- Counting your breath
- Planning your day
- Listening to music
The thing is: You can have an entire arsenal of enablers at your disposal and still find yourself paralyzed into inaction.
Why?
Because paralysis doesn’t always stem from the absence of tools, but from deeper blocks—like mental fog, overwhelm, or fixation on an end result.
In such moments, it might be tempting to force yourself through the situation. (And forcing yourself has it's place.) But a more reliable approach is to adopt narrowed attention: a zoom-in on the one next action that will move you closer to completion.
Take this scenario: You’re lying on your couch, burning with the desire to get things done, yet immobile. Thoughts of all the things you should be doing fly through your mind, but no clear path forms. Even ideas like “sit up and walk to the desk” or “open a notepad to jot things down” are interrupted by alternative ideas. So, you remain immobile—tension mounting as your longing to act turns to discomfort.
Narrowing attention to just one action cuts through that noise. And when that one action is tied to an enabler, it eases you into doing what you might otherwise "don’t feel like doing."
This approach isn’t just practical, it’s rooted in how the brain works.
It’s tempting to think that you’re always in full control of your mind, that one firm instruction can snap you into motion. But that’s often not the case because different brain states dominate at different times.
The neocortex, responsible for executive functions like planning and reasoning, drives intentional action. But during moments of overwhelm or fog, its influence wanes. The limbic system—which holds the fight-flight-or-freeze system—becomes dominate, often giving rise to behaviours that do not necessarily align with your long-term goals.
By narrowing attention to a single, clearly defined action, you reduce the sway of the limbic system and increase activation in the neocortex—inching yourself closer to agency.
Enablers are particularly useful to this because they are clear small actions you can observe, define and adopt. Here is a non-exhaustive list of enablers:
- Narrowing attention to one action.
- Putting words down onto a page (of thoughts and tasks in mind, to clarify next actions).
- Counting your breath.
- Planning your day.
- Sitting at your work desk.
- Listening to music.
- Distilling the next smallest action required to move a task forward—or identifying the orientation you need to adopt.
📌 Item 1
- Subpoint A
- Subpoint B
📌 Item 2
- Subpoint C
- Subpoint D
What action(s) have you found to be enablers? Leave them in the comments.
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