Decision = death
As neurocomplex peeps, we have a million ideas, passions and hobbies, and we want to do it all.
Like: we have five simultaneous hobbies with eight simultaneous projects that we want to finish, while making time to see our besties while working fulltime while running a business while keeping a performance of mature adulthood in the state of the household (ie cleaning). And that’s without including the upkeep of children, fur-babies, house plants or immature parents.
So we add it to our to-do lists. All of it.
It’s not a stretch to say we can tend towards overcommitting ourselves.
And if we are detail-oriented, with high standards; if we love quality and/or beauty; if we need to know the outcome before we begin; if we can’t sequence tasks or timelines, or if we cannot deal with tech or systems to save ourselves…
We can end up a tad overwhelmed.
We end up decision paralysis, we literally cannot decide
We can’t prioritise what task comes first.
Our to-do list is so long and never ending (imo partly because we have included cyclically repeating tasks on it like the laundry, partly because we keep adding and not prioritising, deciding, completing)
I recently devoured and recommended this book to several of my neurocomplex friends and clients:
“Four Thousand Weeks - time management for mortals”
It’s part practical guidance, part philosophy, that addresses the above struggles some of us have in our drive to have a meaningful life.
The author, Oliver Burkeman, posits this: We have literally 4000 weeks in our whole life, if we’re lucky, and if we want to do something well, we can’t do it all.
And when we don’t decide, we spiral. We don’t actually live an enjoyable life.
But deciding and saying Yes to something means saying No to other possibilities, at least at this moment, essentially forcing us to face our mortality. Which our ego protects us from in innumerable ways already.
My addition: Having purpose, a sense of meaning, is so important to neurocomplex people - it helped us survive the harshness of the world, and so becomes bound to our survival. And since our brains operate already in a lot of vigilance, when we’re faced with choice, our avoidance of mortality goes into overdrive. Hence spiralling, procrastination and overwhelm, some of our most unhelpful stims through substance use, doom scrolling, rotting and paying Netflix way too much money for absolute shite content (another unsolicited opinion of mine), and generally avoiding the most meaningful, satisfying activities that we actually really want to do.
When it comes to work, if we're employed, the external accountability helps us push through the spiral and take action. But when we're self-employed, there's a laundry list of things we could and should do, fed by the business gurus, and our survival depends solely on us. And especially when we are super porous and sensitive humans, who want to be powerfully on purpose, this gives a different level of weight to our decisions and actions - they really start to feel like life or death, because we are going to spend the majority of time in our business working with the consequences, and we often started a business because we couldn’t stand to work in environments that didn’t fit, and do work that was boring or not aligned, so we are trying to avoid that at all costs and what if this decision means I end up doing things that drain me and it’s not sustainable - and then paralysis sets in. And the procrasto-spiral is disastrous. Ask me how I know.
After introducing the concept of our mortality, Burkeman dives into the philosophy of Time, and Being, in a really practical way, and I won’t do that justice with my own words, so what I will say is that meaning is a necessary inclusion for a lot of neurocomplex folk, and it added a layer of depth that was really satisfying for me.
Letting myself make an imperfect decision has been a real challenge all my life, and as I’ve decided to go further with my business, I have slid up against it in the most sandpapery way.
But, making a decision - any decision - and taking action creates movement, and movement equals Life and escape from the doom spiral. Movement helps us find our path forward much quicker than if we stayed put and spiralled.
Although I can cognitively prioritise and decide, often the emotional, internal experience is not coherent, and experience tells me that when I take action that’s not fully coherent, it often creates more trouble than good, which stops me taking action. But the simple principles in the book have really helped me to find peace and settle into my decisions and choices, which means I can take much more consistent action. It’s also plugged me more firmly into the truth that life really is short, and to commit to what I see as my purpose, what I want to do with my one wild and precious life. Which is help people. And I can’t help people when I’m standing still and silent on my doom spiral of indecision and procrastination.
So if you, too, are standing on a doom spiral of indecision and procrastination, and complain that there is never enough time - have a read of Four Thousand Weeks. Because you deserve to live a fulfilling life.
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