Do you ever have that sinking fear that you’re going to pour years of your life into your writing only to get absolutely nothing in return?
No sales. No awards. No readers. Just wasted time.
Maybe you worry that the publishing industry is just too saturated right now, or that AI is taking over for authors.
But the truth is, your brain is actively rooting against you becoming a successful author!
I know that sounds ridiculous. Why would my brain fight the one thing that I want the most?
Because what you call success, your brain calls something else entirely. And until you understand that, you will always feel like you’re swimming upstream.
Today, I’m going to show you exactly why this happens and how to fix it so that you will reach your writing goals.
When Your Brain Fights Writing Success, It’s Doing Its Job
Here is the reality: Your brain is not designed for success. It is designed for survival.
And writing a book triggers three distinct biological alarms that are designed to stop you in your tracks.
The first barrier is what evolutionary psychologists call energy conservation.
Think about it like a caveman. For your primitive brain, every calorie you burn needs to result in food or safety. But writing burns a massive amount of cognitive energy with zero guaranteed rewards.
You might write for a year and get no money, no food, and no safety.
So your brain looks at that equation and thinks, “Bad investment. Cut the power!”
And that sudden fatigue you feel when you sit down to write? That is your caveman brain trying to stop you from wasting calories on a maybe.
Brain Fights Writing Success, Then Homeostasis Shows Up
If you manage to push past the fatigue, you hit the second barrier: homeostasis.
Biology tells us that all living systems want to stay stable. Your body temperature stays at about 98°. If it goes up, you sweat to bring it down.
Your psychology works in a similar way. You have an internal set point for your career, your income, and your visibility.
So what happens when you start succeeding? If people start noticing your work, what happens when you finish that chapter or get a publishing deal?
You heat up. You go above your set point. And your brain’s cooling system kicks in.
And here’s the kicker: you don’t even have to succeed for this to happen.
Your brain is a prediction machine. So just thinking about that level of visibility can trigger the alarm.
Your brain predicts that you getting attention for your story, getting an award for it, or having increased sales exposes you to more potential risk, humiliation, and bad reviews.
So it starts the release of stress before you even start writing.
It triggers anxiety and self-doubt and sudden distraction to cool you down and bring you back to your “safe” baseline.
It isn’t really trying to hurt you. It’s trying to stabilize you. And the brain sees you as you are right now as the “safest” version.
That might be aspiring writer, beginning writer, maybe you’ve published a book—whatever it is, the brain sees you as you are right now as the safe place.
That is the homeostasis place. That is the place we keep returning to.
It’s Like Trying to Lose Weight!
To demonstrate this, think about what happens when you gain a few pounds. I’ve noticed this myself. You gain a few pounds. You should be able to get rid of them with a couple of daily jogs, right?
But your body is going to fight that. Because once you gain those few pounds, the body sees this as the new homeostasis. So we maintain this new weight because this is where we are.
That’s the same way the brain works. The brain sees where you are right now as the homeostasis point, and it keeps trying to bring you back to that.
So it makes becoming a successful writer look scary and risky.
The Identity Guard: When Your Brain Fights Writing Success the Hardest
And finally, the most subtle but dangerous barrier of them all: identity protection.
Your brain is obsessed with consistency. Over the years, you have built a very strong mental model of who you are.
Maybe you are the aspiring writer or the dreamer or even the struggling artist. And that identity is comfortable to the brain. It’s familiar.
The moment you start succeeding—or even thinking about success—the moment you shift from “I want to write” to “I am a writer,” you create a conflict in your brain.
To your subconscious, this new identity can feel like a lie. It feels like a system error.
So your brain tries to resolve the conflict by sabotaging the new behavior to get you back to the old familiar you.
You can change. The problem is that your brain fights to keep the “old you” alive because the old you feels safe.
And if you don’t fix this, you will remain that aspiring writer or that dreamer forever.
So you have the caveman cutting your energy, the thermostat cooling your ambition, and the identity guard keeping you stuck in the past.
It’s a perfect storm.
But the good news is that biology is not destiny. Now that we know what’s going on here, we can override these basic mechanisms.
Let’s talk about how to do that next.
Brain Fights Writing Success—So Pay It Immediately
So, number one: to beat the caveman brain, you have to stop relying on future rewards.
The caveman brain is all about energy conservation. It operates on a very simple ledger: Energy out must equal reward in.
The problem is that with writing, there’s a time gap. You put energy out today, but the reward—money, publication, praise—might not come for years.
To a caveman, that’s a terrible deal. That looks like starvation. The caveman doesn’t care about rewards that show up one, two, three, five years down the line. He cares about the energy you’re burning right now.
So solution number one is that you have to pay your brain immediately. You have to hack the system by creating an artificial immediate return on investment.
This isn’t about “treating yourself.” This is biological bribery.
If you write for 30 minutes, you get that piece of chocolate, watch that funny cat video, enjoy minutes of guilt-free scrolling, listen to your favorite song, or go to your favorite coffee shop. Any reward that works for you helps teach your primitive brain that when I write, good things happen right away.
And it has to be immediate. If it’s not, your brain will fight you the next time you want to sit down and write! It’ll say that you’re too tired or that you have too much brain fog.
So to get it to work with you, you have to close the gap between effort and reward so that the caveman stops pulling the plug on your energy.
Brain Fights Writing Success—So Raise the Thermostat Slowly
Number two: now let’s fix that internal thermostat.
Remember, your brain has a set point for how much visibility it feels is safe. And if you try to jump from hiding your writing in your room to best-selling author overnight, that is a massive temperature spike. Your biological alarm is going to go off and you may somehow sabotage your progress.
So solution number two is micro-exposures. The goal here is to fly under the radar of your own brain. We need to take steps that are so small they don’t trigger the brain’s fear response.
So we’re not trying to be brave here necessarily. We’re trying to be sneaky.
Sneaky Things You Can Try
If the idea of querying an agent makes you get anxious, that step is too big. Your thermostat isn’t ready. So make it smaller. Don’t query, just look up the name of one agent today. That’s it.
Or try a secret risk. Submit your short story to a contest.
Why is this safe? Because if you don’t place, literally no one knows. It stays between you and the judges.
And you can hire an editor or a writing coach, and that is a huge step for your commitment. But it’s completely private. No one has to know but you and your editor.
If showing your work to a critique group makes you want to throw up, make it smaller. Don’t share a whole chapter. Just read one paragraph to a trusted writing friend.
When you take that tiny little non-threatening step, nothing bad happens. No tigers attack you. No one laughs. And your brain records that data.
It says, “Oh, we did that and we were okay.”
And slowly, without you even realizing it, your internal thermostat nudges up. And what used to be terrifying becomes a little bit more normal. You’re literally rewiring your brain’s definition of what safe is.
Brain Fights Writing Success—So You Shift Identity First
Here we’re arriving at the biggest barrier of them all, and that’s the identity guard. This is where most writers get stuck forever.
So you want to be a successful author, but your brain’s internal self-image says, “Who are you kidding? You’re just you. You’re an aspiring writer. You’re not one of them, those successful ones.”
And the brain hates inconsistency. If your behavior—writing a book—doesn’t match your identity as aspiring writer, your brain may sabotage the behavior to restore order.
So if you see yourself only as an aspiring writer, but then you go to finish your novel, your brain may sabotage that step. It doesn’t want you to move from aspiring writer to something else because it doesn’t know what the something else is, and it fears that it will be unsafe.
So solution number three is to force the identity shift. We have to change the label before you can get the contract, so to speak.
And because this is the hardest part, I’m giving you a three-part protocol to hack this.
Phase One: Gather Evidence (Brain Fights Writing Success Until You Build a Case)
Your brain is a lawyer. It builds a case based on facts. And right now, it has a lot of evidence that you are a dreamer or an aspiring writer or whatever. We need to give it evidence that you are now a professional.
But you don’t need a book contract for that.
Do you have a dedicated writing space? That’s evidence.
Do you have a specific time that you write every day and you never neglect that time? That’s evidence.
Do you invest in your craft with books or courses? That’s what professionals do.
Start pointing these things out to yourself.
“I am writing at 6:00 a.m. every day. That’s what a professional author does.”
Or: “I’m getting an editor to look this over. That means I’m taking the next professional step just like a best-selling author would.”
Phase Two: Borrow an Identity
Next is phase two, and this is the most fun part.
If you feel too scared to be “author,” then pretend to be somebody else. It’s great if you can give this new identity a name.
Your professional author Kaye, for example. Or your book author Barb. When you sit down at the computer, you aren’t the person who worries about laundry or bills. You are the author you dream of becoming right then in that moment.
Maybe put on a specific hat or play a specific music playlist. Literally dress the part if you want to.
When you act as if you are already successful, your brain stops fighting the work and starts assuming that this is just part of the job.
And the more clues you give the brain that you are this new identity, the more it starts to believe you.
Phase Three: Rehearse the Future Self
And finally, phase three. This is future self-actualization and is something that athletes use to win gold medals.
You can use it to finish your book.
So spend 2 minutes before you write closing your eyes and visualizing holding your completed book, and also the identity of that person.
- How does the author-you hold that book?
- What does their face look like?
And then take it a little bit farther.
- How does author-you walk?
- How does author-you answer the question, “What do you do?”
- How does that person feel when they open their laptop to work on their story?
By rehearsing these feelings, you’re teaching your nervous system that this new identity is safe. You are telling the identity guard, “Let us through. We belong here.”
If you take these steps every day—give your brain little rewards, take micro steps forward in visibility, and then shift identity gradually—you’re going to find that your brain starts working with you instead of against you.
You’ll notice it by how much easier your writing sessions feel, or how much more often you’re risking exposure, or the opportunities that start coming your way.
It takes some time to get your brain on board. But it’s worth it.
Brain Fights Writing Success—So Use A Physical Switch
If you want to give this a try, use what I call the physical identity switch.
Find one physical object. It could be a specific baseball cap, a coffee mug you never use for anything else, or even a specific ring that says writer to you.
This object is going to signify the writer you’re becoming. If you don’t already have something, then get something! It can be anything small that, when you look at it, it reminds you of who you want to become.
For the next 7 days, you only touch that object when you’re writing. The moment you stop writing, you take the hat or the ring off, or you put the mug away.
This creates a physical boundary that signals to your brain, we’re now entering the writer identity.
It sounds silly, but it actually helps separate your safe daily self from what your brain sees as your ambitious self.
Want More Help With Your Writing Brain?
If you found this helpful and you want to dive deeper into how your writing brain works, I’ve just opened the doors to a brand-new community called the Writer’s Brain Studio. It’s a place where we stop fighting our biology and start using it to write more books.
Also, if you’re still struggling to finish your story, be sure to check out my award-winning book, Escape the Writer’s Web. It helps you to personalize the solutions you use to actually get your book done.