A few zero-cost rituals for dissipating writer's block, easing anxiety, and re-centering your focus when you get distracted by ye olde hellscape outside and within

Let's commingle our psychological band-aids here as we limp along together.

Apologies for no newsletter last week. Whoops.

SPEAKING OF WHICH: I’ve written before about how stuck and “blocked” so many of us feel creatively right now. Protracted trauma, uncertainty, disruption, isolation, and monotony all do a number on a human brain—especially the bits that do the deep thinking. WHICH IS REAL COOL FOR THOSE OF US WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DEEP THINKING FOR A LIVING AT LEAST EIGHT HOURS A DAY, AMIRITE?

Ha haha ha ::sets self on fire::

No amount of meditating or self-care is going to calm anyone’s brain bees entirely right now. COVID (and the majority of people in this country losing their damn minds) are structural problems that can only be solved collectively and incrementally over many, many years.

In the mean time, however, that manuscript or email or whatever is already overdue, and there’s another one like it you need to send out right after that. So…..uh. We’ve all got to override that fight or flight sensation at least a few hours a day, right? But HOW?

If you’re anything like me, you’re not under any illusions that you’ll be Polly Productivity at pre-pando levels any time soon. Even so, we have for the most part (I am going to go ahead and guess) officially reached the hour in which we need to deploy all of the emotional ninja resources at our disposal to maintain even a turtle’s pace here.

Wanna do that together?

Through my work with executive coach Elizabeth Su and some extensive light desperation reading before going to bed each night, I’ve picked up some new neuropsychological tools for temporarily calming the bees in the past few months. And they have helped! A bit! At different times and in different ways! I thought I’d share them with you.

I have also, God help me, enabled comments on this post and future posts so that you can share any good ones I’ve missed with your fellow subscribers. It would be my honor to swap trauma band-aids with you all! Or for my fellow geriatric millennials: coping mechanism POGs.

::shakes cane:: in my day, the tokens were both FUNGIBLE and SLAMMABLE

Ok, here are mine: