Forcing Yourself to Do a Task vs. Letting Yourself Off the Hook

By Leo Babauta

People often think, when they’re tired or don’t feel like doing a task (or a habit), that there are really only two choices:

1. Force yourself to do the task anyway; or
2. Let yourself off the hook

And while there isn’t anything wrong with either of these choices, I’m here to remind you that they are choices. And they’re not the only choices.

What else can you do in that situation? Well, here are just a few other possibilities off the top of my head:

• Choose to take care of yourself, and then come back to the task when you’re more replenished
• Find a reason to do the task that inspires you to do it, even if you’re tired — for example, if you knew that doing a task would save a million people’s lives, you probably wouldn’t say, “Oh, but I’m too tired right now”
• Ask for other people’s help
• Find a creative approach that has you bringing play to the task while also honoring your tiredness

As you can see, there are choices, when we get beyond the only two choices that occur to most of us.

Let’s talk about our tendencies, then talk about how to pursue other options than the two main ones we’ve mentioned at the beginning.

Our Tendency

The thing is, most people will default to one of the two choices by habit — if you normally let yourself off the hook, that’s probably a tendency (you might add some self-judgment and self-criticism to that tendency). If you are good at forcing yourself to do work, you probably do that as a tendency.

So become aware of your tendency — which one do you lean towards? There isn’t anything wrong with this tendency, but it will always get you the same results: avoidance gets you stuckness and self-judgment, while forcing yourself gets you a sense of burden, overwhelm, exhaustion and apathy.

Once you’re aware of the tendency, you can ask yourself whether you’d like to try something different. If so, read on!

Creating Aliveness

So first, let’s say you decide that self-care is your priority. That doesn’t mean you’re going to avoid the hard things, but you’re going to make sure you’re not going towards burnout, and take responsibility for making sure you’re getting enough rest, nourishment, mental breaks, and movement.

So that is a given. Now what? Well, now you can move towards the tasks you’re resisting — hard, scary tasks you want to put off.

But instead of forcing yourself, you want to try something different, that doesn’t feel like coercion and doesn’t make you feel so burdened and apathetic.

How do we do that? There isn’t a right answer, but here are some things to consider:

1. Connect with your deeper Why. Something that inspires you to take action, instead of having to avoid or force yourself. What would have you excited to tackle this?
2. Let yourself play. Why does this have to feel like work, or a “nose to the grindstone” kind of thing? Why are we trying to just “get through” all of our work tasks and emails and meetings? What if all of this could be a playground?
3. Let it feel alive. We don’t have a lot of time on this Earth. Let’s let ourselves feel more alive in each moment, whenever we can remember. What would it be like to feel alive right now, as you read this?
4. Don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Sometimes the resistance or overwhelm is too much. How can others be invited to help us face it, or to make it more like play, or to help shoulder the burden? We don’t have to be so alone.

These are some ideas to play with. How can you feel more alive in the tasks you have in front of you today?