I struggle with some aspects of maths. If you’d like evidence, I submit the fact that I have misnumbered this email series not once but twice.

Anyway, today is day 20. Yesterday was day 19. I’m sorry if anyone thought they missed an email.

Looking at my todo list — sadly if inevitably incomplete — I absolutely got do some to’s:

• I finished a commission that I’m very happy with and the client seems to love, and will turn into a generally available print once the client has received it.
• I sent some scary emails. Not Halloween scary, the boring kind of scary.
• I nudged a few other things which I was hoping to finish today towards completion, like my horrible AI article. I find it’s best to do something to get things out of your head, even if it’s just writing a sentence, which means I technically started on the rather vast swathe of material I need to put together for my drawing courses. I’m glad to have finally made a move on it.
• I am feeling the need to soup up the print+merch sales bit of my business up which means I have been signing up for grifty ecommerce playbooks and guides under hide-your-email addresses. I will probably never read them, but occasionally there’s some gold nuggets in amongst the upsells and puffery.
• Adjacent to this 30 day challenge, I am listening to a another 30 day challenge audiobook/podcast by an mental health influencer type who — despite an abundance of caution — I actually rate. His name is Alok Kanojia, and he’s better known as Dr K from the YouTube channel Healthy Gamer GG. Helpfully, he has ADHD himself. I once discussed his work with an ADHD coach of my acquaintance and was pleased — and surprised — to find out that Dr K is actually quite well regarded in the ADHD coaching community. Four days in, the audiobook has met with my not actually a grift seal of approval. If you have Audible, or are good at cancelling free trials, I recommend it.

Wild speculation

People really vibed with yesterday’s email about my absurdly named Reverse Urge Surfing technique. Thanks to everyone who wrote in: I love getting replies from readers.

I’ve thought more on it and I think I’ve figured out roughly — and I do mean roughly, please take the following with a grain of salt — why Reverse Urge Surfing works.^[1]

To the best of my understanding, a lot of what we do every day stems from what we think of as our “lower” functions – reptile brain, mammal brain, guts, nerves, skin, etc — acting in concert. We do a lot unconsciously, or we simply wouldn’t be alive. Moreover, a lot of what we think of as actual decisions are post-hoc rationalisations made by our upper functions, like our frontal lobes. In other words, our reasoning facilities assume that if we’re doing something it must have been intentional, and it makes up a reason accordingly.^[2] So, pretending you’re a robot, being controlled by a set of intentions you made earlier — like your resolution to get up early — is just kind of allowing nature to take its course. If you can get your body moving, it can short-circuit the agonising and resource-intensive argument in your head about whether you should get up or not, and your reasoning facilities just kind of shrug and line up behind it.

The trick seems more pertinent than ever as, after years of trying various things, my main gripe with self-improvement literature is that it isn’t somatic enough; that reading about self-improvement is great as a virtue simulator but rarely translates to anything meaningful, because the reasoning bits of your brain that allow you to read stuff are a few neural layers removed from the parts of you that move through the world and form habits and so on.

Even if I am wildly wrong,^[3] this mental model works for me. It’s upsettingly close to sloganeering like “Just Do It!” but the more I practice just going a bit blank — I imagine my eyes glazing over — and letting my body crack on with the thing some bit of my brain is dreading but that my hands or feet don’t mind at all is effective, liberating, and weirdly fun.

Thanks, as always, for reading.