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  • Image © 2012 Shelly ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ . Licensed under CC-BY

    Here’s a story about how my brain got stuck, and how I eventually managed to unstick it.

    Yesterday I belatedly got around to putting a credit freeze on my credit reports in response to the Equifax data breach (you should too if you haven’t already). It was certainly a pain, made the more so by the knowledge that I was doing this work, and paying fees, because of a broader system dysfunction that I’m not responsible for. So I was in a bad mood to begin with (grr).

    I ran into my brain freeze moment when trying to address my TransUnion report:

    1. For whatever reason, the online verification process wasn’t good enough. They needed me to scan and upload my picture ID and a utility bill (grrr).
    2. OK, I can handle this, I thought. I did the scans and tried to upload the files. Nope – I got an error message saying the files needed to be in TIFF format (TIFF format?) (grrrrr).
    3. Mastering my frustration (or so I thought), I opened Photoshop to do the TIFF conversion, actually kind of proud of myself for staying relatively calm. Nope – another error message saying the TIFF had to be black-and-white (grrrrrr).
    4. At this point my brain felt something like the picture above. I was stuck in problem-solving mode, consumed by the quest to break through the logjam of obstacles and stupidity and of course my own frustration. My brain was working, but I was rapidly losing my ability to do anything but press forward on the path I’d started. It didn’t occur to me, “hmm, I wonder if there’s another approach I could take?'” I was lost in thought–and so I lost my awareness.
    5. So here’s what the problem-solving part of myself did: I found a way to convert a TIFF to grayscale, wondering if that would meet the black-and-white requirement. Nope – this time the error message said, “you have exceeded the number of attempts. Please start again.”
    6. I was numb. I logged in again, looked around for a method to create true B&W (note the illogic of my fevered brain: I hadn’t tested the grayscale yet)…and found myself going down a Photoshop rathole. At least for me, that is not a nice place to be.
    7. And at this point I woke up. It probably helped that I would be teaching a mindfulness class in a couple of days. (Fear of hypocrisy is a powerful motivator!) Maybe I saw one of the many mindfulness books scattered around my office. Anyway, I finally…just…stopped. I let go of the problem-solving mindstream. I looked at the messed-up, pixilated image of the Seattle City Light bill I had been working on in Photoshop.in Photoshop. And suddenly realized: I can mail in copies of the documents.
    8. In 5 minutes I was done. For the price of a postage stamp my problem was solved.

    Of course there are plenty of situations where the only recourse is to press ahead with mental effort. But what was instructive to me about this situation was that my problem-solving mind prevented me from seeing alternatives. The useful thing about mindful awareness is that it, almost by definition, sees everything. In a mindful state you can observe your mind; you can observe how your emotions (grrr) are coming into play; you can remember *why* you’re trying to solve the problem in the first place. And all those things give you many more tools for figuring out the best way to proceed.

    You aren’t stuck with just your frozen brain.