7 Tips to Triumph Emotionally Over Cognitive Inertia

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It’s harder to stop something after you’ve started it because whatever activity you’ve engaged in now has momentum going for it. Conversely, it’s harder to start something before you make the determination and conscious effort to begin it. It won’t start automatically. To initiate the process, a certain amount of internal willpower is needed.

Such is the nature of inertia, which, as a psychological phenomenon, is generally more paradoxical and complex than the kindred experiences of laziness and procrastination. Yet, at one time or another, we’ve all had to deal with it. So, what exactly precipitates this exasperating emotional state?

Cognitive Causes of Inertia

Personally, I believe any number of circumstances can culminate in inertia. But what almost all of them share is afflicting you with a sense of helplessness or lack of control. Or maybe a reactive hopelessness, with your not being at all confident that the action you’re considering would be anything but futile.

Since your thoughts govern your emotions, and, in turn, your emotions govern your behavior, it’s crucial to focus on how, consciously or subconsciously, you unwittingly think yourself into inertia.

Sometimes, you get comfortable enough with the status quo that you’re inhibited from tackling something new and typically more ambitious for fear it might fail. And virtually all cognitive—versus physical—inertia relates to fears associated with acting in unprecedented ways, or in ways where you’ve experienced failure in the past.

One study (2010) also found that symptomatically depressed individuals were more likely than others to fall into the pit of inertia, for they were apt to perceive any action taken as linked to loss and failure. Pessimists can usually be understood in the same way since, by nature, pessimists are predisposed to forecast the results of their actions adversely.

Getting Past Inertia and Progressing Toward Desired Goals

Below are seven steps found effective for defeating inertia. And since the particular sequence for these steps may vary, don’t feel locked into following these in the order I’ve more or less arbitrarily chosen.

1. Set well-defined, realistic standards for what you wish to achieve.

That way, you won’t feel too intimidated to embark on the necessary steps for completing a task successfully. Striving to perform something perfectly may be an appropriate ideal for brain surgeons, but for just about anybody else, it’s just not practical. It will be almost impossible to overcome inertia if your aspirations or prideful standards for success are so high that you never feel quite ready to tackle what lies before you.

2. Be ambitious—but not excessively.

This step isn’t about how exaggerated your standards for success are but how exaggerated all the different goals (related and unrelated) are that you’re hoping to achieve. All the same, in both instances, your unreasonably lofty expectations might make getting started especially difficult. Ironically, they can wind up defeatist, leaving you so overwhelmed that they hold you back from taking any decisive action.

3. Split the overall task into multiple sub-tasks, from simpler to more difficult—similar to first completing easier items in a much larger, more complicated crossword puzzle.

To optimize your chances of success and avoid feeling deluged or swamped, it’s best to separate the task’s various facets and incrementally bring the project as a whole into your comfort zone. It’s also wise to set a sensible deadline for completing each specific part rather than leaving things too open or opaque.

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4. Go public with your goals.

There’s nothing quite like confiding in someone you trust to help keep you on track in realizing what you’ve set out to do. Candidly sharing your objectives can increase your sense of accountability and firm up your commitment to finish what, after all, you’re claiming you can do.

5. Identify and analyze what needs to be done and in what sequence—but beware of the stagnation that comes with “analysis paralysis.”

It’s unquestionably true that in failing to plan, we plan to fail. Still, planning isn’t doing either. So it’s critical not to get caught up in so exhaustively planning your approach that you languish in this stage, no longer cognizant that your internal vehicle for change has gotten stuck in neutral.

Besides, all kinds of unexpected things can transpire once you start a project. So if your steadfast planning, however conscientious, carries with it a certain rigidity, such planning may conflict with the flexibility your project (and almost any project) requires.

It’s essential that you adapt readily to various situations that could come up unexpectedly and necessitate your making adjustments on the fly.

Additionally, planning can create an illusion of safety. After all, you’ve yet to do anything, so failure exists only as a hypothetical abstraction. And regardless of how careful your risk assessment may be, you can’t know in advance what variables—or how many of them—you may encounter once you’re executing your plan.

Consequently, at some point, you have to say, “Stop!” to yourself; at the same time, you say, ”Go!” to the next step on your list.

As one writer astutely observes (Calvetti, 2023): “Danger is hidden in the comfort of planning: the perpetual preparation phase, in which action becomes an ever-distant horizon.”

6. Jettison your fears, replacing them with resilience.

If the fear of failure is central to most forms of inertia, you need to review such unsuccess as hardly fatal. And remind yourself that getting “parked” in inertia is itself a failure.

Merely starting something ambitious is no guarantee of success. Still, you’ll learn something valuable by courageously confronting what, till now, may have kept you from accepting the risks inevitably connected to taking action.

And if you boldly persevere in pursuing your goal, you’ll now know what measures to take to avoid what (at least in part) prevented your project from being successful earlier. The one thing you don’t want to do (out of fear) is to give up prematurely.

Remember: Growing through your mistakes helps cultivate resilience, and resilience is ready to return the favor.

7. Explore—and exploit—AI for all the short-cut advantages it might offer you.

Lastly, inasmuch as rapid advances in artificial intelligence have amassed millions (no, make that trillions) of “bits” of information from boundless sources, it would be foolish not to investigate whether AI might help you rule out possibilities that have already been demonstrated counter-productive.

AI might also assist you in “ruling in” possibilities that might never before have occurred to you. Even with an extraordinarily high IQ, you can’t be expected to know everything, so don’t feel it’s dishonest to include in your preparatory research a visit to an AI site.

They’re just an additional tool to boost the probability that your enterprising, purposeful goals will, with sufficient motivation and endurance, be achieved to your satisfaction.

© 2024 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.