats, and revise a spreadsheet while talking on the phone and keeping one eye on dinner cooking in the next room and what the kids/puppy/cats are up to. Giving yourself time to truly concentrate, especially when you’re doing Process or Product Time, is essential.

  Preserve Time to Focus

  When students tell me they need more discipline, I point out that habits are much more effective than discipline, in part because rigidity and control don’t help us ease into the writer’s trance. The one place we do need discipline is in maintaining our boundaries. Instead of trying to boss ourselves into being creative, which never really works, we need to put that strict commander part of our personality on guard duty between us and the world, refusing entry to anything that will fracture our focus when we write.

  I do Product Time in the morning to protect my ability to focus. Before I check my email or voice mail, before I surf the Internet or read the paper, before I open Excel, QuickBooks, PowerPoint, or any other software program—in other words, before I let the world in—I put in my Product Time. When I have early morning commitments that mean the only way I could do Product Time in the morning would be to get up earlier than is natural for me (and would thus interfere with getting adequate sleep), I do Product Time in the evenings after my partner and I have dinner and relax together. When she goes to bed and the house is quiet, I color or draw for fifteen minutes to settle my mind and then put in my Product Time. I can start Product Time in the middle of the day if I have to, but it’s never as effective as starting Product Time first thing. My mind is revved up, I’m trying to remember ten things at once, I’m attending to other people’s requests and I simply can’t focus on writing projects.

  CHALLENGE: WHEN YOU WRITE, WRITE!

  For one week, don’t do anything but Product Time during your Product Time. Do not multitask. Do not interrupt your Product Time to check your email, shift to another device, program, website or app, look for answers in the fridge, see what your dog/spouse/kids want, or do anything else. Ignore all in-person or electronic bids for your attention for these ten or fifteen minutes. Give yourself the quiet you need to hear your own thoughts and listen to your inner voice.

  When you turn on your computer, refrain from using any other electronic device. Don’t open any windows other than the file(s) you’re working on at that moment. Disable any application that will announce an incoming email, IM or upcoming appointment.

  The only exceptions to this rule are:

  If you’re researching, you’ll probably use a search engine. But be advised, most Internet research is surface only; to get real depth of information from your source and depth of focus from yourself, you need non-Internet sources. Some studies suggest people comprehend more from reading a hard copy than when they read the same article online. And there’s nothing like talking with a real, live person and being able to ask follow-up questions.

  If you like music in the background, your best bet is instrumentals only. If you’re not convinced music with lyrics will interrupt your concentration, try this simple experiment yourself. Try memorizing a list of twenty words while listening to music with lyrics; then test your memory. After a short break, try memorizing a different, but similar, list of twenty words while listening to instrumental music. If you’re like most people, you’ll see a significant difference in your ability to concentrate.

  If you write while your infant is down for a nap, do have your baby monitor on. I could suggest that an awful lot of humans throughout history made it through infancy without their parents owning a baby monitor, but I suspect the guilt of turning the monitor off would make it impossible to focus. Anyone who isn’t an infant or solely dependent on you for medical reasons should be able to muddle through without you returning a text, call, or email for fifteen minutes.

  Even if you live in the Midwest, like I do, and hear a severe-weather siren, there’s no need to turn on the radio or TV. Just go to the basement and write there. Believe me, you’ll know if a tornado comes through.

  It’s amazing how much more writing you do when all you do when you write is write.

  INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: THE FUTURE OF FOCUS

  Neuroplasticity giveth and neuroplasticity taketh away. The brain’s
ability to adapt doesn’t always serve us. Our nearly constant use of electronics and our cultural expectation that we be constantly and immediately available to everyone and everything through smartphones and cell phones, email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, other Internet apps, tablet computers, TV, radio, etc. may rewire our brains in ways that make it increasingly difficult to sustain focused attention for more than a few minutes.

  A recent article in The New York Times provides these statistics:

  In 2008, people processed three times more information each day than they did in 1960.

  People currently spend an average of twelve hours a day exposed to media; in 1960 they spent five hours a day.

  People check email or change windows or computer applications while at work “nearly 37 times an hour.” This means we have an average attention span of just under two minutes!

  Computer users visit an average of forty websites a day, according to research by a supplier of time-management tools.33

  This same New York Times article cites Stanford communications professor Dr. Clifford Nass as saying, “We’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it. . . . A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.” According to Nass, losing our ability to pay attention is also undermining our capacity for empathy. “The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other.”34 Obviously, empathy is vital to writers; to reach or influence an audience, you have to empathize with them.