Hello stuckness my old friend
Last week, I spent an entire day fighting myself.
Last week something happened that is now pretty infrequent: I lost a whole day to internal resistance.
I was supposed to deal with the mountain of clean clothes overflowing my laundry basket. I did not. I was supposed to call my gas and electric supplier to continue my epic battle for the refund I'm owed. I did not. I was supposed to make progress on a new essay, and hoo boy did I not. I spent about an hour revising the same lacklustre paragraph and pretty much proving to myself that the essay was un-writeable, after which I slunk away.
I honestly can't tell you exactly what I did for the other seven hours, only that it in no way resembled a fun day off. (I wish I was like some of my clients, who obsessively clean when they’re dealing with intense avoidance, but I'm more likely to leave a trail of crumbs behind me.) If you've had days like this, you know that your actual activities kind of fade from view, because what you're really doing is struggling. You're trying whatever you can think of to get yourself to do the thing. And then you're still not doing it. You're like someone conducting an increasingly desperate hostage negotiation, and you are also the hostage.
I wound up the day with what is currently my ultimate form of self-sabotage: staying up way too late. I am living my best life when I’m up at six, so lights out at 3 am is a great way to ensure another crappy day will follow the one I just had.
By the next morning, I was exhausted and my brain was on a rampage. I tried to remind it how rarely I have days like this now, but my brain was not interested in my progress. It was only interested in my lack thereof. As in: Shouldn't you have graduated from avoidance by now? Wasn't the goal not to have days like this ever? When are you going to be cured already?
When I heard that last question in my head, something clicked. That was the moment when all the work I've done on internal resistance, for myself and for my clients, made itself felt. Because I realised I knew exactly how to ensure that I no longer experienced it again. I only had to do one thing:
Stop levelling up.
The reason I couldn't get traction yesterday was obvious as soon as I had this realisation. I’ve gotten used to things being easier. I can launch right into the kind of work that I used to have to claw myself toward by inches. I can look back at a year and remember the isolated times I spent in resistance, rather than trying to identify some productive days within a sea of slog. But the essay I'm writing now is considerably harder and riskier than what's now my norm. My resistance-bar may be higher than it used to be, but I'm currently pushing right at it. And that meant my brain had started freaking out.
So if I wanted to spend the rest of my life without experiencing any internal resistance, all I had to do was stick with the status quo. I just needed to focus on all the things that used to feel impossible, and stop trying to make what currently feels impossible do-able. Then my brain would settle down and I could have an avoidance-free life.
Yeah, I wasn't going to do that.
That's one thing about people who have dealt with internal resistance for much of their lives. We don’t quit easy, or we would have given up a long fucking time ago.
Once I understood what the options really were, I could also see the biggest difference between how I used to feel and how things look today. It feels like I have a choice. I can choose to level up, and it will be hard. My brain will not like it, and I’ll have occasional lost days. Or I could choose the status quo, and that would be hard in other ways. (Eventually I’d get bored and restive and probably start looking for thrills in less beneficial places than at my desk.) Either way, the decision would be about how I want to spend my time, not about how to ward of emotional apocalypse.
At this point, I noticed something funny about my day of resistance. My brain already knew which option I was going to choose. That was part of why the experience was so miserable. Subjecting me to a day of struggle was a protest move, a way of delaying the inevitable. My brain was throwing a tantrum like a kid who already knows they won't get their way—complete with refusing to go to bed on time.
But even at its worst, my brain could not quite work up the kind of agonising struggle against myself that I used to deal with almost daily. I did not like my interlude of avoidance, but it didn't feel apocalyptic. It was more just a bummer. Sort of like getting ready to leave on a trip and finding out you have to renew your driver’s license in person first. It’s annoying and an ass-ache and nobody enjoys it. It takes up more of your time than you expected. It can cause you to throw a full-on tantrum. But what’s hanging in the balance isn’t your viability as a human. It’s a journey to a place where you really want to go. And while the experience isn’t pleasant, it’s also not your ultimate destination.
After I thought all this through while making coffee that morning, I sat down and wrote the best 500 words of the new essay that I've written so far. What had felt like a conceptual impasse that would require days to resolve proved to be a tricky transition that I fixed in a few minutes. I can see where I need to take the piece next. I can see that it will happen.
But I only got there because I eventually remembered the eternal lesson of internal resistance, which is how we escape the horrific, threat-of-emotional-apocalypse version of avoidance in the first place. The lesson is this: internal resistance is information. It's a coded message from the part of us that looked at our plans and thought, Oh, we are SO not doing that.
There are ways of dealing with this part of our brain, so it no longer sees what you’re trying to do as too emotionally freighted to risk. But to start dealing, we have to start by getting curious. In my case, I had to stop insisting that I should be over this experience and start asking why that might not actually be true. I had to hit pause on the self-recrimination and investigate instead.
And to do that, I had to face reality: that part of my brain that wanted to level up wasn’t going anywhere. Even if I had decided to coast, that part wouldn’t have stopped nudging at me. Just like it wouldn’t let me give up when I was a 20-something secretary who had chickened out on grad school the first time around and felt like I’d already failed the life I was supposed to have. Maybe the could-have-been-a-contender vibes wouldn’t be as strong, because at this point I’ve now done a lot of things I set out to do. But I still would still have been hit with those telltale stabs of envy whenever I saw people creating at that higher level I’d abandoned.
Internal resistance is sticky, but that part of us it’s fighting back is relentless. It keeps reminding us of our untapped potential when we wish it would just shut the fuck up already. For betting or worse, there seems to be no true off-ramp from wanting to put what’s inside of us into the world. That means we’ll always encounter some amount of resistance, because we’ll always be pushed by that persistent, niggling, indelible voice that wants us to do more than we’re comfortable with yet. But it also means that the resistance can never really win.
If you want help investigating your own internal resistance, you can check out my free mini-course How to Stop Avoiding Stuff. You’ll learn a way to respond on those lost days that will help you get traction. Sign up to get it here. And if you’ve already gone through the course and you want a refresher, grab a copy of my quick Investigate Don’t Recriminate guide here. Any questions, let me know.