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It usually happens to me that, when I spend hours trying to understand or solve some problem, at a certain point I start feeling very tired and block, and the more time I spend, the less fluent my thinking is and the most stuck in the problem I am. This has been quite a difficult issue to diagnose because when this occurs I am always thinking that the solution to the problem is close and I keep trying, stubbornly. But in reality, my mind is rambling and losing the point of the problem. The thing is that, after finally ending this work period (maybe one, two or three hours), the rest of the day is screwed in terms of productivity because my mind is wasted and I feel very demotivated. This is what I call brain stew.
This issue links to a phenomenon I discovered with professor Barbara Oakley in Learning How to Learn course. By the way, this is a totally recommended free course. Its name is Einstellung, which is a german word that represents the moment when someone cannot advance or find a solution to a problem because this person is stuck with one only preconceived idea that he/she thought must be the solution a priori, but finally is not.
This happens most when you are kind of an expert in the kind of techniques you are trying to apply. First facing the problem, you are so sure you know what will work. At a certain point, you feel that things are not going as foreseen but you keep trying. The tests are each time more and more desperate and you find yourself trying crazy things that you would laugh at if it weren’t you who is doing them. But you are trapped in this brain stew pit.
How do you get out of brain stew?
In these cases, I just need two things
- Stop trying
Sometimes you need to stop trying. If you find yourself in the desperation loop of a brain stew, just stop. Please. Leave it for a moment.
- Take some fresh air
Just like that: rest, change to another topic and return to the problem later or maybe the next day. Uncountable times it has happened to me that the next day I land again to the problem I was dealing with the day before and it is a matter of minutes when I say “Oh, this wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
- Take a piece of paper
This is powerful! Start writing the description of what is happening to you. Like, literally, write what is happening: “I started with this problem, which seemed easy but…”, “Then I tried this an was only worse…”. You cannot imagine how clarifying writing can be. It puts things into perspective, and shows what is the next reasonable thing to do.
How not to get into it?
So far, we’ve seen how to try and leave this mind state if you get trapped in it. But how to avoid it in the first place?
For solving this problem, I myself try two things: doing a weekly schedule, and force myself to use just the time I planned for solving a problem and not a minute more (this is very hard when you are immersed in an interesting and/or frustrating topic)
Preparing a weekly template is one of the most surprisingly simple and useful ways to avoid brain stews. If you stick to it, the shadows of brain stew are lost long before they catch you because you are already working on another fresh task. It also helps in covering all the tasks that you foresee along the days—those that are typically kept in the drawer for weeks and weeks. All advantages!