Desire Not Denial

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time this week preparing for additional work that I don’t want to do.

My supervisor recently told me about an online therapy platform she’s working for.

“It’s really slick and they have some excellent resources,” she told me.

“Maybe I’ll have a look at it,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant.

“I’ll send you the link.”

I don’t need more work and, what’s more, I don’t want to do any, yet I still find myself writing a CV, a task I have not done for more than thirty years.

Perhaps most alarming of all is that this all came about when I declared I’ve been finding it hard to use free time effectively because I focus more on the “effectively” bit instead of the “free” bit.

It has revealed to me a problem I appear to have had in making, adjusting or ending habits where I focus too much on denial and not enough on desire.

I noticed it recently with crisps.

I like crisps a bit too much.

I once ate an entire family bag of Twiglets on the drive home from Tenterden and spent the evening with stomach cramps drinking copious amounts of water to quench my thirst.

If I open a bag I’ll eat them all so my strategy for addressing this issue was to stop buying crisps.

It worked, after a fashion. After all, having no crisps means you can’t eat them, but it did create in me an intense desire for crisps which was made more powerful by self-imposed denial.

Denial is not the best way of establishing new habits.

For years, as I tried to coach my ADHD mind toward effective organisation I tried a variety of different productivity apps.

All that resulted was that I managed to spread my chaotic disorganisation across multiple platforms without proper visibility of what I’d planned where.

More recently I became concerned at my tendency to watch videos on TikTok of dogs doing cute things or people hitting one another with soft tortilla wraps and tried to impose a regime to get me away from my screen and back into my beloved books.

None of these forced programmes of change was successful because they relied on denial of what I didn’t want rather than a desire to gain the benefits of the change I did want.

I tell my daughter about the article I’m writing.

“Oh yeah, like the time I tried to stop myself eating biscuits by telling myself I could only have one biscuit.”

“What happened?”

“I ate all the biscuits.”

Salvation came, I realised, in the form of my friend Martin who is a recovering alcoholic.

I noticed that over the years since he has been in recovery I have almost stopped drinking alcohol entirely. Not because I told myself I couldn’t but because I gave myself the space to prefer constant sobriety.

My organisational skills got better when I lightened up on myself and worked with my limitations rather than against them, and I put down my phone when I allowed myself the choice between a good book or a video of someone eating an insanely hot chilli pepper.

I solved the crisp problem by getting multipacks of small bags in the full knowledge that even I will draw the line at opening more than one bag at a time.

As for taking on work that I neither need nor want I fell into that because I find it hard not to do things that feel useful, but that’s a whole other story.

I’m going to push past that discomfort and cancel my chat with the online therapy people and then I’m going to watch the cricket and have one small bag of crisps.