How to meet everything all at once without turning on yourself
When the work feels urgent but unreachable (and you keep blaming yourself for the pause).
Maybe you’re not stuck. Maybe you’re absorbing too much, too quietly. This post isn’t a fix — it’s a mirror. One that lets you step out of the spiral, even for a minute.
It doesn’t look catastrophic.
It looks like sitting in front of your laptop with a bowl of cold pasta and four open documents, trying to remember which version of your outline is the real one.
It looks like switching between articles and Teams messages and the half-written supervision agenda that now reads like a riddle.
It looks like being too wired to write, too tired to think, and too embarrassed to explain why nothing’s finished — because nothing ever really is.
This is what “everything all at once” feels like in a doctoral body.
Not just overwhelm.
But a kind of inner folding, where all the urgency turns inward.
You don’t miss deadlines, you move them silently.
You don’t tell your supervisor you’re struggling, you tell yourself you’ll catch up by Friday.
You don’t stop working, you just stop believing any of it counts.
The unspectacular spiral
Yesterday, you opened your doc at 9:00am.
By 9:12, you’d remembered a library book was due.
Then a bill.
Then that email you forgot to reply to.
You clicked open your inbox, then forgot why.
Then you remembered that other doc you meant to check.
Then your coffee went cold.
It’s not dramatic.
It’s just endless.
You keep telling yourself you’ll get back on track —
but the track keeps multiplying.
Most of us call this procrastination.
But what if that label is too thin?
What if this isn’t resistance — but a learned attempt at self-protection?
"It feels like I’m rearranging everything around the work, but never touching the actual thing,"
a student said in our last workshop.
Maybe your system isn’t failing.
Maybe it’s trying to buy time in a structure – maybe even a life – that gives you none.
The unsolvable calendar
Imagine trying to solve a puzzle where the pieces keep changing shape.
That’s what academic time feels like.
Every time you almost begin, something else flashes:
A new priority.
A new standard.
A new voice in your head saying, “You should’ve figured this out by now.”
You’re not behind.
You’re just caught in a feedback loop — where the more you care, the harder it is to start.
And the longer it takes to start, the more you question your capacity to finish.
Here’s what breaks the loop:
Not discipline.
Not waking up at 5am.
Not a fresh spreadsheet with fake control.
It starts with this:
“What if this isn’t a focus problem?”
What if you don’t need to be harder on yourself —
you need to be held by something steadier than self-pressure?
This isn’t a fix. It’s a pause.
We’ll follow this thread deeper in Tuesday’s paid post:
The hidden physics of being stuck — and why it’s not what you think.
For now, let this be enough:
You’re not the only one swimming in this.
You’re not imagining the weight.
And you are allowed to stop proving you’re fine before asking for rhythm.