Starting again when you don’t really feel like it

I’ve been meaning to start posting again after the summer holidays.

And I keep… not doing it.

I have plenty of ideas. I know why I want to be here. I enjoy sharing things I’ve learned through medicine, coaching and my own slightly chaotic experience of being a neurodivergent human being. I like the conversations that happen afterwards, particularly when somebody says, “Oh! I thought that was just me.”

But I have a complicated relationship with social media.

Putting myself out there feels uncomfortable. I can happily stand in front of a room full of people and talk. Somehow, posting something on Instagram can feel considerably more exposing.

Then I stop posting for a while, and starting again becomes a thing.

Which got me thinking about activation energy.

Getting started takes energy

In chemistry, activation energy is the energy needed to get a reaction started. Once you’ve overcome that initial barrier, the reaction can proceed much more easily.

Human behaviour can feel remarkably similar.

Going for a run after weeks of running regularly is one thing. Going for the first run after three months off is quite another.

Cooking dinner when you’re already in the habit of meal planning is easier than restarting after a fortnight of holiday food and empty cupboards.

Returning to the gym. Restarting meditation. Opening the document you’ve been avoiding. Making the phone call. Posting on social media after disappearing for the summer.

There’s a hump at the beginning.

And sometimes I think we interpret that hump as evidence that we don’t really want to do something.

Perhaps it simply means we haven’t got moving yet.

Motivation doesn’t always come first

We often imagine behaviour working something like this:

I feel motivated → I take action → I make progress.

Sometimes it does.

But psychology gives us another useful route:

I take a small action → something changes → motivation becomes easier.

This is the idea that underpins behavioural activation. Rather than waiting until we feel motivated enough, confident enough or enthusiastic enough, we can begin with an achievable action.

The action itself gives us new information.

I can do this.

That wasn’t as difficult as I expected.

Actually, I feel quite good now I’ve done it.

And then the next step requires a little less activation energy.

The first step can be ridiculously small

There are lots of versions of this idea.

“Eat the frog” suggests tackling the thing you’re avoiding rather than allowing it to loom over you all day.

The two-minute rule asks what tiny version of the behaviour you could do right now.

The five minute rule says start doing the task for five minutes, but give yourself permission to stop after five minutes without any guilt attached.

All these behaviour-change approaches focus on making the desired behaviour easier: reducing friction, changing the environment, attaching a new behaviour to something already established.

They all recognise the same human experience:

Starting is often the hardest bit.

And then sometimes we make starting harder by deciding that it has to look impressive.

If I’m “returning to social media”, apparently I should have a content strategy. A posting schedule. Several reels prepared. Some sort of coherent plan.

That feels like quite a lot of activation energy.

Or I could write one post.

This one.

There’s a Lifestyle Medicine lesson here too

I see versions of this all the time in conversations about health.

Someone wants to become more active and thinks they need to start exercising five times a week.

They want to improve their diet and imagine reorganising everything they eat, strictly following a new ‘diet’.

They want to sleep better and create an elaborate evening routine they have to execute perfectly.

Sometimes those plans work.

Sometimes the size of the plan becomes the reason we never start.

So, let’s remove that barrier we create for ourself.

A ten-minute walk counts.

Adding something nourishing to lunch counts.

Going to bed fifteen minutes earlier counts.

One small action can change our sense of what is possible. And once something has started moving, keeping it moving often requires considerably less effort.

So, this is me taking my own advice.

I’m still ambivalent about social media. I suspect I always will be. I want to share more of my work and ideas, and I want to have conversations with people who find them useful. I also find the whole business of putting myself online rather uncomfortable.

Both of those things can be true.

I don’t need to resolve the ambivalence before I start.

I just need to make the first move.

So, here it is.

Post one.

Activation energy overcome.

Now let’s see what happens next… stay tuned!

Need help getting started with something yourself?

If there’s something you’d like to get started with, but you’re finding that first step harder than it sounds, you don’t have to figure it all out before you begin. If you’d like some support to get things moving, get in touch for a discovery call and let’s have a chat about whether coaching might help.