Season 2 Episode 3: Why You Can't Just Stop the Habit Eating Your Writing Time
Season 2, Episode 3
The habit eating your writing time is usually one you were rewarded for somewhere else — over-giving, over-preparing, doing everything alone, building another system. Willpower doesn't touch it because it isn't a bad habit. It's a pressure response that worked, reinforced over years, still running after the conditions that built it are gone. The fix starts with naming what it protected you from.
Show notes:
Reward doesn't always mean praise. Sometimes the payoff was that a conflict stopped, or people stayed pleased, or nobody could let you down — and nobody ever thanked you for it, so you never noticed it was being reinforced.
In this episode I trace where a pressure response comes from, why the four Houses each reach for a different one, and the four-question audit that shows what yours is costing the book. Plus the workplace story behind my own: why I became a workaholic, and what it took.
In this episode:
Why personality is temperament plus everything that shaped it
Reward without praise, and how the pattern got installed without your consent
The construction years: no boundaries on work time, and what that cost
The initials experiment, and what it proved
The four-part audit — pressure, response, payoff, cost
The 90-second pause, and the one question that interrupts the loop
Questions Authors Ask Me About This
Is self-sabotage a discipline problem?
No. Discipline assumes the behavior is irrational, and it isn't. A pressure response is a solution that worked — often the only one available at the time. Treating it as a character flaw adds shame to something that responds much better to observation.
Why doesn't willpower work on these habits?
Because you're not fighting a bad habit, you're fighting one that delivered. It stopped a conflict, kept you employed, made someone back off. The brain keeps what works, and it doesn't check whether the conditions still apply.
How do I know which habit to work on first?
The one with the clearest cost to the book in front of you. Not the biggest, not the oldest. Run the audit on whatever you did this week instead of writing.
Can I get rid of a pressure response?
Usually not, and trying tends to backfire. There's real capability buried in most of them. The goal is keeping it at a level you control, so it stops deciding when you write.
Transcript — Season 2, Episode 3
You've spent years calling this a discipline problem. But the habit stalling your book may be one you were rewarded for.
At this point you've tried to stop giving your writing time away. You've tried to stop doing everything alone. To stop building three projects around your book, or treating one broken routine like total failure.
But elsewhere — elsewhere, that same behavior has been praised. You're caring. You're resourceful. You're brilliantly prepared. It helped you become the person everyone counts on.
So the thing you keep calling self-sabotage may be competence running on autopilot.
Personality isn't only what you came with
Let's talk about personality, because the four Houses can feel a little like astrology. It isn't. It's psychology — a little genetics, a little temperament. Sure, sometimes we come out this way. Anyone who's raised children understands that they arrive with a personality.
But personality gets shaped by environment too. By outside forces, by how we interpret what happens around us, how we react, and then how we react to other people's reactions to us. There are so many ways a personality gets built.
Some people are more empathic. I'm one of them, even though writing emotion is difficult for me — which is strange, isn't it? How are you an empathic person and still struggle to put feelings on the page?
For me, and I think for a lot of people like me, the empathy came from somewhere specific. I learned very early to read a room, because I needed to know whether my face was going to be a problem. Or my breathing. Or anything I did that might become a problem that put me in danger.
I can tell what you're feeling. I don't necessarily know how to have a conversation with you. Those are two completely different skills.
Say that somewhere along the way there was a deep betrayal. Someone broke your trust. Now you have a hard time trusting people, and every time you react out of that, it shapes who you become — because now we know how you'll respond in certain situations.
When we're figuring out how to take ownership of an author business, that's the lens. Understanding how each of us got here helps us build the tools we need to keep producing, especially when we're not in a healthy place to produce.
Reward doesn't always mean praise
This is the part people miss.
Sometimes the reward was that a conflict stopped. That people stayed pleased. That nobody could control you. That uncertainty became manageable, or the world felt predictable again, or no one could let you down.
You didn't choose the pattern in one conscious moment. It stacked up in increments. You learned from each of those moments, you built the tools you needed to succeed — or to fail at a comfortable level — and you practiced a useful response until it felt like you.
Not always who you wanted to be. Just until it felt like you.
What that looked like for me
I have so many hangups around writing sustainably. That's the biggest reason I took this on — because it's something I need.
The workplace was a traumatic era for me. I'm socially awkward, people find me strange, and then I walked into construction as a woman who didn't want to be an admin. I wanted to be a strategist. I build things. I like looking at a mess and figuring out how to turn it into a project people can actually use.
To do that, I had to put myself in a leadership position as a woman. Awkward, ADHD, probably somewhere on the spectrum. Not easy to deal with. I put myself into a lot of situations I probably shouldn't have, and that's what I learned from.
And the thing that got rewarded was becoming a workaholic.
Number one: no boundaries on the time I'd invest, as long as it was work. But personal time? The repercussions were astronomical.
This is a person who scheduled the birth of her baby for a Saturday so she could take Sunday off and be back at work Monday. Because there was no guarantee I'd have a job if I took even a week. And the reason for that was that I annoyed the men I worked with. Because I said no. And they didn't like it.
That was one thing. There were all the things that led up to it. Well-baby visits — you have to see a doctor regularly when you're pregnant, especially carrying a ten-pound baby with low blood pressure. I was working fifty-plus hours a week and taking off an hour and a half once a week. Everything should have been fine. It wasn't. That was one more nail.
So to make up for it, I produced. As much as I possibly could.
Because that was the only way to get them to stop yelling at me.
I needed them to stop telling me how inferior I was, even though my work was good. Everyone in the field would say so — as long as I signed someone else's name to my drawings.
I ran an experiment once with the lead drafter. I said, hey, for one week, let's do something crazy. He signed his drawings with my initials, and I signed mine with his.
My drawings got accepted. Easily. His got challenged the moment they hit the field.
I said, do you see what I'm dealing with? And he said, yeah. But I'm not going to do anything about it.
Sometimes the habits we build are just how we make a terrible situation survivable.
And to this day, I struggle to make my own writing worth that level of focus. The focus itself isn't great — it's probably a little toxic. But a fraction of it aimed at my writing would change things. So many parts of my life have been devalued to an extreme when it comes to anything writing-related.
That's my story, and it's only one of them. I have a lot of habits I'm working on.
The four-part audit
When you're trying to work out which habits are holding you back, look at four things:
Where the pressure is. What your response is. What the payoff to that response is. And what it costs.
Then decide whether it's a habit you actually want to keep.
Because a strength doesn't stop being a strength just because it has a shadow. But being good at a response doesn't mean it should run every situation.
What stays true across the Houses
Sustainability has to be repeatable. It has to be something you can do again and again, because expert level comes from doing the same thing a thousand times.
What we change is the pressure response: the immediate payoff it creates, the cost to the book, and the question that interrupts it.
Each House has shared reactions to similar kinds of events. That's why one of the first things I ask any author is what House they're in — so I understand how they're going to respond to a given situation.
The lens describes a possible pattern. It doesn't prove a particular history, and it doesn't excuse the present-day cost. That's important.
You didn't come into the world a particular archetype. You came in with a personality, and then everything that shaped you made you a whole entity. You didn't develop these responses because you're weak.
You kept them because they worked.
I'm a workaholic because it worked. It made the loud, tyrannical people shut up long enough for me to feel regulated. That had real value. In my current environment it's not helpful — because now the tyrant is me, and I'm very hard to shut up.
But it can belong to you without being in charge of every decision you make.
The 90-second pause
Here's the test.
When you hit the situation, name what happened. Just name it.
Then ask: what did I immediately want to do? And what did I believe that response would give me, or protect me from?
That last question is the only thing that's moved me this week.
Then don't argue with the answer. Ask one more: what does this book need from me for the next ten minutes?
Mindfulness here just means noticing the pattern before automatically obeying it.
If your habits are running you
If you feel like your habits have taken control and you want some insight on how to turn it around and get back to work — that's something we can do. Without replacing the habit, because some of these are good to a degree. We want to use the strength buried in there, just keep it at a healthy level, so you can take that stalled book and make it a book you can sell.
Book a free Unstuck Author Call. I'll listen for your House, for what it learned to rely on, where the response is costing you now, and what to change first.
If you can see the thing you keep doing but can't tell whether it's helping you, protecting you, or trapping you — bring me the stalled book and the pattern you can't make stop.
Go to realindieauthor.com and click Unstuck Author Call.
Happy writing.
