I'm in my mid-40s, and trying to re-learn 'feelings'

I am a procrastinator. I have ideas that I talk myself out of all the time. Occasionally, I manage to get them to a point at which they’re ready (by any reasonable measure) for the world to see, but something always stops me from actually pressing the button.

I’m predisposed to overthinking, delaying, tweaking, and telling myself I just needed a bit more clarity before I shared anything.

And so things stay unfinished, joining an ever-growing list of ‘nearlies’, a list I often look at and use to convince myself of my own shortcomings.

It’s always been this way. I have very rare, short bursts of focus, energy, and belief that enable me to move some stuff forward, but the majority of my time is spent in a sort of self-resentful inertia.

Knowing that it’s cyclical has actually become more problematic and frustrating, but I’ve tried countless things to break the loop over the years, and none of them have stuck. That is, until a relatively recent experience that may have helped me to re-learn feelings.

Re-learning feelings

I’d been chatting with Paul Dykes. We met at a local co-working space and got chatting over a coffee a few weeks later.

He specialises in helping organisations to close the gap between what they say and what they do, and he was just about to launch a version of his services targeted at sole traders/self-employed/solo business folk.

He invited me onto the founding sprint of the course and, despite my own anxieties about doing something like this with strangers, I was very much of the view that I needed to try something different than I’d done in the past and said yes.

About half an hour into the first session, though, I had what I would euphemistically call an adverse reaction. I found myself thinking that what I needed/wanted from the session was quite different from what everyone else was talking about, and I basically switched off.

A kind of fog descended – the sort that blinds you emotionally. My head got busy, thoughts raced and collided and I couldn’t focus on what anyone was saying. I just sat there, frustrated, angry at myself, completely unable to engage.

Paul clocked that I’d psychologically dropped off and asked me to stay on the call once everyone else had left.

He guided me through an exercise that, honestly, sounded a bit woo-woo at first. He asked me to visualise what that fog – that emotional reaction – might look like, and encouraged me to see it, engage with it, sit with it.

As I did, I realised something I’d never quite seen before.

That fog was a defence mechanism. It was my mind’s way of protecting me from uncertainty – from not knowing what would happen next, or how I’d cope with it. It was trying to keep me safe, and in the process it was leading me and my choices.

'Sitting with' something

Paul suggested I should sit with that thought for a day and see what came up.

A day later, I still felt frustrated. I wanted to quit the group, and I didn’t feel like I belonged there.

But a day later, something clicked.

I realised that the feeling of the fog descending during that call was the same thing I used to feel when I’d lose my temper as a kid. I’d often flare up, lash out with minimal provocation – let’s call it middle child syndrome – but somewhere around the age of 12 or 13, I started to mature and shut that response off more often than not.

For thirty-odd years, that feeling didn’t really have anywhere to go.

And now, any time uncertainty hit, it came roaring back in a modified form, as frustration, self-criticism, paralysis – anything to protect me again.

That’s when I realised something important: for years, that feeling had been leading me. But now that I could see that, with a lot of work I could put the wheels in motion to enable me to lead it in the future.

Starting to put the theory into practice

So, I started doing exactly that.

I looked at the things I’d been sitting on – the work I’d held back from sharing, the messages I’d drafted but never sent, the projects I’d convinced myself weren’t quite ready – and I just started moving.

Each time that familiar fog crept in, I acknowledged it, reminded myself it was just that old defence mechanism trying to help, and then I did the thing anyway.

Little by little, things have started to shift for me.

Instead of second-guessing myself, I’m taking action. I launched things publicly that had been stuck in my drafts for months. I reached out to people I’d been avoiding. I just did it, focusing on building momentum by killing of the list of ‘nearlies’, and not letting it start to grow again.

But like I said earlier, I’ve aways been good at doing this in short bursts in the past, and the proof for me will be when I’ve seen that I’ve been able to sustain this for a period of time.

It’s been a month now, and I’m still going.

I’m catching myself when the doubt and the old narratives I’ve told myself for decades start to creep in, and I’m able to talk myself through it and to a more positive, can do place – quite literally in many cases.

This is a real-time update at the moment, and I’ll come back with an update in due course, but I’m sharing it here now because it’s been a lesson to me that it’s never too late to try something different.

I’m unpicking a lifetime of self-doubt, clinical perfectionism, anxiety and more as I work my way through this, but I can actually see that this time it might be working. And if it does, the outcomes will transform how I feel about myself, what I do with that, and how I show up in the future.

So, yeah, it’s a pretty big deal for me, and there might be something in here for you too.

And it’s decent reminder that leaning into something you’d normally run away from can prove pretty fruitful.