In defense of lazy days

I'm typically very good at motivating myself to practice singing, go to the gym, or write. I love improving my skills and I love creating but sometimes (oftentimes?) I just. can't. be. bothered.

I'm totally guilty of procrastination, but while most people would look at it and think, oh you're being a bit lazy today, I've begun to think of my off days as subconscious workdays. We'll dig into this idea over the course of this post.

Surely, doing something is better than nothing though?

Regardless of how you feel on the day, isn’t just showing up and getting some work done better than nothing?

Sure, some days, it's just a case of getting a little momentum going and you're back in the flow of things. Knowing when to push yourself a little and knowing when to back off is an art form unto itself though, and as someone who has been burnt-out before, these days I prefer to lean towards backing off.

There is no harm in making an attempt at showing up - maybe go to the gym, do a warm-up, and if you're still not feeling it, stop. It's alright to go home, you can give yourself credit for trying.

If you're leaning towards taking a break, I'm here to provide you with the justification:

Consciously you might be feeling lazy but I promise you the subconscious part of your brain is still hard at work.

When it comes to practicing your craft, working out, or trying to create something original, here's why I disagree with 'just showing up':

• If you’re having an off day and if it means you’re going to be practicing below standard. Showing up can mean that you’re going to be programming in sub-par technique and thus, embedding bad muscle memory.

• If just showing up means that it’s going to be a waste of energy and that it'll leave you still depleted for tomorrow - a day where you may have been on fire if it weren’t for you banging your head against the wall today.

• I disagree with just showing up because it’s lazy in and of itself. You don't have to always be busy. If you feel like you do, you should check in on your stress and anxiety levels.

Why you’re not feeling it today

Let's consider why you may be having an off day in the first place. This way you'll get to understand yourself and your rhythms a lot better, and it'll put everything into perspective for you.

Think about the day before this day that you’re feeling off. Did you do anything that (metaphorically speaking) may have left you with a ‘hangover’ today? Maybe you simply had a huge practice or creative day the day before and your brain is either still processing all the new information or is drained from the workout you just gave it.

With working out at the gym, the building of muscle comes during the recovery period after the workout. Likewise, for practice, our brains need time to process all the new information we’ve fed it. As Daniel Coyle says in The Talent Code, it takes time to build all the new neural pathways necessary to produce progress in a skillful endeavor.

In terms of creativity, well that ebbs and flows as the connections and patterns that your subconscious has been making bubble to the surface in... well, bubbles. Maybe nothing is ready to bubble to the surface today.

Maybe you’re feeling consciously lazy today because your subconscious is actually busy working away - and of course consuming energy - and needs a bit of time and space because it's just not ready to show you the results yet.

Daniel Kahneman, in his revolutionary work Thinking: fast and slow talks about how our conscious mind is actually a support actor in the great play of our minds. All the big work is happening below the level of consciousness.

There is hope for conscious productivity though

Usually, if I'm feeling off for the day, it's off in general and I just need to blob out and do mindless stuff, and that's fine. First and foremost, this post is about giving you permission to take a break. But sometimes this lackluster feeling is quite specific and you might just need to shift your focus.

It’s funny, I was trying to work on another post on a subject that I am really enthusiastic about but I was feeling very average about it all. I had no motivation to write about the topic whatsoever, no matter how long I forced myself to stare at the screen.

So I started randomly flicking through a bunch of other posts I’d half started and saw this one and BANG, I was on. Words and thoughts flying out quicker than I could put them down.

What was the difference?

The first post that I was trying to force myself to write just wasn’t ready yet. It wasn't ready in the sense that my subconscious mind was still working on putting the pieces together. I'd been reading up on the subject but I obviously hadn't allowed my subconscious time to put everything together in a novel way yet.

Whereas, this post you're reading now was ready - my subconscious had pieced all the necessary pieces together and had now presented the outcome to my conscious mind, ready to throw them on the page (with only minor conscious tweakings).

If you don't have something else to work on though, that's fine too. You can still try to come up with other productive things you could do that could still be somehow related to your endeavor. Everything feeds into everything else in your subconscious, our brains love detecting patterns, and this could lead to a novel idea coming to mind sometime in the future.

What if I've been in a lull for a little while?

I'm just going to keep this post about short to medium-term lulls. The long-term stuff could be many factors and would be a different article.

I would say, definitely don't worry if you're even having an off week or two. I very often go hard with singing or songwriting for a week or two and then do very little for the next week or two and always come back with something good when I'm feeling on again! I always feel like my voice has gotten better after a good week or so off. Likewise, sometimes I don't pick up the guitar to write for weeks or months at a time and then two or three ideas come out in quick succession.

Our subconscious mind is always working away beneath the surface. Sometimes what it's working on takes a while longer than we'd like to bubble up to our conscious mind.

It's normal

To reiterate, maybe a lazy day is exactly what you need because chances are, if you have been working and feeding your mind, your subconscious isn’t being lazy at all. It is - you are - still working away beneath the surface.

Time to rest and muse about things isn't laziness - in fact, it's argued to be a sign of intelligence.