Why You Know What to Do and Still Don't Do It

It's 9.40 in the morning and you have one important task. You open the laptop, look at the task, and check your phone. Then you make tea. Then you tidy your desktop folders, which, to be fair, did need it.

By 11 you're tired, and you've done nothing. Most of us know this morning well.

The odd part is that you weren't short of information. You know what to do. You even know how long it'll take. So why doesn't knowing help?

This is the first of seven short pieces on that question. It's an old one. Some of the best answers are in texts more than two thousand years old, and in the Sivananda books that explain them in plain language. They turned out to be far more practical than I expected.

I live in a Sivananda ashram in Kerala, and for the last two years I've practised all the paths of yoga every day. Most of what I've learned there is surprisingly ordinary. Mostly it's one small thing, repeated.

The oldest version of this problem

In the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna asks Krishna a question that could have come from a self-help forum. Why does a person do wrong, he asks, even against their own wishes, as if something is pushing them? (3.36)

Krishna's answer is short. Desire and anger, he says, born of restlessness. Once you see them as the force behind what you do, you can fight them instead of fighting yourself (3.37 and 3.34).

There is a much-quoted line in Sanskrit literature, traditionally attributed to Duryodhana in a later text, that sums up the same bind: I know what is right but I can't bring myself to do it. I know what is wrong but I can't stop. Every procrastinator since could have said it.

Neither text calls Arjuna lazy or Duryodhana stupid. Both treat the gap between knowing and doing as part of being human, and then ask what to do about it.

The monkey in your head

Yoga has a picture for this: the monkey mind. A monkey can't sit still. It jumps from branch to branch, grabs one thing, drops it and grabs the next. There's nothing wicked about it. It's restless, that's all.

The Yoga Sutras call this chitta vritti, the movements of the mind. Patanjali's second sutra is the whole programme in six words: yogas chitta-vritti-nirodhah. Yoga is the calming of the movements of the mind (1.2). He never mentions a to-do list.

So the question changes. We usually ask, "How do I make myself work?" Yoga asks, "What's keeping my mind so busy right now?"

Arjuna has the same complaint. The mind, he tells Krishna, is restless, turbulent, powerful and stubborn, and trying to hold it is as hard as trying to hold the wind (6.34). Krishna doesn't argue. He agrees it's hard. Then he gives two tools: abhyasa and vairagya, practice and detachment (6.35). Patanjali offers exactly the same pair (1.12).

A pundit, a question, and a silence

There's a small scene in Inspiring Talks of Gurudev Sivananda, written down by Swami Venkatesananda, that I think about often. A learned pundit comes to Swami Sivananda and asks how to control the wandering mind. Sivananda answers in four words: by vairagya and abhyasa.

The pundit asks the natural next question: how do I develop vairagya? Sivananda says nothing. The pundit leaves. Afterwards Sivananda remarks that such visitors have studied many books and carry a stock set of questions, and that they will go on asking without ever practising.

I've been that pundit. Maybe you have too. We collect the right answer and feel as if the work is done. Sivananda's silence was his reply. The pundit already had the answer. He'd just never spent an ordinary morning doing it.

What practice and detachment mean at 9.40

Both words sound grander than they are.

Abhyasa, practice, is the effort to stay with one thing. Patanjali says it becomes firmly rooted when it is done for a long time, without a break, and with care (1.14). Effort and intensity aren't on that list. A little every day beats a lot now and then. Swami Vishnudevananda, in his commentary on the sutras in Meditation and Mantras, puts the reason plainly: "A change in character occurs only through formation of new habits."

Vairagya, detachment, means you don't have to follow every pull. You can still want things. When the phone buzzes or the tea calls, you notice the pull and stay where you are. The monkey can jump. You don't have to go with it.

Swami Sivananda uses tea as his own example, in the chapter on vairagya in Mind: Its Mysteries and Control. If your mind keeps thinking of tea and you feel pain when you don't get it, that is attachment. He adds a useful detail: merely giving up tea isn't vairagya. The pull itself has to loosen. That's why a forced "no" so often turns into a bigger "yes" by evening.

Put together, the instruction is very ordinary: do a small thing repeatedly, and don't chase every distraction. In Practical Lessons in Yoga, Sivananda says these two, practice and dispassion, are the things needed for success in mind-control.

Why you don't need more willpower

When we don't get things done, the usual advice is to be more disciplined. Make a stricter schedule, find a better app, shout at yourself in the mirror. It works for a day or two, then the old pattern comes back.

The old texts put the problem one step earlier. A restless mind can't hold on to a plan, however good the plan is. So the first job is to settle the mind the plan depends on. That's why Patanjali starts with the mind and gets to schedules much later, and why this series starts with energy before any tips.

Sivananda says the same thing with a farmer's picture. Practice done without dispassion, he writes, is like sowing in stony or salty ground: the effort is real and nothing grows. Or like irrigation water that runs into rat-holes instead of the field.

He also turns the idea of willpower upside down. In the same chapter he says that when you let go of one craving, like tea, the energy that went into it becomes willpower, and giving up one thing makes the next one easier. So willpower is mostly energy you've stopped wasting.

Picture a glass of muddy water. Stirring it harder won't clear it. You put it down, wait, and the mud settles on its own. I suspect a lot of discipline works the same way.

Three small things to try

None of these needs a mat, an hour, or a retreat.

1. Breathe before you begin. Take five slow breaths, with the exhale longer than the inhale. It tells the body that nothing is chasing it.

2. Shrink the task. Don't write "finish report". Write "open the file and write one sentence". The monkey will follow a small branch.

3. Put the phone in another room. I know. I didn't enjoy hearing it either. Krishna warned about the wandering senses, and a phone feeds them all day.

Another way to look at it

We treat procrastination as a character flaw. I think it's more like the weather. It comes, stays a while and passes. You can't fix the weather, but you can dress for it.

The Gita says it in one line I find very kind. Lift yourself up by your own effort, and don't let yourself sink, because you are your own friend and your own enemy (6.5). The mind that stalls you at 9.40 can also sit you down at 9.45. It depends which one you make friends with that morning.

So tomorrow, when the monkey starts jumping, sit down, take a few breaths and write one sentence. That's enough for one morning.

What comes next

Over the week we'll look at the fuel underneath all this. Tomorrow: why "getting 1% better every day" never ends, and what yoga calls prana.

Where to read more

All of these are Sivananda-tradition books. The Divine Life Society (dlshq.org) has offered several of them as free e-books.

Mind: Its Mysteries and Control, Swami Sivananda (chapter on Vairagya and Tyaga)

Practical Lessons in Yoga, Swami Sivananda

Practice of Karma Yoga, Swami Sivananda

Inspiring Talks of Gurudev Sivananda, chronicled by Swami Venkatesananda

Meditation and Mantras, Swami Vishnudevananda

If this helped, forward it to one person who is stuck in the same morning. And if you'd like somewhere quiet to think out loud, an Explorative Letter is a pen friend who writes back.