Five ways to avoid March (Hare) Madness

‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, `you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.’~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

Are you suffering from March (Hare) Madness? About this time of year, many people are looking forward to their spring breaks. A lot of academics set themselves up for failure by saying, “I’ll have loads of time to get that article written when I’m on break and not teaching classes.”  Speaking from personal experience, it doesn’t work that way.  Instead, you may find yourself frittering away all that time, and go back to your regular duties profoundly depressed and frustrated with yourself by how little you got accomplished.

The March Hare, as you may already know, is a character from Alice in Wonderland who appears at the beginning of the book in his waistcoat, muttering “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I shall be late,” while referring to his pocket watch. He then promptly disappears down the rabbit hole where Alice follows him. He constantly dashes around looking for tea-time with his friend, the Mad Hatter.

The idiom “mad as a March hare,” refers to the real animal’s behavior through the breeding season (generally March in Europe) including boxing at other hares and jumping vertically for no apparent reason, though it could possibly be something to do with mating displays.

Now, you may be asking, how does this bit of trivia apply to me and getting my writing done? Because if you are not careful how you construct this time off, you may run around exactly like the March Hare and get nothing done. Binge writing doesn’t actually work.

A study on business productivity by Evan Robinson, a computer game developer, determined working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Wow. The longer you work continuously, the more severe the cognitive impairment, even if it’s not immediately apparent to you. I vividly remember writing a portion of my MA thesis in maniacal fashion over one spring break, only to return to it a week later and realize it was completely incoherent. With arrows leading in all directions, the piece appeared to be the mad scribbling of a lunatic.

So, how do you avoid March Hare madness?

1)    Start by avoiding the temptation to go down the rabbit hole in a mad dash. Instead, if you plan to write, plan your break to include some actual downtime at the beginning. Most people get a week or so for their break, often starting on a Friday or Saturday, so that first weekend is ideal for spending time resting or doing fun things with friends, partner, or family members. I’ve written about this before in Less haste, more speed: 7 ideas for getting summer projects done. You will do your body and your brain a big favor by first giving it a rest.

2)    After enjoying some downtime away from any academic projects, it’s time to get going again. Create a short-term writing schedule for yourself and stick to it. If you do your best intellectual work in the morning, schedule it then; if you do your most creative work in the evening, schedule it then. There really are larks and owls in terms of circadian rhythms, so honor yours.

3)    Make sure your schedule actually gives you about 3-4 hours of uninterrupted time. Perhaps you need to make sure the kids are either at camp or with a caretaker. Perhaps you need someone to come to sit with your ailing mother. Whatever it takes, be willing to invest the resources to give you this precious commodity, time. Actually sitting down to write is one of the most important actions you can take. As Steven Pressfield writes in The War of Art: “When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”

4)    Remind yourself that 3-4 hours of concentrated time is all most people’s brains can endure. Your brain is a three-pound muscle, and just like any other muscle, it needs to be treated with respect. You may think you are doing your best work staying focused and on task, but resting it by daydreaming is when creativity flourishes. For more on this, see Look out the window for better thinking and writing.

5)    And one final reason: constant work can burn out your insula, the part of your brain that controls empathy. The left front insula handles homeostatic functions, helping to regulate the sympathetic and parasympathetic body functions. The right front insula is where you register literal physical pain as well as the pain of emotional isolation. The right front insula lights up when you experience human emotions from disgust to love, integrating the information from the left insula. High emotional arousal consumes the very energy you need to sustain progress and can result in burnout.

Hypomania

Robert Boice describes writing frenetically as “hypomania.” He says it goes beyond the “superficial and disorganized writing it often produces” causing profound depression, difficulty restarting a writing project, resulting in less output and sometimes even long-term difficulties like writer’s block. He uses the example of novelist Ayn Rand, quoting from Barbara Brandon’s 1986 biography: “As the last of her powers of endurance were spent, as her nervous state grew more jagged and fragile, the bitterness and pain in her personality began to take the ascendancy.”

As my mother would say, “All things in moderation.” This is great advice for avoiding the depression that often sets in when you cannot get your writing done in a short, specified period of time. Instead, normalize your writing habits by setting reasonable goals. Set your writing times to create a sense of rhythm and forward momentum. The tried and true technique of writing every day for 15 minutes is far better for completion of a writing project than expecting you can write solidly 8-10 hours a day for a week. Instead of suffering from March hare madness, you can be more like the tortoise and ultimately win the race.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,