Waiting to feel like it

Ask most people why the bathroom hasn't been cleaned and you'll hear some version of "I haven't felt up to it." The plan, if you can call it one, is to wait for a day when the energy and the mood arrive together, and to clean then.

The belief is reasonable because you have evidence for it. You remember days when you felt like it. Maybe it was a bright Saturday in spring when you opened the windows and went through the whole flat, and it was almost enjoyable. Cleaning was easy that day. So you concluded that mood is the key ingredient, and that on the other days you lack it.

Go back over one of those days in detail, though, and the order of events is often different from how you remember it. Take the hour before visitors arrive. You don't feel like cleaning. You start because you have to, grumbling, with the hallway. Twenty minutes later you're wiping the skirting boards, which no visitor in history has inspected. At some point the mood turned up, and it turned up after you started.

I think this is the common pattern. The feeling of wanting to do a job follows the first few minutes of doing it more often than it comes before. If that's right, waiting for the mood means waiting for something that gets produced by the thing you're waiting to do. You can check it. Next time you start a job you didn't want, notice how you feel two minutes in, and compare that with how you felt at the door.

It helps to see where the reluctance sits. It isn't spread evenly across the job. Nearly all of it is packed into the start. The worst moment of washing up is the ten seconds before the tap runs. Once your hands are in warm water, the experience is neutral at worst, and some people find it quietly pleasant. A large part of what you've been avoiding all week turns out to be those ten seconds.

Then there's tiredness. You work, you may have children, and at eight in the evening you're tired in a way that's real. I'm not going to tell you the tiredness is imaginary.

But two different feelings both get called tired. One is physical depletion, where your body needs rest. The other is the heavy, sinking feeling that arrives when you face a job you don't want. The second feels exactly like fatigue, and it has one telltale feature. It lifts fast when something appealing appears. If a friend rang right now with a good invitation, would you find the energy? It's a rough test, and it won't tell you anything about illness. But if the answer is yes, a good part of what you're feeling is reluctance. If it's no, you're worn out, and you should rest without guilt. Chapter 7 is about how to do that properly.

So the question you've been asking yourself is the wrong one. "Do I feel like cleaning the bathroom?" will get a no for the rest of your life, and that's fine, because you don't need a yes. The question that matters is much smaller. "Am I willing to pick up the cloth?" You can be willing to do ten seconds of almost anything.