The Stigma of Asking for Help: Writer’s block isn’t a motivation problem

‘I’m working in it’ (is a Social Shield)

Do you know how many researchers struggle to write? I don't either, and frankly it doesn't matter. What matters is if you struggle.

And I know this because I struggle. Like right now.

I'm sitting here trying to write a blog post about writer's block and the stigma of asking for help, and what I'm actually doing is talking it through with someone else first, mapping the ideas out loud before I can get them onto the page. My thinking is there; fully formed, somewhere. But the packaging? The packaging is another problem entirely.

I have a lot of deep thoughts I struggle to package. I suspect you do too.

That gap, between the thinking and the writing, is where most of us in this space of research live. And the story we tell ourselves about that gap is almost always the same: I'm not motivated enough. I'm not disciplined enough. I'm not ready yet. Tomorrow I'll start.

But here's what I've come to believe, after years of writing my own papers, supervising students, coaching researchers, and yes, still struggling myself: the gap isn't a motivation problem. It's not even really a writing problem. It's something deeper than that, something the institution built and then handed to us without instructions.

Publish or Perish: The Pressure We Can All See

Let's start with what we can see.

Publish or perish isn't a metaphor. It's a productivity regime with real consequences: for your contract, your funding, your reputation, your sense of whether you belong in the room at all. The pressure is structural and it is relentless, and most of us have learned to perform productivity under it whether or not we're actually producing anything.

I spent years doing exactly that. Saying "I'm working on a paper" in the same tone I'd use to say "I'm fine," which is to say, as a social shield rather than a status update. It kept the anxiety at a manageable distance. It also kept the paper exactly where it was—a work in progress.

And this is where most conversations about writer's block stop. At the surface. At the performance. At the time management tips and the writing habit advice and the thirty-seven strategies for getting words on the page. I'm even guilty of writing that blog. The positive feedback it got is not lost on me.

We do all of this as if the problem were scheduling.

It isn't.

The pressure of publish or perish is real, but it's the visible layer. What it produces underneath, in the body and mind of the individual researcher, is something more specific and more interesting. And considerably harder to name out loud.

The Wicked Problem Nobody Mentioned in Your Methods Training

Here's what's actually going on.

There's a concept called a wicked problem in design and planning theory. Not wicked as in evil, though it can feel that way. Wicked as in: a problem that cannot be solved by one person working alone, that changes shape every time you try to address it, and that has no single right solution. Urban poverty is a wicked problem. Climate change is a wicked problem—some even call it a super wicked problem. In any case, you cannot think your way out of a wicked problem from inside it.

Writing a journal paper is a wicked problem.

Not because writing is inherently impossible, but because the conditions under which we do it make it structurally unsolvable in isolation. The argument isn't fully formed until it's written. The writing can't happen until the argument is formed. You need a reader to know if it's working, but you can't show anyone until it's ready, but it can't get ready without a reader. Around and around.

Design programs (like the one I taught in) understand this implicitly. The entire pedagogy is built on critique: desk crits, pin-ups, charrettes, peer review before anything is finished. The assumption in design education is that design problems cannot be solved alone. And yet, as I watched my own design students struggle through it, the emotional cost of sharing their unfinished work was enormous. The vulnerability of the half-formed idea in a room full of peers with a critical eye. Depression rates in design programs are among the highest in higher education. The critique culture extracts a price, but it also prepares them for real-world practice through timely feedback in a way that traditional lecture-based models cannot train for.

Academic writing has the same wicked structure but none of the built-in critique culture. Worse, it has an explicit norm running in the opposite direction. You are expected to produce finished, authoritative work from behind a closed door. Alone. The message, spoken or not, is that needing help is evidence of not belonging.

So the shame of asking for help isn't a personal weakness. It's a rational response to an irrational system.

And underneath that shame is something more specific than a fear of judgment. It's a threat to identity. To your identity. To my identity. In a culture built entirely on individual intellectual authority, the moment we say "I'm stuck and I need help," we are not just admitting a logistical problem. We are putting our claim to expertise on the table. That's not procrastination. That's not laziness. That's self-protection.

The institution built this. Then handed it to you without instructions. And then wondered why you weren't writing.

Sanctioned Vulnerability (Or: You Already Do This)

So what do we do with this?

Not fix it. The institution isn't changing on our timeline. But we can change the conditions under which we work inside it, which is actually the most effective design response to a wicked problem. You don't solve a wicked problem. You change the structure around it.

And the simplest structural change available to any researcher, at any stage, is this: stop writing alone.

I know how that sounds. You've been told, implicitly and explicitly, that your ideas are yours to develop, yours to defend, yours to deliver fully formed to the page. Asking for help before that feels like cheating, or worse, like proof that you shouldn't be here—and (worst case, but it happens) what if someone steals your ideas? I've felt that. Most of the researchers I work with have felt that.

But consider what you already accept without question: peer review. You submit your finished work to strangers for critique, and you call it rigorous. You revise based on their feedback, sometimes substantial feedback, and you call the result your own. Nobody questions your intellectual authority because you responded to a reviewer's comments. The system built that in.

So why does asking for help before submission feel categorically different? What exactly are we protecting, and from whom?

The answer, I think, is that peer review happens after the door is closed. It's sanctioned vulnerability, vulnerability with a process around it, vulnerability that the institution permits. Asking for help while the work is still forming is unsanctioned. It's vulnerability without the paperwork.

That distinction is worth taking a moment to sit with. Because the cost of unsanctioned vulnerability—the shame, the avoidance, the paper that stays exactly where it is—is real. And the cost of never asking is also real, we just don't account for it as clearly.

Here is what I know from the other side of this: the researchers who ask for help earlier write better papers. Not because someone else wrote it for them. Because thinking out loud with a trusted reader changes the quality of the thinking. Because having someone ask "what is your actual argument here?" at the right moment saves months of circular drafting. Because knowing someone else is in the room, even just to witness the process, makes the wicked problem surmountable. Name it; climb it.

There’s no weakness in your process. That's the process working correctly.

We Were Never Supposed to Write Alone

So here's what I offer you instead of another list of writing tips. (Although, let me know if you want tips because I have no lack of them to share). My invitation:

Every week I open a Zoom room for researchers to write alongside each other. No instruction, no agenda. Just one hour of quiet, focused writing time with other people doing the same thing. Afterward, anyone who wants to stay joins 30 minutes of open Q&A. It's called Write with Me, it's free, and it runs twice a week to accommodate different time zones.

It's a small structural change. But that's the point.

One of the researchers I worked with earlier in my career was Li Wenpei, a PhD candidate at the National University of Singapore. Here is what she said about our work together:

"Your approach of guiding my thinking with questions was especially helpful. While you might provide an answer at the moment, I continued to seek new solutions in different contexts. Our weekly meetings pushed me to summarize my challenges and reflect on my progress, fostering deeper thinking and greater improvement in my writing."

What Li Wenpei is describing isn't a writing trick. It's a change in conditions. Someone in the room asking the right questions at the right moment. The wicked problem becoming, slowly, attainable.

You don't have to write alone. You were never supposed to.

If you're ready to stop writing alone, join us. Tuesdays and Thursdays, whenever you can make it, skip it when you can't. Register here.

And if you're not sure whether you need more than a writing session, stay tuned. A diagnostic tool is coming soon to help you figure out exactly where you're stuck and what kind of support might actually help.

Ready to take your pilot study from findings to first draft? The Draft It! Essential 10-Week Workshop is a self-paced course designed to guide you through preparing your first draft for submission to a peer-reviewed journal — with tutorials, a community discussion board, and a workbook to keep you moving toward a finished draft. Register today and at the same time join the Publish It! Community for free and connect with other academic writers navigating the same path.

Footnotes

Don’t forget to check out my new video this month on selecting citation software here.

You can find it in the Publish It! Library 

Or watch on the Publish It! YouTube channel. I upload new content monthly so subscribe if you are interested!

If you are ready to Draft It! check out The Essential 10-Week Workshop – a self-paced course with tutorials, community discussion board, and workbook designed to guide you in preparing your first draft in 10 weeks for submission to a peer reviewed journal!  

And while you are at it—join the Publish It! Community and share your experiences with other academic writers. It’s free!