The Seeing Sequence Meets the Conundrum of Getting Boring Things Done

Updated April 10-14, 2024, January 27, 2025

The Problem

I have to clean. It’s the last thing I want to do. Have to, want to. Enemies. The opposite ends of my conundrum. A conundrum is a decision made difficult by opposite and equal choices, a dilemma.

Back story: I’m in the middle of a want-to activity, and the pleasure of momentum it creates. Then I remember I have to do the clean. Momentum lost. Ouch! I immediately check to see if I felt like doing the clean. Nope. Okay, I begin to search for something that creates that want-to/feel-like urge I just lost. This immediately makes me uptight; because  I’m now being pulled back and forth in my head, between two opposing fears. On one side, fear of losing a want-to, say, any pleasure, by doing a have-to, clean. On the other side, fear of losing a have-to, clean, by doing a want-to, eat. I’m trying to have it both ways: feeling like doing something that can’t create feeling like it. The pull from each side creates wicked tension. I need to stop it. I need to get relief.

My mind searches for something to give me relief by making me feel like doing the clean.

• Eating.  Couldn’t stop until I was stuffed.
• Organize things around me. I end up going from one thing to another, finishing nothing. Discouraged.
• Watch something. I end up staring into space and watching the crap running through my head.
• Lying down to rest. More crap running through my head. I got tired. That worked great.
• Aaagh! Get angry at myself. I’m pumped for a few seconds, then it fizzles.
• It fizzles into feeling sorry for myself. Numb time.

Finally, I’m saved. People are coming soon. If they see I haven’t cleaned, they’ll disapprove and I’ll be embarrassed. I picture myself doing the clean to avoid disapproval. I’m now what I would call “motivated”. What a relief! But I pay a price for that relief. It’s small, but ultimately a threat to my ability to function in my life, and therefore to my peace of mind. That price is my independence, my self-agency. How?

Well, what caused me to do the clean? It wasn’t me deciding to do it, me being in a true response. I was in a problem solving response.  I was solving the problem of how to get myself to feel like cleaning by imagining and magnifying the problem of disapproval and how much more pain it would cause me than the pain of having lost my momentum and being left with coming boredom. I didn’t even see that I was depending on getting relief from pain caused by imaginary disapproval to make me feel like doing the clean. That’s not independence, which is doing without depending on relief right in front of me to trigger feeling-like doing it to get the relief.

But I like relief.  What’s the problem with depending on it?

The problem with dependence on relief:

• I hate planning, or looking ahead. When I’m forced to, I predict some form of failure, such as it will be too hard and long. This causes me to be afraid. I solve the fear by avoiding.  Or I solve it by being optimistic makes me 1. skip steps, and when they appear and add more work, feel sorry for myself and get frustrated; or 2. makes me fantasize more than I can do, and give up part way through. Ugh!
• I put things off. “Later, baby. That’s my motto.” Often I fail to even recognize when I’m putting things off because I’m so used to it. Then it’s too late. Boring cleanup multiplies. Plus, I’ve added another track of avoidance to memory.  Avoidance becomes even more automatic.
• I defend my avoiding of have-to stuff by saying I’m “spontaneous”. Ya, spontaneously lazy.
• Worst of all and hardest to see: I can’t do anything from inside. I can’t initiate anything. Like the bone in William Steig’s “The Amazing Bone”, or the frog prince, or the beast in “Beauty and the Beast”, I wait to be freed from the prison inside my head, by something that makes me move. It never comes.

Now, there is a way out of my prison of fear of doing boring stuff – low return work – without feeling like it. It’s the Seeing Sequence. But I cant even do that, because, unlike the bone, the frog, and the beast, there is nobody coming to set me free into feeling like doing the Seeing Sequence. I often wondered why I don’t do what’s good for me even when I know how and am able to. This is it.

I can only do the Seeing Sequence when I have to put out fires; when all the unfinished things in my life cause me so much pain that I need to seek relief by doing right now what hurts most. In fact, I live by looking to do things without having to make the effort of suffering through the boredom – the low return – of doing the clean. So top of my to-do list are things that I call high-return work. They give me a high return for low effort. Think any pleasure-seeking or approval seeking.

This is not the same as having the memory center to get stuff done by decision. It’s the opposite. It would only give me relief from the fear of having to do stuff from zero momentum. The fear is the real prison. What fear again? The fear, on one side of my conundrum, of doing a lot of work that returns low satisfaction; low-return work, like cleaning. Low-return work cannot, ever, trigger any feeling-like urges in me.

So how can I live happily without feeling like doing things? I’ll just be miserable getting stuff done all the time and have no time for pleasure from high-return work. No way. Too scary. I circle away toward relief from the fear of the misery of doing low-return work without feeling like it. That circle turns, and turns, in a downward spiral into a very limited existence. Home bound, killing time.

But who cares. There’s nothing I can do about it. At least I can get relief from my favorite sources, like approval from people who see my cleaning done. Or can I? For a while my sources work. Then my brain gets used to the same relief. Boring! And it gets sick of the guilt of not getting things done and of how defensive it makes me. My exaggeration of the pain caused by have-to work returns with a vengeance, because I’ve delayed again the practice of suffering it and therefore I haven’t grown used to it.

So what to do? I hear the hint come to me. Why bother with trying to do the have-to side? If that end of the conundrum is gone, there’s no tension caused by it pulling me away from want-to. If there’s no tension there’s no need to get relief from it by seeking high-return, want-to stuff. But that’s the same as saying there’s no want-to there, in my mind. That’s right it doesn’t appear. Without having to do the clean, which has always triggered fear of misery caused by doing it without wanting to, my brain doesn’t search for want-to stuff to get relief from the fear, and thus my brain doesn’t produce tension. By not making myself do low-return work, urges to do high return work diminish. By the simple act of not trying, of going with not feeling like doing, tension doesn’t appear.

So what’s left? Nothing, except the thought “Start the clean”. It occurs to me try to keep the lack of tension going . How? I see the smallest step that doesn’t trigger boredom beyond a few second. The boredom ends with the small momentum of having that step behind. me.  I mechanically stop what I’m doing and wait for the momentum I was in to go down a bit. It works. I try to repeat the idea. I move toward the clean mechanically. I do first parts of the clean mechanically. I’m dead inside. But no tension either. No want-to. Once I get the cleaning started, I get more momentum, that pleasurable feeling of being in automatic movement toward completion. I want more of it. I do more of the clean to deep the momentum going. I’m invested in it. Sunk costs that I don’t want to lose. Then I see the clean getting behind me into the record of my life, my identity. My momentum strengthens. Time passes without me noticing because I’m completely absorbed, in the zone, unselfconscious. I finish the clean. It’s off the list, all of it behind me. It’s in the books of my life memory as an independent stand alone being.

But the best part came from having no feeling at all at that moment, just before I started, when I thought of doing the clean. I wasn’t waiting or looking to have to do it or to want to do it, There was no tension.

That’s not the end of the story. Two forever problems remain. First. Me going with the want-to side only reduces tension in that instant. I had a lot of time to experiment with stringing together these instances doing avoidance of have-to, and then to turn the painful experience of that waste into the idea of going with it in order to stop the tension. Most of the time, I don’t have that opportunity because the other things I have to do in my life can’t wait. If I also make them wait while I avoid on purpose, I’m back to having to do them because I’m in pain from putting them off.

The second problem is the lengthy low-return work called “practice”. The thought of getting rid of the conundrum of getting things done by not going with the have-to side, and instead by choosing to avoid it, doesn’t stick in my mind after I first see it. It’s in memory, but the memory is small. As a result, when I need it, which is at the time the next have-to appears, my focus is not drawn to the memory of going with not feeling like it. Even if I turn it into a rule. Instead, my focus is pulled into the huge memory center I’ve built since I was a toddler: “seek here the positive feeling of relief”. These two problems make getting beyond my beginner’s luck look hopeless.

But it isn’t. To find hope,I need to look for the cause of nature’s conundrum being so intense and see that the cause is solvable by me.

The Cause

Not upbringing, not experiences. Instead, psr’s. Psr = inappropriate or imaginary problem solving response. It’s not real solving of real stuff. Ipsr is too long and doesn’t roll off the tongue well, so … psr – problem solving response.

The Solution, The Change

Bitch and complain (also called “flow” or “flow-with”) the psr’s, often many times (instructions are in the examples below). The repetitions build a memory center that pulls my focus into it. While there, I don’t oppose myself by finding fault with every thought that  forms my true response (my decision).  Instead, I simply externalize it.

Good to know:

1. While my mind can go blank, it’s rare compared to my mind’s almost constant stream of thoughts and feelings. This stream causes many distractions, all day every day. I need to be good at ignoring them.
2. All loss, no matter how small, causes pain. That pain is the feeling called grief. Thus, loss causes grief.
3. Failure causes loss of what I was trying to do.  Therefore, failure causes grief. The most important failure in daily life is the failure to ignore distractions which occur at the end of my thought that forms my true response, my decision. My decision is not a psr. It’s the real true me. I call the grief from failing to ignore distractions, at the moment my true response appears, the pain of failing to ignore.
4. Everyone is born with a different intensity of the pain of failing to ignore.
5. If my pain of failing to ignore is strong, I am naturally afraid of it. Since a decision triggers the need to ignore distractions, which trigger my high pain of failing to ignore, which triggers my fear of the pain,  I’m  afraid of making any decision. When my fear of making a decision appears, I’m compelled to solve the fear. So, I find problems – faults –  with the decision and solve them. I  get the positive feeling of relief. Relief replaces my fear and so distracts me from the pain of failing to ignore. The result: I’m always editing (looking for and solving flaws), that is, problem-solving, the thoughts that form my decisions in order to get relief from my normal fear of this abnormally high pain.
6. One of these edits/problem-solving responses (psr’s) to a decision is the fantasy that the feeling of relief will make me feel like acting, feel motivated to act, on my decision. (Here lieth the source of the world’s fruitless search for motivation.) But it doesn’t work. As soon as I solve one problem, a new one appears. In fact, solving signals my brain that I want to do more solving, so I can get more relief. So, it brings me more problems. I call this constant line of psr’s “fear driven seeking of relief” or “second guessing” or “obsessing” about my decision.
7. If my pain of failing to ignore is weak, I’m  not afraid of it. Therefore I don’t produce anxiety – an abnormal fear of a normal situation, and other psr’s that mess around with my decision.
8. All emotions, including grief caused by loss of anything, big or small, will keep coming back if opposed or avoided. To solve grief, including by avoiding it, is to oppose it. As a result, solving grief causes it to come back.
9. All my problems are caused by me trying to solve/oppose the pain of failing to ignore. Culture says I should fix this pain. My brain says I should feel it, suffer it, and see how it won’t harm me if I do. This will make me ignore it by my moving on to seeing and externalizing my true response/my decision.

The Seeing Sequence, which is the sequence of  bitching and complaining /flow in order to see my true response, gets me to stop trying to solve the pain of failing to ignore. As a result, the pain, like all emotion, runs out by itself, most often in bits, not all at once.  A good but not must-read:  Why the Seeing Sequence works.

(Notice: words in brackets below mean I can choose from several wordings, or the words are instructions or blanks to fill in that fit my own experience.)

How to Bitch and Complain/Flow with Psr’s using the following Example List

1. I’m avoiding doing a clean.

Step 1

Pick the thought or feeling I think is a psr.  Optional: A useful guide: The Database of Psr’s

I’m avoiding

Classify my emotional response to the psr using three simple classes:

“good me” for feelings that are positive (pleasure) or for feelings that I imagine will solve things fast (anger always comes with the fantasy that I can shake up the environment into going my way),

“bad me” for hurting or judging myself.

“poor me”  for fear and for feeling sorry for myself.

(NB. I decide on how many psr’s I want to b and c. It could be just one, or I could do all of them until they stop coming. The more I practice, the closer I get to one, then a ghost of one, then none. The number of practices is like learning to walk, or to play a musical instrument, or to play a sport well or to cook food well, or do anything well. It’s a large number. )

Like this:

poor me, I have to do a boring clean.

good me, I’m looking to see if I feel like doing it.

poor me, I don’t.

good me, I’ll pleasure-seek by eating, watching video, whatever if takes that’s easy,  to make me feel like doing it.

poor me, it doesn’t work and now I’m farther behind schedule.

good me, I’ll search for some motivational saying to make me feel like doing it.

doesn’t work, poor me.

bad me, judge myself with a fantasized standard that says I’m inferior for not feeling like it, to scare me into doing it.

bad me, anger at myself in order to,

scare myself into doing it, good me.

good me, people are coming. Now I feel like doing it, because I can see relief from avoiding their disapproval.

Step 2

The reversal: (find the cause of the psr’s, not by asking why, but by imagining what I would see if I didn’t do psr’s to myself.)

Because poor me if I didn’t _____,(do these psr’s: eat, etc)

I’m afraid I’ll see I’m in the pain of failing to ignore distractions, (which occur at the end of my thought that forms my true response; that wording is coming 4 lines below)

namely, the delay in the pleasure of getting over the grief from the loss

of momentum caused by the end of what I was just doing:

(namely) _______ (I fill this in).

At the end of my thought that forms my true response:

I’m already dead inside about this act of ignoring. (Dead inside means I don’t at all feel like ignoring)

But I have to ignore anyway (if I want to get this thing out there).

So start ignoring the delay by focusing on

(ignoring is done by focusing on something other than the thing I want to ignore)(I want to ignore the delay in getting over grief, so I focus on something – matching the action image of my decision with action  – other than solving/opposing the delay in getting over grief)

mechanically (which means without feeling like it/without motivation)

(externalizing my true response/decision by matching my external action to the action image of my decision/true response)

(I state it her) (do the clean) ______.

Step 3

Wait to see what comes into my mind.

If another psr, repeat Steps 1 and 2 until: psr’s stop, or I decide to stop, or I run out of time and have to do something else.

If my true response, I naturally (which means in first-party observing self/unselfconsciously/without stepping outside myself/without thinking) get up, got that part done, move toward my tools, got that done, take them to do the clean, start on the first part. Momentum coming in as smooth as caramel.

______ (describe my true response)

Short version:

psr: Avoiding, Good me.

distraction: delay in the pleasure of getting over the grief from the loss of momentum of whatever I’m doing

true response: ignore the delay by focusing on _______ (the sub-steps of doing a clean)

Repeat, repeat, repeat until I win the battle with my anxiety and go do it.

Ultra short version, same as “observe, don’t solve” in post “…Can’t sleep”:

(don’t feel like it), poor me

(avoid), good me

(go and eat), good me

(shake myself up with anger) – good me

and on and on until I find myself mechanically going to, making the transition to, ________ doing the clean

Postscript

Reminder 1 to self:

To b and c or not to b and c. That is the question. To b and c is to suffer the frustration of missing the signal – a psr – to b and c an astonishingly large number of times. To not b and c is to suffer constant anxiety and the exhausting work of trying to solve it. Thus, both ways suck. Only I can decide which way I want my existence to suck in any moment, when I do catch the signal, the psr.

Reminder 2 to self:

I need to memorize these sentences or I’ll never do them. And even when I do memorize them, it will take more suffering my anxiety before I remember to do them, and even more suffering before I even decide to do them after I remember. Even then, I’ll need more practice to do it live, in the moment. That’s the easiest way? Yup.

Reminder 3 to self:

The above two reminders are about what causes change in my brain: persistent practice that builds alternate memory centers. Change doesn’t come from  judgement or punishment or encouragement or copying rules or help from another. So I’m free not to use them, and I’m especially free of needing to judge myself for not using them. To repeat in another way: the only thing that changes my brain is seeing through the tricks my anxiety plays on me to solve itself, and disbelieving them by b and c, over and over again. Only then will I have built a new memory center, a new planet, of bitching and complaining that pulls my focus into it and emits true responses.

Reminder 4 to self:

Question

Why don’t I just say what the the distraction is? Grief. The grief from the loss of the momentum caused by the end of whatever I was just doing,

Answer

Because grief would not be a distraction if it went away instantly. While grief is brief, like all emotion, it keeps coming back in waves that don’t go away instantly. Therefore, it distracts me from focusing on my true response. Thus, the distraction is not the grief, it’s the delay in the pleasure of getting it over with in the instant I have to transition, that is, change, my focus from forming to externalizing my true response. My high pain of failing to ignore that delay compels me to fix the pain. But I must not give in. I have to train myself to suffer that pain through that instant by mechanically focusing on externalizing my true response. Tall order.