Back in the day, goofing off was when you had your make-or-break Math exam the next morning. You stared at your ‘rough’ book, you stared at the pile of question papers from previous years, and then you went off to make yourself a snack to have with a can of Coke. Tidy up your room or else, your mother warned you sternly. You stared at the unholy mess strewn all around you, wondered if you could pitch the theory of Useful Calculated Mess to her, then decided to duck out and go hang with your friends instead.
Now they’ve dignified the Art of Goofing Off; they call it the start of a functional brain freeze. Psychologists say this functional brain freeze is when on the surface you are functioning in a manner that passes for normal but find yourself often suddenly succumbing to a curious lassitude, an inertia that effectively puts the brake on moving forward on your personal or professional path.
Like when you need to start work on your presentation/project report/the ending to your next novel/beef up your understanding of AI, and you decide to crawl into bed and have a 6 pm nap that could last until 6 am the next morning. Like when it’s Sunday and you have an endless list of stuff that just must get done today, but you decide on an hour of scrolling through your socials; of course, you spend the better part of the day lounging on your sofa bed, goggling at 5 Mysterious Things Spotted in the Andes, cramming fistfuls of potato chips into your mouth, and guzzling beer that’s gone flat.
There’s one crucial difference between then and now, though. Then, with all the optimism of youth, you were confident that you could brazen your way out of it all. Now you know that Nemesis, the Greek goddess of vengeance, is going to catch up with you, one way or the other, sooner than later. In fact, you can see her making her way over to you.
Apparently, when the brain receives an overload of stressful information, it goes into freeze mode basically to protect it from crashing and burning. Now, let’s face it. What with an intense dangerous conflict going on someplace not too far, which no one wants to call a war, a massacre of women and children someplace else, which no one wants to call a genocide, rulers passing laws that effectively cut off people’s rights at the knees, living conditions worsening under laconic leadership, ghastly crimes on the rise because everyone seems to be on a short fuse, these are times of relentless stress. If you haven’t reached burnout point yet, that’s only because your brain has got into a functional freeze mode.
So OK, you are goofing off a little more than necessary, but don’t dump guilt on yourself. Some amount of evading the task at hand is just your mind throwing out some foam pads to cushion your falls. It’s alright, as long as you get back on the rails eventually.