Overcoming Apathy and Action Paralysis

Apathy and action paralysis hinder self-development and positive change by stopping you from taking the required action. These unresourceful reactive states often have unconscious roots, making it easy for them to overpower you if you don’t have an effective mindfulness strategy in place.

When you know that positive change is needed but don’t take any action, apathy (diminished motivation) and action paralysis (sabotaged decision-making) are often at work. You may feel that you are wasting your time, or you may prefer your creature comforts to the uncertainty and effort of responsible change. When billions of people collectively think in this unresourceful way, it’s no surprise that apathy and action paralysis reign supreme and perpetuate unfulfilling and often destructive patterns of living. In today’s world, where the stakes are high and we need more than ever to take our power back and implement positive solutions, this kind of collective self-abandoning is no longer sustainable.

To implement positive changes in your life and to help make the world a better place, it’s important to know how to overcome apathy and action paralysis. In this post, I will explain how the practice of mindfulness can empower you to do this and will share some important techniques I use as a mindfulness consultant to help my clients take action.

The Reactive Patterns Behind Apathy and Action Paralysis

Reactive patterns are the automatic, often unconscious patterns of thinking and behaving that occur in response to something to which you have an aversion or attachment. Examples of reactive patterns that contribute to apathy and action paralysis include resistance, conformity, and addiction. The fear and attachment to safety, comfort, or pleasure in these patterns limit you.

These reactive patterns, if given a voice, might sound something like:

• I will only take personal growth so far because, beyond a certain point, I would have to make big and scary life changes. I would have to face the distressing contradiction of staying true to myself and my authentic values in an inauthentic society, which could be so isolating. I love being like a child and don’t want to fully grow up.
• I love the comfort of watching television and getting lost in social media. They distract me from the deeper responsibilities of living, so I will continue doing this tonight until it’s time for bed. The storyline in today’s episode is very good, and I want to keep watching!
• It’s not up to me to get involved in changing society. I’ll leave it to someone else. It’s too much responsibility and I don’t want to change my routine, which I’m quite comfortable with. Anyway, my parents and friends would ridicule me if I didn’t respect conventional social norms, and I don’t want that. I’d rather stay in a box as long as I have my comforts there.
• I want to feel loved by my partner, so I won’t get involved with following all my interests if my partner isn’t interested as well. Relationships are about compromise, so I will sacrifice some of my interests, otherwise we would just end up in an argument and one of us might end up leaving, which would be the end of the world to me.
• I dare not go and make friends with my neighbours as they would think I am weird or rude for intruding and being a nuisance, or worse still, they may be horrible people. I don’t want the effort of doing that anyway, especially if it means I become socially obligated to them. I don’t want to end up lending them things or having to invite them into my home. It’s easier to stay indoors, lock my door, and do the same routines I’ve always been doing.
• It’s easier for me to go and get that product from a supermarket. It’s cheaper too. I don’t want the effort of purchasing ethically and ecologically, or of changing my life to be more responsible. I’m only one person out of 7 billion, so it doesn’t really matter in the big picture where I buy my products from as my actions are insignificant. People feel the same as me, so nothing is going to change.

Can you spot the reactivity of these thought patterns and how the fear of change and attachment to comfort can sabotage positive development and reinforce limitation, stasis, and learned helplessness?

Breaking free from these reactive patterns is particularly challenging when you are disabled by unresourceful states and lack mindfulness. Spending time in states of trance, which occur with prolonged screen time and other acts of dissociation, can be particularly disabling. Mindfulness is the key to liberating yourself from these unresourceful states and reactive patterns.

Apathy and Action Paralysis in the Brain

When brain scientists at Oxford University used brain scanning techniques to study apathy, they found less efficient connections in the premotor cortex of apathetic people (Bonnelle et al., 2016). These people required more brain activity to turn decisions into actions. This finding underscores the significance of mindfulness in overcoming apathy: mindfulness can reduce reactivity and distraction, focusing the mind for the extra brain effort required.

Similar to the premotor cortex, the prefrontal cortex also plays a key role in decision-making and action-planning. It’s the executive centre of the brain. Dysfunction in this area results in apathy (Moretti & Signori, 2016). As researchers at the University of Pittsburgh state, mindfulness increases the ability to recruit higher-order prefrontal cortex regions to down-regulate the lower-order brain activity (reactivity and negative thinking) that can lead to apathy. Consider, for instance, how fears or negative thinking, in the absence of mindfulness, can make decision-making and action-planning stressful or unfruitful.

The main takeaway from this research is the importance of implementing a daily mindfulness practice to increase your brain’s efficiency and, by extension, your capacity to break through apathy and action paralysis.

Apathy and Action Paralysis in Society

In Self Empowerment, I described how certain social and cultural norms encourage dissociation and passivity. Indeed, society institutionalises apathy and dissociation to make centralised government easier. This practice dates back at least to Ancient Roman times when bread and circus was offered to the people to appease them. The modern-day equivalent to these offerings is, of course, the entertainment industry.

In a social context, apathy and action paralysis occur when:

• The scale of social change seems too large to get to grips with because we feel insignificant and anonymous in mass society, without a true sense of community support.
• Mass society encourages conformity to social norms and the dominant worldview. If we dare to challenge these, we may be criticised, ridiculed, condemned, ostracised, or crucified.
• The power of spectacle holds us in unresourceful, passive states of trance. Spectacle is created in the mass media and distracts us from the fundamental individual and collective issues that require change.
  

How to Overcome Apathy and Action Paralysis

Overcoming apathy and action paralysis requires a strategic approach. Here are six practical steps to empower yourself to take action.

1. Cultivate Mindfulness

Apathy and action paralysis arise from unresourceful states and reactive patterns. You will unconsciously generate and maintain unresourceful states if you don’t become aware of your state and change it. Mindfulness, the practice of consciously directing your attention in the present moment, without reactivity or judgement, allows you to consciously choose resourceful states and break free from unhelpful ones by disengaging from the thoughts and emotions that create them. Mindfulness, by empowering you to disengage your attention from your thoughts and emotions and direct it consciously, also reduces your likelihood of being automatically taken over by your reactive patterns.

To cultivate mindfulness, practise withdrawing your attention from your thoughts and emotions and anchoring it on your breath in the present moment. Whenever your attention wanders back to your thoughts and emotions, notice this lapse of focus, and gently bring it back to your breath. As you disentangle from your thoughts and emotions in this way and build a strong sense of presence, choose to create the positive, empowering states and thoughts necessary for taking the action you have put off. For more on this mindfulness technique, see The Power of the Mindfulness of Breath Meditation.

Mindfulness, by providing you with greater awareness and choice, and facilitating positive changes in your internal state, empowers you to become more resourceful and overcome any apathy and action paralysis associated with making life changes.

2. Challenge Cognitive Distortions

While in your mindful state, identify and challenge the thoughts that perpetuate apathy and action paralysis, and then challenge the cognitive distortions within those thoughts.

For instance, look at the following belief that leads to apathy or action paralysis:

People feel the same as me, so nothing is going to change.

Can you identify the cognitive distortions of generalisation, negative thinking, black-and-white thinking, and jumping to a conclusion in it? They show that the belief is distorted and inaccurate.

You can challenge the cognitive distortions as follows:

For a list of cognitive distortions and their explanation, see The Art of Critical Thinking: Key Steps to Free the Mind.

3. Set Conscious Goals

Once you’ve cultivated a desire for positive change with the help of your mindfulness practice, establish realistic and achievable goals for positive change, and write them down. Divide them into short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals with a timescale, and create tasks for fulfilling them. To keep yourself on track, stay mindful to avoid distractions, and regularly review and modify your goals based on your feedback and experiences.

4. Avoid Overwhelm

To overcome apathy and action paralysis, it’s important to avoid overwhelming yourself. Start small but think big regarding any positive change you wish to make. Take little but decisive steps on your journey to positive change. Seek out resources and support to assist you. If your goal is social change, keep in mind that you are not solely responsible for making that social change.

5. Strengthen Support Networks

If you are on your own, isolation or lack of support might generate apathy and action paralysis. To address this, strengthen your support network. Seek out or form a community of people who share your needs, values, and vision. This is particularly important for co-creating positive social change.

6. Schedule a Guidance Call

Take action and schedule an empowering Guidance Call with me to address any remaining apathy and action paralysis.

References

Bonnelle, V., Manohar, S., Behrens, T., & Husain, M. (2016). Individual Differences in Premotor Brain Systems Underlie Behavioral Apathy, Cerebral Cortex, 26(2), 807–819. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhv247

Moretti, R., & Signori, R. (2016). Neural Correlates for Apathy: Frontal-Prefrontal and Parietal Cortical-Subcortical Circuits. Frontiers in aging neuroscience, 8(289). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2016.00289