Tip 1: don’t try harder!
A voice spoke to me out of the gloom, saying “Smile and try harder for behold, things could be worse.” And so I did smile and did work harder and lo, things did get worse.
Tip 2: do something different!
Anything, so long as it’s different.
What is happening?
Every moment of the day our stupid brain is judging whether our smart mind is succeeding or failing. Too much failing and the stupid brain decides to take over and stop this nonsense. We call that being stressed and the brain wants us just to admit failure and cease immediately. So long as some succeeding is happening, the brain will just keep quietly out of the way.
So when I attempt to write this paragraph for the 5th time, my stupid brain reckons “that’s 4 failures so far, I can’t do this”. I feel stressed and suddenly it feels like I am stuck. Worse than that, the brain is sensing a threat here and wants to freeze everything, just in case.
This is a tiny little version of a big phenomenon called Learned Helplessness. If everything you try doesn’t work, you begin to give up – on everything. The escape is to find something, anything, to succeed at. Urgently.
Anything? Yes: go for walk; listen to a playlist; cook a meal. It almost doesn’t matter, so long as it is something you will enjoy and maybe find interesting.
If time is pressing, then switch to another section of the essay: is there an easy bit to write and get out of the way?
Can I avoid this?
Not really, but you can make it less likely or less disruptive. Think about this.
In producing an essay, you are continually switching between
i. a large-scale architectural vision of it: what is the story here and how does it end?
ii. the minute detail of this sentence: what word to choose?
These are quite different things and need quite different mental resources. It’s a bit like trying to watch the television and read a book at the same time.
Much of our mental life is about this balance between the large-scale, global pattern and the fine-scale details that it is made from. Look at a tree and try and count the leaves: same thing. Listen to a song and try and hear the individual notes (actually don’t because most of can’t).
Some people are better at navigating between the story and the word than others. Personally, I need a clear and strong sense of story before I can write the words. What sort are you?
Find out what sort you are: try both approaches and see which feels easiest.
Then don’t fight it: do things your way.