The painkiller vs supplement shift for tasks you're avoiding
A reframe that helps you start THAT task
Every year, my family puts together a Christmas basket for a family in need through a local charity. This year, the person who usually handles it couldn’t do it, so I stepped up. I was genuinely excited to take it on.
That was weeks ago. I haven’t started. Every time I think about it, I feel this wave of exhaustion before I’ve done anything. The deadline keeps creeping closer and the guilt keeps stacking up. The thing I wanted to do has become the thing I’m avoiding most.
I kept thinking I needed to do it well. Make it thoughtful. Get it right. But when your brain is already overloaded, that kind of thinking just makes the task feel impossible.
So I tried something different. Instead of thinking about doing it well, I started thinking about it as pain relief.
The reframe
When your brain is overloaded, work stops feeling like progress and starts feeling like endless effort. Every task becomes another thing you need to excel at, another standard to meet, another way to prove you’re keeping up.
The Christmas basket became about being thoughtful, choosing the perfect items, making sure it felt personal. Every time I thought about starting, my brain went straight to: “This needs to be meaningful. I need to choose the perfect items. I need to do this properly.” That pressure made it impossible to start.
But when I reframed it as pain relief, I stopped thinking “I need to do this well” and started thinking “I need to get this off my plate so I can stop feeling guilty every single day.” Make future me less stressed. Remove one small weight so tomorrow would hurt a little less.
The shift is treating the task like a painkiller instead of a supplement. Supplements are about enhancement. Making things better, optimizing, taking things to the next level. That requires energy you don’t have when you’re already running on empty.
