Why We Ignore What We ‘Should’ Do (and How Creatives Can Tip the Scales)

The “Should” Paradox

You promised yourself today would be different. The task was clear, the time was blocked out, and you even felt a flicker of motivation this morning. But now it’s hours later, and you’re still circling it—thinking, overthinking, avoiding, starting and stopping, doing anything but the thing. You know what needs to happen… so why can’t you make yourself do it?

If you’re a creative person, this inner conflict may be all too familiar. It’s not laziness or a lack of desire. Instead, it’s often an invisible tug-of-war between your intentions and the complex inner workings of your brain, emotions, and personality.

Let’s demystify that tug-of-war. We’ll explore why this happens from a neuroscience perspective, how the creative personality intensifies it, and what you can do about it, compassionately and effectively.

What’s Going On in the Brain?

Even when you want to follow through, when you’ve made a to-do list, carved out time, or told someone your intentions, your brain may still push back. This isn’t a flaw in your personality. It’s a combination of neurobiology, wiring, and survival instincts. Understanding what’s happening under the surface can help you work with your brain, not against it.

1. Executive Dysfunction: Too Many Tabs Open

The prefrontal cortex handles high-level tasks like planning, decision-making, and self-control. But when it’s overstimulated, by internal chatter, emotions, multiple creative projects, or a flood of sensory input, it burns out quickly.

For creatives, whose minds are often filled with visions, connections, and overlapping deadlines, this can feel like trying to open a new document with twenty already running. You know what to do, but the “start” button won’t click.

•    🧠 Mental Health Tie-In: This is common in ADHD, anxiety, depression, and burnout. Executive dysfunction isn’t about willpower, it’s about bandwidth.

2. Dopamine and Reward Prediction: The Motivation Gap

Dopamine isn’t just about pleasure, it’s about anticipating rewards. Your brain releases it when it expects a task will lead to something desirable. The more novel, exciting, or clear the outcome, the more dopamine floods your system.

Tasks that are repetitive, uncertain, or emotionally risky, like editing a story or replying to a tough email, don’t trigger that reward signal. For highly creative or neurodivergent brains, which crave stimulation and thrive on new ideas, the lack of immediate dopamine can feel like hitting a motivational brick wall.

•    🎯 Helpful Frame: You’re not unmotivated. Your brain just hasn’t been convinced this is worth doing yet. External structure or gamification can help.

3. Threat Detection and Avoidance: The Amygdala Alarm

The amygdala’s job is to scan for danger. When it perceives a threat, like potential failure, judgment, shame, or even success that might change your life, it can send your system into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

From the outside, this can look like procrastination. Internally, it’s a survival response. The task you “should” do might feel threatening on a subconscious level, and your brain is doing its best to protect you from discomfort, even if that means avoiding progress.

•    ⚠️ Mental Health Tie-In: This is especially true if you’ve experienced trauma, rejection, or high performance pressure. Your system is trying to keep you emotionally safe.

4. Default Mode Network Overdrive: The Wandering Mind

When your brain isn’t focused on a task, the default mode network (DMN) takes over. It’s responsible for introspection, imagination, and memory, essential for creativity, but a challenge when you’re trying to focus.

Creative thinkers often have an overactive DMN, which can make task initiation feel like swimming upstream. You sit down to work, and instead find yourself brainstorming a novel, replaying a conversation, or designing a new studio in your head. These inner detours are not failures, they’re signs of deep cognitive activity that simply needs redirecting.

•    💭 Helpful Frame: You’re not distracted, you’re imagining. Learn to notice the drift and gently return your focus.

The Psychology Behind the Pause

Creative resistance doesn’t just live in the brain, it’s also shaped by your inner narrative, emotional memory, and personal history. The hesitation you feel when facing a blank page or unfinished task isn’t random. It’s the psychological residue of how you’ve learned to protect yourself, make meaning, and move through the world.

1. Self-Sabotage Scripts: “That’s Just Not Me”

Many creatives unconsciously carry identity-based narratives that keep them stuck. You may have been labeled “scatterbrained” or “undisciplined” early on, or internalized the idea that creative people can’t be structured or consistent.

Over time, these beliefs become self-fulfilling. You might abandon a project not because it’s too hard, but because some part of you believes that finishing isn’t in your nature. The inner voice that says, “Why try? You’ll just drop it anyway,” isn’t truth, it’s trauma dressed as personality.

•    🧠 Try this reframe: “Structure isn’t the enemy of creativity, it’s the container that protects it.”
  
  

2. Decision Fatigue: Drowning in Possibility

Creatives are idea-generating machines. That’s a gift, but it can also be a trap. Too many choices, what medium to use, which story to tell, what to prioritize, can overload your cognitive system.

The brain burns energy with every decision. When you spend your day choosing between dozens of equally valid creative directions, by the time you sit down to do the thing, your mental fuel tank may already be empty.

•    🎯 Tip: Reduce friction. Choose one project to commit to this week. Limit your daily decisions to avoid burnout from micro-choices.
  
  

3. Emotion Avoidance: Procrastination with a Purpose

Sometimes what looks like procrastination is actually self-protection. That task you keep putting off? It might bring up fear of imperfection, criticism, or exposure. Vulnerability is baked into creativity, and avoidance is often a strategy to delay discomfort.

You’re not lazy. You’re responding to a task that carries emotional weight. Whether it’s shame from a past failure or anxiety about being seen, your pause is trying to keep you safe.

•    ❤️ Try this check-in: “What emotion am I avoiding by not doing this task?”
  
  

4. Burnout and Stress: The Creative Shutdown

Creative work requires emotional labor. When you're operating under chronic stress, whether from external demands, internal pressure, or simply life, it’s common to experience motivational shutdown.

Your nervous system can’t stay in high gear forever. When it senses overwhelm, it may hit the brakes as a form of survival. This looks like disinterest, numbness, or fatigue, but it’s actually your body trying to recover.

•    🧘 Mental health lens: You may not need more productivity hacks. You may need more rest, regulation, or nervous system support.

Through the Creative Personality Lens

Your creative brain is a wellspring of innovation, emotion, and insight, but those same gifts can also make consistency, follow-through, and traditional productivity especially difficult. What looks like procrastination or avoidance is often a reflection of how you’re uniquely wired to think, feel, and create.

Let’s reframe the struggle by understanding it through the lens of your creative temperament:

1. Big Vision, Small Steps: The Intimidation Gap

Creative people often have extraordinary capacity for imagination. You don’t just see the next task, you see the whole world that task could build. The final painting. The polished essay. The perfectly orchestrated launch.

But the more vivid your end vision, the more overwhelming the starting point can feel. The gap between your idea and your current capacity creates internal friction, one that can breed avoidance, perfectionism, or doubt.

•    🔍 Helpful reframe: Start small not because you’re thinking too little, but because your vision deserves to be nurtured into reality, one step at a time.
  
  

2. High Sensitivity: Depth as a Double-Edged Sword

Many creatives experience the world with heightened emotional and sensory awareness. You might deeply feel the weight of your own expectations, a sharp critique, or even the energetic shift of the room you're in.

This depth is powerful for art-making, but can be taxing when it comes to initiating or finishing tasks. A seemingly simple action, like sending an email or sharing a post, can feel emotionally loaded.

•    💡 Mental health lens: You’re not overreacting, you’re highly responsive. Build systems that help buffer and regulate your energy, not drain it.
  
  

3. Perfectionism in Disguise: Identity on the Line

For creative people, work is often personal. When your creativity is tied to your identity, doing it wrong can feel like being wrong. That fear doesn’t always sound loud, it may whisper things like “I’ll do it when I’m more ready,” or “It’s not quite the right time.”

This isn’t laziness, it’s protective. It’s a subconscious attempt to avoid the pain of not measuring up to your internal standard.

•    ✍️ Creative insight: The imperfect version done today teaches you more than the perfect version postponed forever.
  
  

4. Rhythmic Motivation: Trusting Your Creative Cycles

Creative energy isn’t linear. It arrives in bursts, inspiration, flow, momentum, and then it recedes. Our culture rewards consistency and speed, but your natural creative rhythm may be cyclical, seasonal, or intuitive.

When you try to force your rhythm into rigid molds, you may burn out or shut down. But when you learn to recognize your cycles, you can begin to plan with them, batching during your flow, resting during your low tide, and offering yourself grace in between.

•    🌙 Empowering truth: You’re not broken for having creative seasons. You’re alive. Learn your rhythm, and design around it.

The Power of Not Wanting To

Sometimes, the reason you’re not doing something isn’t because you’re stuck, blocked, or broken, it’s because you don’t actually want to. And that truth can be surprisingly hard to admit.

In a culture that glorifies productivity and doing what you “should,” not wanting to do something is often dismissed as laziness or defiance. But for creative people, who tend to be deeply intuitive, values-driven, and emotionally attuned, resistance can carry real information.

1. Resistance as Inner Wisdom

Not wanting to doesn’t always mean avoidance. It may mean misalignment.

Maybe the task is outdated. Maybe the project doesn’t reflect who you are anymore. Maybe the goal you’re chasing was never your dream to begin with, it was someone else’s version of success.

•    🎯 Ask yourself: “If no one else were watching, would I still want to do this?”
  
  

2. Internal Conflict vs. Inner Knowing

Sometimes we confuse the tension of “I should” with the truth of “I want to.” It’s easy to miss the signal under the noise.

Inner conflict sounds like:
“I should want this.”
“Everyone else is doing it.”
“It would be stupid not to.”

Inner knowing sounds like:
“This doesn’t feel like me.”
“I’m exhausted just thinking about it.”
“I light up when I imagine something else.”

You may be fighting for motivation when what you really need is permission, to shift, release, or revise your priorities.

3. The Gift of Letting Go

Not every good idea needs to be completed. Not every opportunity needs to be seized. Sometimes, the most powerful creative act is deciding not to continue with something that no longer fits.

Letting go isn’t failure, it’s clarity.

•    🧠 Mental health insight: Chronic resistance is often a cue to pause, not push. Sometimes, the stuckness isn’t about the task, it’s about the truth you’re not letting yourself say out loud.
  
  

You don’t have to force yourself to become someone who endlessly finishes every idea. Instead, you can become someone who listens to their resistance with curiosity. Who discerns between procrastination and intuition. Who knows when to commit, and when to gently walk away.

Because not wanting to can be just as powerful as knowing what you do.

Mental-Health-Informed Solutions

Here are practical, gentle strategies designed to support your brain and honor your creative spirit:

1. Build Executive Support
Use time-blocking, alarms, and body doubling (working alongside someone else) to offload planning pressure and stay anchored in the moment.

2. Chase Micro-Rewards
Pair low-dopamine tasks with small joys: a favorite playlist, tea, or checkmarks on a visible list. Give your brain a reason to stay engaged.

3. Soothe the Nervous System
When anxiety blocks action, calm your body: try box breathing, somatic grounding, or a quick walk. Regulating your body makes motivation more accessible.

4. Reframe the “Should”
Shift tasks from obligation to choice: “I should email that client” becomes “I choose to reach out and share my work.” This aligns with intrinsic values, not guilt.

5. Shrink the Starting Point
Instead of “paint the series,” try “set up the easel” or “make a brushstroke.” This lowers the activation energy and tricks your brain into motion.

6. Make It Visible
Use a kanban board, visual planner, or post-it wall. Seeing progress externally builds momentum and makes abstract tasks tangible.

7. Therapeutic Support
If these struggles feel chronic or overwhelming, therapy (especially with someone who understands creative minds or ADHD) can help untangle deeper blocks.

A Real-World Creative Struggle

One client, a gifted writer, came to me after months of stalling on a project she was once passionate about. She described hours of “preparing” that never led to writing. Together, we uncovered a blend of perfectionism, fear of visibility, and dopamine depletion. Once we broke the task into micro-actions and reframed the project as playful instead of performative, she began writing again, not from force, but from flow.

Final Thoughts & Invitation

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by your inability to “just do the thing,” you’re not broken. Your brain is complex, your personality is nuanced, and your creativity is powerful. The space between knowing and doing isn’t laziness, it’s a system waiting to be understood.

Try just one strategy this week. Don’t overhaul everything, just notice. Experiment. Be curious.

And if you’d like guidance that’s personalized, gentle, and rooted in mental health and creativity, explore the Creative Empowerment Pathway, where we’ll turn “shoulds” into sustainable action, together.

Why You’re Stuck (And What To Do About It)

A Creative's Cheat Sheet for Getting Unstuck

🧠 Your Brain Might Be…

• Running Too Many Tabs
• Your prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed, decision fatigue is real.
• Starving for Dopamine
• You crave novelty. “Boring” tasks don’t release the motivation chemical.
• Avoiding a Threat
• Perfectionism, fear of failure, or shame activates your amygdala.
• Lost in Thought
• Your powerful imagination hijacks focus through overactive daydreaming.

🛠 TRY THIS:
✅ Use time blocks and Pomodoros
✅ Break tasks into micro-steps
✅ Pair tasks with novelty or a reward
✅ Write your next physical action step down

🧠 Your Feelings Might Be…

• Avoiding Discomfort
• You’re not lazy, you’re avoiding hard emotions (fear, shame, self-doubt).
• Paralyzed by Perfectionism
• “If I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t do it at all.”
• Overwhelmed by Choice
• Too many ideas or options can create analysis paralysis.
• Too Tired to Try
• Burnout or chronic stress has zapped your capacity.

🛠 TRY THIS:
✅ Reframe “should” as “want” or “choose”
✅ Set a timer for just 10 minutes
✅ Use grounding tools (breathwork, movement)
✅ Limit your daily decisions, simplify

🎨 Your Creative Personality Might Be…

• Stuck in the Big Picture
• You see the end vision but get lost starting.
• Processing Too Deeply
• Tasks feel emotionally heavier than they look on paper.
• Riding an Energy Wave
• Your creative rhythm is real, and nonlinear.
• Waiting for the Muse
• You’re resisting structure that could actually support freedom.
  
  

🛠 TRY THIS:
✅ Honor your rhythm and add small rituals
✅ Use a visual planner or wall calendar
✅ Define “done” in flexible, creative terms
✅ Practice imperfect starts (build momentum, not masterpieces)

✍️ Reflection Prompts

1. What task am I avoiding, and what emotion might be underneath?
2. What’s the smallest action I could take to move forward?
3. Which of these blocks shows up most often for me?
   
   

🔁 Pin or Print This Reminder

1. Progress ≠ productivity.
2. Motion ≠ motivation.
3. Start small. Start messy. Just start.
   
   

You are not broken. You’re creative. And you’re figuring it out.

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