Break the Twitch Articles

On the surface, there isn’t much to the popular plastic-tomato-kitchen-timer-based productivity system. Take a deeper look behind it’s simple facade, and you’ll find something quite profound. And perhaps most importantly, it’s something that is easy to miss when trying the system out for yourself.

What is the pomodoro technique?

The Pomodoro Technique uses a timer for tracking work sessions, and subsequent break sessions. Francesco Cirillo, the technique’s inventor, accomplished this by using his kitchen timer that looked like a tomato*, which led to the quirky name: tomato, or pomodoro in Italian.

I credit much of this method’s eventual popularity to the chance that Cirillo had a tomato timer on hand, not an egg* timer.

How does pomodoro work?

The process has two stages, a work block and a break block—here’s a look at one simple round.

• Set timer for 25 minutes
• Work for 25 minutes
• Set timer for 5 minutes
• Take a 5-minute break

Beyond that, the times are entirely customizable. You can do any work/break split that helps your brain the most — and it requires a bit of experimentation.

I’m studying a relatively complex subject to prepare for a certificate program this fall, and have experimented with using around 200 of these work/break blocks (so far).

For efforts that require multiple elements of working memory held in place, longer work blocks are most effective for me. My favorite splits have been both 60/30 and 90/30.

With my current area of work, slightly longer breaks allow for both focus mode thinking and diffuse mode* thinking. This allows my brain to process and chunk the information while I’m exercising or making lunch during these longer 30-minute breaks.

The truth is, when it comes to how long your work and break times are, there is no “right” or “wrong” way to do it. Just like most things, it’s all about trial and error. Try experimenting with what might work best for you — the type of work you’re doing will influence the results, too.

What’s important to note is that there is a way to do the pomodoro technique that largely defeats its beneficial outcomes. Interestingly enough it’s more related to the fun part of the technique — the break or reward. Speaking from experience, this is the most common reason the system doesn’t work for many people who try it.

Fortunately, there is a better way — and if it hasn’t worked well for you in the past, it’s worth another look.

The problem with pomodoro

Realistically, the biggest flaw of this system is the one I hear most commonly, and one I was guilty of myself. When the work timer ends, we don’t want to stop, and I can understand why. Especially for the attentionally-diverse brains* out there, deep focus is a golden gift — one that comes at no small cost. The last thing anyone would want to do after achieving that state is leave it, right?

*You know, the ones that decide to use words like attentionally.

If the point of the pomodoro technique is to achieve superhuman levels of focus and productivity, why should you stop once you get there? Why take a break and have to go through the effort of getting in the zone all over again… isn’t that missing the point?

No, it’s not missing the point — and to understand why that is, we have to go deeper… into ✨emotions✨.

The kid doesn’t trust you… yet

Imagine that you have a child. If you have a child above the age of five, imagine… your child. You’re spending the day together, going to the park, reading some books, and playing with Legos. After a fun day, it is time to clean up.

The problem is, no one likes cleaning up Legos—especially six-year-olds. So as the adult, you cut a deal.

Alright kid, if you spend 25 minutes cleaning up these Legos, we’ll go get an ice cream cone to celebrate.

You, the very much adult

The kid considers the deal, and shakes on it — who can turn down ice cream? You set a timer for 25 minutes, and the clean-up process begins. It takes a while to pull out the bins and find a groove, but the little one completes the task as agreed. Sure, there are still other things to clean up, but after 25 minutes a ton of progress is made.

Excited for ice cream, the kid feels a sense of satisfaction for completing the task, and is ready for the reward.

Oof, you know what—we’re on such a roll, let’s just keep cleaning. I don’t think we have time for ice cream today, anyway.

You, still the adult

Not only does this more or less ensure a meltdown, but it’s setting the expectation for future arrangements. In short, the kid can’t trust you — and trust takes a long time to rebuild. Adding to this predicament, kids don’t really know how to communicate that lack of trust. So when it comes time for the next clean-up, they procrastinate, complain, and drag their feet.

We’ve all seen it (and experienced it) before.

These seemingly insignificant violations of trust, when repeated over and over, build a pattern which starts to look a lot like avoidance. Procrastination. The things that, as adults, we beat ourselves up* about thus continuing the pattern.

*why am I the way that I am??

So about this kid…

Here’s the kicker, which may by now be obvious. That kid we were just talking about isn’t your kid or (anyone else’s kid for that matter). That kid, is you — your inner child — or as I like to refer to it, your ✨emotional self✨. It’s that feeling in your gut, the tightness in your chest, along with the full range of wonderful and horrible emotions that we experience as humans.

In my experience, one of the most impactful perspectives to take is this: all those human feelings we feel are just the inner child trying to communicate its current status.

In the same way that a kid doesn’t really know how to effectively communicate what they need at a young age, your inner child doesn’t either. It can’t say words, so it communicates through a complex language of emotions — which are a major piece of how (and why) we do* anything at all.

*or don’t do…

Just think, when you’re excited about something, how quickly do you jump up to take action? How hard do you work at it? When you’re dreading something, how about then? Both cases are just driven by emotions.

What about the adult?

In the ice cream story above, the adult is your big-old human brain. 🧠 The “if-we-don’t-get-this-done-we’re-a-failure” adult brain trying to keep the chaotic train of modern life on the tracks. And hopefully going vaguely in the right direction.

The managing expectations, calculating future consequences, if this happens I’ll die alone, adult brain. Luckily, the brain is the negotiator and deal-maker in the relationship. Constantly navigating the messages that the child is sending up through emotional messages passed through the nervous system.

Interpreting those messages isn’t as obvious as it seems* — it’s like speaking any language, it must be learned and practiced. But whether you think they are or not, they’re there — and they’re motivating a lot of the action (or inaction) in your life whether you like it or not.

*This is where things like yoga, meditation, and breathwork come into play. Slowing down enough to actually bring awareness to your body and the feelings it’s sending you.

As an adult in this world, if you have the awareness to see it (therapy can help uncover this), you are constantly navigating these two parts of what you most often refer to as ‘I’ (or, ‘you’ depending on how the voice in your head is reading this right now).

When the emotional self is ignored, dismissed, told to suck it up, and lied to, that pattern continues over years and years, getting deeper and deeper. All of a sudden, these things look more like a character flaw than a long-built habit. Eventually, the negative thought cycles as an adult reinforce the pattern more deeply. “Ugh, why am I so bad at focusing? Why can’t I just sit down and do this?”

One might literally feel incapable of doing certain things based on this feedback loop.

Thus, a new paradigm is needed. A self-compassionate practice with exposure therapy, taking small but consistent steps to rebuild the trust that was lost. It is but one small piece of the puzzle, but perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

The secret pomodoro sauce

Set a timer for 25 minutes, settle in, work on something until the timer goes off, then stop.

Get up, stretch, eat a snack, or heck, go get ice cream. Celebrate.

Most importantly, let go of the expectation that this is supposed to “work” immediately. It’s going to be uncomfortable because it’s a departure from what you’re used to — but that’s the entire point.

Start small, and work your way up to longer sessions over time if that’s what works best for you. If a work session runs over by a minute or two, that’s fine. If every now and then you’re on such a hot streak that it doesn’t make sense to stop right now, that’s fine, too*.

You’re allowed to be gentle with yourself! Really!

The point of pomodoro isn’t to trick yourself into focusing on a task you didn’t want to do. It’s not about achieving a state of deep focus and then staying there for as long as possible.

It is about creating a trusting relationship with your child self over the long term. When done with this approach, it creates a new dynamic entirely. It is about managing negative emotions in a healthier way as an adult, listening to our bodies and our emotions while repairing a long-strained partnership.

In effect, it’s about working a system that allows you to heal your relationship with focus and work. It’s about reducing the effort required to start, focus, and get into that zone over the long-term. It’s not a quick fix, it’s healing self-work. That means you can use this system for all kinds of things — creative work, reading, etc. If it’s always a grind when you set the timer, that adds negative reinforcement to the system so mix it up!

“Healing work with a tomato timer? Come on, Anthony.” I can hear you thinking it. But it is just one of the many small ways we can begin to approach our lives and work with compassion and understanding. Without giving it to ourselves, there’s no way to truly understand how to give it to others. It has to start with you.

The ironic part about all of this, is that this method eventually becomes so much more wildly productive than any other approach. Not in the sense of “look at how much more I can get done now that…”, but in the way of, “look at how productive I am when I allow myself space throughout the day while listening to (and meeting) my emotional needs!”

Maybe it falls under the slow is smooth, smooth is fast principle, or something similar.

What I do know for sure is that strong negative emotions take a lot of energy to overcome. They’re incredibly draining, and can often throw multiple days askew. There is a dang good reason that parents of young children adhere to strict schedules of bedtime routines and naps for their kids. When those emotions are high to the point of fight-or-flight levels, mental recall declines, working memory suffers, and it takes even more energy to accomplish the tasks required.

Thus, the cycle continues and burnout is always around the corner.

Two steps back

There is an inherent “two steps back, one step forward” aspect to all of this. If you’re used to using adrenaline as focus motivation, it’s going to be hard to unwind. It’s, yes, going to actually slow you down at first. It’s going to take a lot of patience and effort to break the patterns of dependency on that style of work. But there is a better way — and one worth exploring.

While there are many ways to approach rebuilding self-trust, using a little plastic tomato timer is absolutely one worth exploring.

If your early schooling was anything like mine, it didn’t include much about identifying and managing emotions. It’s such a massive part of the way we process and respond to the world, yet there is surprisingly little focus on how it all actually works. Isn’t it strange that we study logic and ‘common core’ subjects like complex mathematics (most of which never gets used in adult life unless one enters a STEM field), yet barely scratch the surface of understanding human emotion?

Emotions comprise a huge part of how we experience the world, so if they’re ignored, we’re missing a major piece of the puzzle—especially when it comes to understanding ourselves. It starts with awareness, simply feeling and identifying what emotion is currently being experienced. From there, we can understand what that particular emotion is asking for, and find a healthy way to meet its attachment (in other words, what that emotion is asking for).

It might be helpful to think of emotions like an inner child—one who is simply expressing what they need in the only way they know how. Understanding how to interpret and meet these needs for the inner child means fewer “tantrums” that lead to twitches. Understanding the emotion being felt, what that emotion is asking for, and a healthy way to meet that need, makes day to day intentionality much easier.

Four Basic Emotions (And What They’re Asking For)

ANGER: Outrage, Hostility, Agitation, Annoyance, Irritation

Anger can be triggered by many things, but some examples of prompting events are:

• Believing you’ve been treated unfairly
• You or someone you care about being attacked or threatened
• Losing power, status, or respect
• Not having things turn out as expected
• Physical or emotional pain

ANGER NEEDS:

Most often, anger is the result of a hurt that needs to be expressed, heard, or validated. When anger is repressed, it might not even be felt fully—which makes it even harder to know when to act on meeting the need it’s asking for.

There’s a reason that anger often turns to sadness, grief, and tears when it does get intense—hurt causes a complex array of emotions and sadness is a part of it.

FEAR: Anxiety, Nervousness, Shock, Worry

Fear is a completely natural response to perceived (and real) dangers. There are many things that can trigger fear—even if nothing happens in the actual environment we’re in.

• Being threatened
• Being in a similar situation where you’ve been hurt in the past
• Being alone, or simply in an unfamiliar situation
• Having to perform in front of others
• Flashbacks, etc

FEAR NEEDS:

Comfort, reassurance, and validation. It’s often helpful for fear to be expressed, externalized (get it out of your head) and comforted. Sometimes we simply need reassurance that things will be okay. Other times, we need to have our fears validated and heard by others, so we don’t feel so alone with them. That can be enough to comfort the anxiety about a situation. Journaling is a way to externalize fear without requiring another person.

Remember that these emotions are your inner child expressing what they need in the only way they know how. Pushing them away, dismissing, or entirely ignoring these feelings will not solve the problem. It will only build up over time—and if you have kids you’ll know, it becomes a tantrum.

Explore ways to comfort and ground yourself in mind and body. Yoga, meditation, weighted blankets, breathing, strong pleasant scents, etc.

SADNESS: Grief, Despair, Defeat, Depression, Dejection

When dealing with loss, things going worse than you expected, or not getting something that you worked for, it’s natural to feel sadness. Every emotion fulfills a purpose, one we need to fully process the difficult events in our lives—so it’s there for a reason.

• Losing something or someone irretrievably
• Not getting what you have worked for or believe you need in life
• Being rejected, disapproved of, or excluded
• Being with someone else who is sad or in pain
• Feeling alone or isolated

SADNESS NEEDS:

Support, acknowledgement, and expression. Much of the time, sadness needs to be expressed to feel better. Expressing it to another person in an emotionally safe relationship can help provide the support we need to process and feel the sadness.

SHAME: Embarrassment, Humiliation, Self-Conscious, Shyness

Shame is one of those emotions that can be incredibly difficult to allow ourselves to feel and process. It feels awful, and can manifest in different ways, but generally is one of the few emotions that doesn’t serve much positive purpose to feel. It’s an incredibly powerful emotion, and understanding it really helps process where it’s coming from.

• Being rejected by people you care about
• Having others find out that you have done something wrong
• Being laughed at/made fun of
• Being reminded of something wrong or shameful you did in the past

SHAME NEEDS:

Empathy, understanding, and compassion (most often, self-compassion). Mistakes are bound to happen. No one is perfect, yet the feeling of shame can be a crippling one. It’s in the moments when we think that we deserve it the least, that we need compassion and understanding the most. Few positive things come from shame without understanding, compassion, and empathy. Without them, we learn to avoid and hide from situations that have caused us shame (and have potential to cause it again).