online body doubling sessions

Hi Lucy here! The Embrace Your Space Patreon is a place for neurodivergent folk to meet and find support in gentle ways.

Currently we’re focusing on making regular online body doubling sessions for both our national and international cohort.

But what is body doubling all about?

A lot of neurodivergent folk experience difficulty concentrating to get things done, particularly if they need a certain type of focus. We might have received feedback in the past about our laziness or distractability, confusion by teachers or managers as to why we didn’t “just do it”. And so we don’t really move into understanding our experience of difficulty concentrating and stay in circles of stuckness.

Some of the reasons why we might struggle to get tasks done are:

• Because they’re very boring and provide no tangible sense of reward or success at the end and so having enough dopamine to get the task done is a struggle to begin with. These can include paying bills, housework and life admin.

• Because there are multiple steps involved in the task and one of these might be an obstacle. For me, a good example of this is when I need to collaborate with someone i.e. booking an appointment, following up an incorrect charge or anything that involves another person input in order for my task to go ahead.

• Another struggle point can be fear of failure and success, I struggle with this one big time when it comes to writing. I think I am scared of both messing up/not being good enough and I also fear getting any sort of attention and that this might create subsequent steps that I have to do. As such, I haven’t done any writing for most of the year, and this is a big one I want to work on with the assistance of body doubling.

Body doubling to get tasks done is INCREDIBLY helpful, and we’re still figuring out why. Some of the reasons I have come across, or have noticed myself are:

• The sense of camaraderie with another person/s also concentrating.

• The sense of being anchored by someone else, I don’t have words to describe this perfectly, but it’s like another person creates a “wholeness” to a period of time, and it’s harder to step out of this than it is when I’m by myself. When I’m by myself, time pockets are much more fluid, and I slip between them too easily, getting distracted and not returning to what I was originally doing.

• The ability to focus more as the other person may see when you get distracted and redirect you.

• The possibility to ask for help or check something; when I’m by myself this would usually end in a task stopping if I hit an obstacle, but if there’s the ability to problem solve with someone else, I’m much more likely to keep going.

  
  

These are some of the reasons I find body doubling helpful, and yet I wasn’t familiar with the term OR concept until two years ago. Why wasn’t this something I learnt in school or university? And when I mention it to other people, they’re often confused as to the point of it.

Creating body doubling spaces for neurodivergent folks not only holds that space once or twice a week, but it also grows the awareness of the practice and hopefully spreads to other people who may also find it helpful.

At the moment, the times and dates for these sessions are booked a week or two in advance, but the aim is for them to be regular weekly sessions, with each weekly session being at a different time to suit different time zones and working styles.

Currently the patreon membership is $7 a month and you get access to all of the body doubling sessions which are 1.5 hours and access to an exclusive Discord server where we share our art, our works in progress, our special interests and also reminders for the sessions. Visit Embrace Your Space for more information.

Embrace this Space is Lucy's practice and is a magical part of Rainbow Muse Collective