What causes tension?

And indecision, avoidance, perfectionism and all that fun stuff?

Image by Daniel Curran on Unsplash. Weirdly reminds me of kintsugi.

What’s a good way to get a rope as taut as it can possibly be? Get two equally strong people to pull at it from either end.

What’s a good way to be as tense as you can possibly be? Try and do two completely contradictory things at the same time. Vacillate endlessly between two choices. Or put off making the decision as long as possible and let both options fight it out in your gut.

Tension and anxiety often feel very nebulous and opaque, difficult to pin down. But a lot of the time if you really look at the root of the problem they’re caused by a totally mundane set of circumstances: you’re trying to pull off two outcomes at once, maybe because one appeals to your desires and the other appeals to your conscience, or because both possible actions tap into opposing but equally powerful fears. Sometimes the choices themselves are opposites (will I, won’t I?) but the core fear they trigger is the same.

I want to be a good friend but I don’t have the energy for that call at the moment but I really don’t want to be a bad friend but I really don’t have the energy. I’d like to ask this person out but it’d be awful if they said no but it’d be equally terrible if they said yes because it’d just lead to a bunch of other pressures down the line and I’d eventually mess up. I’m afraid if I stay with this person they’ll let me down but I’m afraid if I leave them I’ll be alone but I really don’t want to be let down but I really don’t want to be alone. I also really don’t want to upset them but I also don’t want to upset myself but if I upset them that’ll upset me anyway but if I upset myself that’ll upset them anyway.

When core fears are spelled out in plain English they’re very simple and direct - and often very silly - but the mind doesn’t want to look at them, so it constructs a thicket of gnarled overthinking around them and pretends the million what-ifs it’s invented are the real things you’re worrying about. Safer that way. Even legitimate worries are only worrying because they have much larger fears behind them; remove the big fears and I doubt any of us would ever worry about anything. Let’s look at the monologues again:

I want to be a good friend (otherwise I’m a bad person in general and don’t deserve to live) but I don’t have the energy for that call at the moment (because my weak boundaries will keep me on the line too long; enforcing boundaries would make others hate me and prove I’m a bad person). I’d like to ask this person out but it’d be awful if they said no (because it’d confirm how unlovable I am) but it’d be equally terrible if they said yes because it’d just lead to a bunch of other pressures down the line and I’d eventually mess up (and confirm how unlovable I am). I’m afraid if I stay with this person they’ll let me down (casting me into the loveless void of death) but I’m afraid if I leave them I’ll be alone (casting me into the loveless void of death).

Interesting places, minds.

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I believe my post-2020 chronic gut problem was caused by tension resulting from core fears pulling me in different directions, turning my insides into a permanently taut rope. There was a combination of wanting to get out and dreading the upheaval that would cause (staying vs. going). Needing to speak up but being afraid to, and convinced that I wouldn’t be heard anyway (speaking vs. staying silent). Not wanting to take what I knew were excessive Covid precautions but taking them anyway out of the fear that I’d be a bad person if I didn’t (OCD-ing vs. not OCD-ing). Resenting what I was making myself do. Doing it anyway. Lots of tension.

The first two examples involved not doing what I wanted to do. I have to - but I can’t. So I won’t for now. The part of me that was being denied wouldn’t stop letting me know it was being denied, because the urge to live in alignment with our real values (as opposed to moralistic or fear-based ones) is very deep and powerful. I think one of the major causes of depression in general is not living the way you know you’re supposed to because it’s too risky or difficult, resulting in a lot of trapped emotional energy that clamps down on all your other emotional energies. You look soporific and listless on the outside, but you’re sitting on a raging whirlwind inside - the energy that isn’t being released into the outer world is all whooshing around in the inner one, damaging the muscles and tissue as it goes.

Making a choice you’re not happy with by default is extremely different to consciously making it, owning it and deciding to be happy with it. On some fundamental level a “by default” choice is never made at all, and the contradicting opposites just keep pulling away at each other in your organs.

The OCD example involved the opposite problem: doing something I didn’t want to do. I really should - actually I shouldn’t have to. Fear probably stops us from acting more often than it makes us act, but both manifestations are equally damaging. I suspect the part of me that’s suspicious of self-discipline is scarred from all the times I’ve misused the concept of discipline, using it like a cudgel to force myself to do things I knew in my heart weren’t actually necessary or useful. My “Covid OCD” was an extreme example of that, and the physical results were correspondingly extreme.

Again, it’s impossible to shut off the bit of yourself that knows how it’s really best for you to live, so if fear is forcing you down a completely inauthentic path, that deeper part of you is always going to be tugging you back the other way. If the fear is just a bit stronger than your deeper sense, you’re going to keep heading down the path regardless, but only slowly and painfully. Imagine trying to walk down the road while someone who’s nearly your size is constantly pulling the other direction on a rope tied around your waist. Won’t be a very pleasant journey, will it?

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Today, when I catch myself vacillating for too long about something that isn’t very important - and what is very important, at the end of the day? - it’ll always be because the stakes are way higher in my head than they are in reality. Take something silly, like ‘Should I write today or go out and enjoy the sun?’ It doesn’t sound like much of a problem, until you pull apart the bad memories, core beliefs and dark fears that surround both options.

If you don’t write today that means you have no discipline, have chosen to hide your light under a bushel again, will go on not contributing your fair share to society and don’t really deserve to live. Look at the writers you respect and the targets they hit. Why don’t you hit those targets? All you have to do is sit there and type, it’s not like you’re rescuing children from a burning building!! You can’t even do something as simple as that? What the hell is wrong with you???

OK, I guess I should write then.

Again?? All you ever do is write! It’s just like they said in school - you’re a loser who prefers books to people. Don’t you care about the state of your social life at all?? Also, this country barely gets any sun and you’re choosing to squander what little good weather there is sitting indoors by yourself? I bet everyone else is at the beach today, or drinking cans by the canal, or doing something incredibly outdoorsy and healthy that’ll make them feel glad to be alive. Are you ever going to move that body of yours? Jesus Christ!

(The correct response to the above dilemma, of course, is to do some yoga then write outside.)

Note the inner critic’s tactics here - it sticks to the same worn-out grooves harder than a Boomer married to their vinyl collection, ignoring all my mental, physical and interpersonal progress over the last 20 years and pretending I’m still the same teenager who never exercised and could have benefited from some nicer friends. The critic is only angry because it’s afraid; its aim is to prevent me from doing anything that could ruin my life, and if that means seeing threats around every corner and wildly exaggerating them, so be it.

In this scenario, the tension would be bad enough if I seriously wanted to write, and also badly wanted to go to the beach with friends. But now say I only half-want to do both those things. I want to write because writing is fun, but I also don’t because it feels a bit too much like hard work. I want to go to the beach with friends because the beach is fun, but also organising social things is stressful because people might turn up really late, or flake out altogether, or not get along with each other, or get on my nerves about something or other, etc. So even if I rejected one of my options and focused on the other one, I’d still go back and forth on whether to do it or not. I’m not being pulled two different ways, then, but four: to write or not to write, to go to the beach or not to go?

Now add in everything else I could/should be doing - weeding, proofreading, recording, or just goofing off - and it’s a short road to decision paralysis.¹

No wonder so many people are creatures of habit; it takes a lot of thinking out of the day. But to be a creature of habit you have to fully buy into your existence and say ‘This is the life for me’. My blessing and my curse is the extreme Type-4 open-mindedness that says ‘Maybe I could be having a much better life if I tried a bit more of X, and also its complete opposite Y.’ (Think of it as like FOMO, but for everything.)

The real problem-under-the-problem here, though, is a lack of trust. If I trusted myself wholeheartedly, my open-mindedness would be a lot more enjoyable: there’s a big difference between ‘X might be a laugh’ and ‘What if I’ll ruin my life if I don’t try X? And what if I ruin my life if I do?’

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Let’s look at the writing example more closely. This is going somewhere and will lead us right back to trust. Trust me.

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If I write for fun, why did I just say it feels a bit like hard work?

It’s a hobby, right? No-one makes me do it, do they? Why would there be any part of me that doesn’t want to do something that I literally do for the love of it?

Again, it comes down to the stakes being too high. I once asked my OCD counsellor, who always used to say thinking wasn’t much use and life was all about taking action, why it was that he chose to live the life of the mind, get a doctorate in psychology and spend his time writing books on mental health. Doesn’t that involve a lot of thinking? Arguing with yourself in your head as you work on intellectual problems? Obsessively looking for the truth? Sounds a bit like OCD, right? (OK, I didn’t put it like that.) His answer went something like, ‘For me, my work is like playing in a sandbox. I’m experimenting with ideas, trying out different things and seeing what happens. It’s fun.’

That’s not what experimenting with ideas is like for me.

Well OK, it is - initially. I have Google Docs and mangled scraps of paper full of thoughts I enjoyed thinking, exploring this direction and that, making connections, linking up one aha to another until I’ve made a wonderful daisy chain of ‘em. But organising the ideas into actual posts that I actually publish is a very different matter. Same with music. I find improvising relaxing and enjoyable. Writing a song that hangs together well enough to satisfy my harsh standards is a lot harder. Arranging it is a little harder again. Producing it, significantly harder again. And releasing it? Very nearly impossible.

This isn’t the same thing as writer’s block. Writer’s block means you don’t know what to write about. I could be writing about a hundred different things right now, and new ideas would keep swirling around my head all day. No blockage there. The blockage comes when I try to shape all those raw ideas into something I’m happy with and that I can imagine others approving of. The stuff doesn’t just have to be good, it has to be very good. Bulletproof. Invincible. There has to be no chance it can be rejected. After all, if work that says something about me is being rejected, that means I’m being rejected. Stands to reason.

It’s easier to overcome this mentality with blogging than it is with music, because this stuff’s more analytical (bit of distance) while my songs are more directly emotional (raw). That’s why you’re reading this. The delightful paradox here is that the more joy I take in something, the more difficult it is to do, because the more totally the work manages to express something fundamental about me, the harder it is to imagine it going out there and not being well received. Insecurity-driven perfectionism makes the stakes of any form of artistic expression very high indeed.

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Here’s what all this has to do with tension.

As we saw, the harsh inner monologue that I transcribed earlier, which I’ve fondly nicknamed the Thou Shalt,² demands that I do everything extremely well or not bother doing it at all. The things that I love the most are the easiest things for the Thou Shalt to ruin, turning what should be a joy into a chore. The child’s logic of ‘I want to express myself through songwriting today because it fulfils a deep need and makes me happy’ gets turned into the disapproving parent’s logic of ‘You’d better write a good song today otherwise you’re wasting your finite time on this planet’.

Now, observe the inner child’s response to this. Where before they’d been bubbling over with energy, now they feel apprehensive and oppressed. Almost immediately, this makes them feel resentful. Wasn’t the whole point of this songwriting thing to have fun? Why has it suddenly turned into a burden? They don’t want to write songs any more now. They turn avoidant. Become tired. Come up with a range of unconscious strategies to get them out of doing what they no longer want to do, including numbing themselves with their phone, doing something sort-of productive like checking emails, or suddenly remembering a whole bunch of non-creative tasks they urgently need to attend to. If those approaches don’t work, there are always physical sensations to hand: fatigue, peckishness, horniness, aches and pains, and even sickness.

Every one of these things sets up tension: I should be songwriting, and instead I’m doing or feeling X. What a calamity. Pulled this way, then that. The will divides. The binaries are created. I should do this, but I don’t want to. So I won’t. But I really should.

Imagine you’re playing Lego with your kid. Now imagine you’re not very nice. Every time the child sticks a couple of bricks together you say ‘NOT LIKE THAT!!’ Then finally they try a combination you both like, and you say ‘OK, that’s slightly better, but you’re going to need to match that standard 100 more times before I’ll even consider signing off on this project.’ They try adding a third brick, and you say ‘NOT LIKE THAT!!! I have the neighbours coming over in an hour; you don’t want to EMBARRASS us both in front of them do you??! Start again!’

I think the kid would get sick of Lego pretty quickly.

If this pattern continues day after day - the child wanting to create, their tyrannical parent ruining it on them, the child not wanting to create any more and losing energy - pretty soon they’ll wake up already tired and avoidant to save time. (I strongly suspect that a lot of chronic fatigue is the body’s way of rebelling against a lifetime of being made to do the right things in the right way, or else.) You’ve skipped the this-or-that tug-of-war stage now and jumped straight to the part where your projects seem oppressive and you’ve lost your motivation. Anxiety has become depression. Your kindness-starved inner child has started wanting nothing but comfort, in both the “comfortable” and “comforted” senses of the word. Tune in to what it’s telling you. It’s become very tired and all it wants to do is sleeeeep…to be left alone to do sweet nothing all day…guilt-free…is that really such a crime…³

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The Thou Shalt’s response to the child’s depressive avoidance, naturally, is to accuse them of laziness. You didn’t really think you were going to get away with relaxing, did you?

The child now has a choice: make their Lego dream palace, while suffering the constant tension of trying to do it really well; avoid the activity, and suffer the tension of constantly feeling they should stop being so lazy and do it; or vacillate between the two, and suffer the tension of trying to do both things at once. Fear, shame and catastrophising in all directions: if I don’t do this perfectly it’ll be a disaster; I’ll fail in the eyes of everyone who matters; I’ll be judged unworthy - and if I don’t do it at all I’ll have failed to live up to my potential; I’ll be a waste of space; and I’ll be judged unworthy. Refusing to decide, of course, really means choosing not to do the thing, without owning the decision and relaxing into it (‘If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice’). Tension, tension, tension.

All because the Thou Shalt fundamentally doesn’t trust the inner child.⁴ It’s terrified that if it relaxes its vigilance for a second, the kid will lapse into indolence and bad behaviour and bring disgrace on the family. That’s why it keeps screaming at them to get building the Lego. The bitter irony, of course, being that the child already wanted to play with the Lego, and now they aren’t playing with the Lego. If the Thou Shalt hadn’t gotten in the way, the kid would have built a ten-turret castle by now. Ergo, they’re more active and productive without the Thou Shalt than they are with it. The confused superego has instilled the very “laziness” (avoidance) it spends its life railing against. After all, the word lazy only applies with chores and things you don’t want to do but have to. The Thou Shalt’s use of the term is nothing more than an admission that they’ve turned what should be a pleasure into a chore.

So is the correct reply to You need to do what you’re good at to justify your existence on this planet ‘I don’t have to do anything, so I won’t’?

I don’t think so. The problem is that if you’re passionate about something, you may not need to do it to justify your existence on the planet, but you absolutely need to do it for your own sake, to get it out of your system. It’s very hard to be happy otherwise. I’ve tried not pursuing my music because the whole process of recruiting bandmates and retaining them and teaching them the songs and booking gigs and negotiating ticket prices and promoting events and finding recording studios and considering release strategies is so very exhausting, but not doing it makes me as unhappy as doing it. It’s that push-pull tension again: I want to do it and I don’t; I can’t and I have to. Of course, the problem isn’t really that I don’t want to do it, it’s that I do want to but my fears ruin it on me, like the touchy parent ruining the Lego.

It makes it clearer for me to think about it this way: there are 1) good motivations for pursuing a valuable project like completing an album, 2) bad motivations for pursuing it, 3) good motivations for not pursuing it, and 4) bad motivations for not pursuing it.

1) Good reasons to = to express myself, for personal fulfillment, for catharsis, to get all my ideas out of my head and into the world, because I love it

2) Bad reasons to = to prove I’m worth something, to not be idle, to make it perfect and bulletproof, to be the best, to make absolutely everyone like it/me

3) Good reasons not to = temporarily stepping back from the fray whenever 2) overwhelms 1), or I need a break from all the creative decisions, people management, promotional treadmill etc

4) Bad reasons not to = fear of my inner critic, of failure, rejection, my peers doing better than me, you name it

Thou Shalt accusing you of being lazy? It’s lobbing a 2) at you; ad hominem; disqualified; feel free to ignore it. Need to rest, need time to be alone, to recharge, to draw inspiration from negative space, to indulge in the purposeless wallowing that’s essential to all creativity and pleasure? It’s 3) time. But if you go on and on not working when there’s a part of you deep down that wants to, you’re into avoidance territory, and 1) is going to start nagging away at you. If your drive keeps pestering you and you keep ignoring it, the likelihood is that you’re being ruled by 2) even when you’re not creating, and that’s why you’re not creating. Or 4) has got to you, and your fears about the results are cutting your enthusiasm for the process off at the source.

Interesting places, minds.

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Here’s one for you: why is a child building a Lego castle “playing”, and an adult mixing an album “working”? Because adults don’t think there’s any value to what they do unless it’s serious, difficult and annoying. Well, what if we treated our hobbies - hell, even our “actual work”, whatever it is that pays the bills - as play? As a game? What if caring less about it made you want to do it more? What if the stakes were lower? What if there weren’t any stakes?

We keep forgetting that the only reason we do anything at all is because we want to do it.⁵ We keep taking things we enjoy, telling ourselves we owe it to the world/God/the imaginary judge in our heads to do them well, thoroughly killing our enjoyment, doing the things anyway, then resenting the world for making us do them. But the world isn’t making us do anything. We are.

The Thou Shalt says you’re lazy. You’ll be more energetic if you drop the Thou Shalt. The Thou Shalt wonders where your inspiration has gone. You’ll get it back if you disregard the Thou Shalt. The Thou Shalt accuses you of being a mope. You’ll stop being a mope if you stop listening to the Thou Shalt.

We don’t need to do anything to turn on our creative flow because we’re alive, and life consists of nothing more nor less than existing in a constant state of creative flow. All we need to do is remove the blockages, and the biggest blockage is the Thou Shalt. As Anthony de Mello is so fond of reminding us, when you remove the obstacle to vision the result is sight.⁶

Quick Q&A:

Q: What’s the best way to get a kid to play with their Lego?

A: Dunno, depends on the kid. Why do you care what they play with anyway?

Q: OK, what’s the best way to get a kid who wants to play with their Lego to play with their Lego?

A: Em, you don’t need to do anything? They’re going to do it anyway.

Q: How about if they want to play with it deep down, but they’re afraid to because you keep bullying them when they try?

A: Be less of a prick I guess? Apologise, smile at them and tell them to do what they like for a change?

Q: Bingo.

A: “Bingo” isn’t a question.

Q: What happened to being less of a prick?

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So why do we treat ourselves worse than we’d treat our children? How are we so used to being horrible to ourselves that it sounds counter-intuitive to say ‘being gentle with yourself means you’ll achieve more than if you keep forcing yourself to achieve things’?

Just picture the scene. You’ve made friends with your inner child. You trust them. You’re confident that they’ll do some good with their time on the planet when left to their own devices, because goodness, creative energy and love are fundamental to their nature. So they run off and play. Fun, isn’t it?

Gentleness dissolves any number of the binaries that pull away at each other and cause the tensions in our system, including the lazy-workaholic binary. Treat yourself kindly and work is no longer a miserable compulsion, meaning it’s not something you feel any need to avoid. Same logic applies with those ‘bad’ behaviours that we despise ourselves for. We’re numbing out and ducking our responsibilities because life with the Thou Shalt makes them all so miserable, then being shamed for our coping mechanisms by that same Thou Shalt.

Compassion even dissolves that age-old million dollar question: do I accept myself as I am, or strive to change for the better? There’s actually no binary here at all; no “or”. The more you accept yourself as you are now, the easier it is to change. When it comes to overanalytical self-criticism addicts, it isn’t our shadow, our hangups, our griefs and rages that make us miserable: it’s our constant pearl-clutching in the face of these things. We either deny they’re there at all (while knowing they are = tension) or judge them incredibly harshly (which sets up a tug-of-war: I feel this but I shouldn’t = tension). Accept the hangups and rages and they become less important. You relax. You’re no longer making yourself a problem. You feel lighter, more open; freer to choose your responses, and then your actions.

You’re no longer a battleground in which you’re resisting reality and then resisting your own resistance, feeling enraged by the world then guilty about it, or getting upset and rolling your eyes over your own sensitivity. You’re following Thich Nhat Hanh’s advice and resisting nothing about yourself or the world.⁷ No resistance means no tension. You’re not torn between doing two different things. You’re doing one thing: compassionately observing.

Accepting yourself means, by definition, that you’re becoming a more accepting person, which means you’re becoming a more loving person, which means you’re automatically going to treat everyone around you better, which means you’re changing for the better. QED, accepting yourself = changing for the better.

Better still, accepting yourself = allowing your essential self, which is already good, to relax and do its thing. This isn’t really changing who you are, it’s becoming more who you already are.

The Thou Shalt is so hellbent on making sure you don’t do anything bad that it sabotages every impulse in you to do something good. You know there isn’t really any need for this sadomasochistic game, and that’s why you feel tense all the time.

Try not playing the game. See what happens. Next time you have some time off, let yourself do exactly what you want the entire time, as if you were five years of age. Do you just want to lie down? Is that OK? What are you thinking about? Indulge yourself? Is that OK? Is it fun? Still fun now, or is it getting boring? If it’s still fun, is that OK? If it isn’t, do you want to make something, build something, do something? Really want to (excitement), or fake want to (resignation)? Fake want to with some really want to underneath? Why? If an I should comes up, what would happen if you let it go?

There’s only one thing you absolutely must do if you try this. And that’s let me know how it goes.

1. Ah, decision paralysis, my old friend. One of the leading causes of anxiety? It’s no mystery to me that navigating this nebulous meta hyper-financialised hyper-complex hyper-real streets-&-screens-&-thinking-machines simulation we’re all living in would tend to stress us out. If not answering their calling makes people depressed, then having too many complicated options makes them anxious. In days gone by most people didn’t have the opportunity to answer any kind of calling, or really do much of anything except till the soil. Once you do have the opportunity for the perfect life - or seem to - there’s a lot of pressure to follow through. It’s not that I think we’re unhappier than downtrodden mediaeval serfs. But in some weird way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were more anxious.

2. Delicious phrase of Freud’s: ‘the general character of harshness and cruelty exhibited by the [ego] ideal - its dictatorial Thou shalt’.

3. Chogyam Trungpa memorably calls this state of mind the “setting-sun world”.

4. Told you to trust me. Now give me the first four digits of your password and your mother’s maiden name.

5. This even applies to the things we don’t want to do. If we really didn’t want to do them, we wouldn’t do them. There’s a part of us that does want to - even if it’s just fear - and that’s why we’re doing them.

6. Not sure who originally said this, anyone know?

7. Which isn’t the same as saying ‘Don’t do anything about injustice’, of course. The enemy is always tension: if you can fight injustice outwardly without getting twisted into knots about it inwardly, you’re laughing. After all, the injustice is bad enough as it is; why let your opponent win two victories by letting them dictate how you feel?