If you've been struggling to do things you know you want to do, it makes sense that you might try to come at the issue through building better work habits—and not just because of the ubiquity of Atomic Habits and the 47 other habit books published in the last five years.
Turning to habit-formation also makes sense because of the particular kind of experience that internal resistance is. Most often, avoiding our work seems to happen on some kind of weird autopilot. One minute you're looking at your afternoon and realising you have time to attack that one task you've been dreading —and the next minute you're lost in your IG feed or hitting the couch for a nap.
Building new habits can seem like the perfect antidote to this negative autopilot, because the entire point of habit formation is to make things automatic. Clearly if we could just get ourselves to do the right things automatically instead of the wrong things, then we would no longer have a problem.
But there are key differences between building a habit and overcoming internal resistance, which have to do with different experiences of inertia and motivation, cost and benefit, repetition and reward. And that means that even the most powerful strategies for habit formation won't usually trump our resistance.
I think it's worth understanding exactly why habit isn’t helpful here, for a couple of reasons. First, if you're trying habit-formation as a solution to internal resistance, you're probably blaming yourself when it doesn’t work. Seeing why habit is simply not the right tool for the job can help dial down some of this self-recrimination.
Second, when we understand why we can't beat resistance through better habits, we also understand something crucial about how internal resistance actually works. And that gives us a big advantage in finding a path that can actually take us toward the exit.
We can start by considering the so-called keystone habit of making the bed. Or, more precisely, let’s start with not making the bed, and why someone might not bother. Perhaps they never saw the point of doing something they'd just be undoing in 16 hours. Or they're always in a hurry in the mornings, and it hasn't seemed worth allotting any of their scarce time to bed-making. Whatever it is, the reason likely amounts to seeing bed-making as a low-return expenditure of time and energy. Case closed. As the kids would say, it's not that deep.
But because it’s not that deep, it’s also pretty easy to revise this implicit bed-making cost-benefit analysis, provided the person comes to believe there's sufficient benefit to putting in that extra bit of time and energy required. If they see enough benefit, they'll have the motivation to try adding the task into their day. And if they follow the habit-formation script of cues/repetition/reward, they can put bed-making on autopilot in a few weeks.
Now let's compare this bed-making scenario to one that involves internal resistance. I had an aspiring-writer client—let's call her Megan—who wanted to spend some time reading every morning before work. Megan's goal seemed to her like a prime target for habit formation, given that it involved a small shift in her daily routine. But she wasn't able to get any traction through the habit route—not because she didn't try hard enough, but because habit-formation failed to address the particular way cost and benefit work in internal resistance.
Here's what I mean. In the case of the unmade bed, we started with an obvious cost for what looked like very little benefit. The bed didn't get made because the cost of doing it was obvious while the benefit seemed nonexistent.
But in Megan's case—as in every case of internal resistance—precisely the opposite was true. Megan knew exactly why it would benefit her writing to read more. What she didn't know was why she couldn’t do it.
Even when she factored in the time and effort of ring-fencing 10 minutes in her busy mornings or staying out of her email inbox until she got to work, the benefit of feeding her writer's brain with ideas and inspiration clearly outweighed the minimal costs involved. If anything, the cost of not reading every day seemed like the most weighty factor in the entire calculus. With each day she neither read nor wrote, Megan felt her connection to her writer-self was growing more tenuous, and it was painful and frightening.
In this situation, the process our bed-maker followed—identify the benefit and repeat the behaviour—is so unhelpful as to be almost nonsensical. For one thing, Megan is already crystal clear on the benefit she would get from spending this time reading. And for another, despite this clear benefit, she can't seem to do it at all, much less on repeat. The instructions for resolving internal resistance through habit formation are basically: just repeat the thing you can’t do until doing it becomes effortless. Easy-peasy! And then we blame OURSELVES when we can't follow these instructions successfully.
If we want to identify an approach more helpful than this non-solution, we need to attend to the other major difference between the non-reading and non–bed-making scenarios. And that is this: in cases of internal resistance, it really is that deep. Specifically, there is always a deeper, implicit cost-benefit analysis at work that our brains have not yet shared with us. In Megan’s case, for example, I knew that her brain had to perceive a significant, unspoken cost to doing her morning reading, or she would be able to do it.
I knew that because when something provides a big, important benefit—like Megan's connection to her writer-self—and only costs a very small amount of time and effort, we fucking do it. And this is true even if, like Megan and probably most people reading this, you're convinced you're supremely lazy or lacking in self-control. Megan got a BA in a subject she wasn't thrilled about and pays her taxes every year. She is 100% capable of trading the short-term cost of 10 minutes of her morning for the long-term benefit of advancing in the thing she cares most about doing with her life. And that's true of everyone reading this email. If you managed to graduate from high school—hell, if you graduated from potty training—you are clearly capable of identifying and paying a smaller cost for a larger future benefit.
All of which means: Megan's reading avoidance did seem advantageous to her brain in some way, we just hadn't figured out how. Something was tipping the scales in a way that made choosing not to read feel like the better option. And soon, using the discovery process I created for internal resistance issues, we found it. In essence, Megan had some deep beliefs stored in her brain about what committing to artistic success would look like, and who in her life it might be left behind if she succeeded. Spending time every day on her writing came with a huge hidden cost attached: the potential loss of connections that at times had felt necessary to her survival. And that meant the gains to her writing self—which she kept trying to use as motivation—were actually part of the threat her brain was trying to hold at bay.
Each morning when she turned away from the book on her nightstand and picked up the laptop instead—the moment which seemed like giving in to some trivial and self-destructive impulse—her brain was acting to protect her from something that it thought was even worse than losing her writing self. But because she had no idea that this even worse thing even existed, much less that it was weighting the scale, all she could see was her failure to do something that mattered profoundly to her. The experience of daily self-betrayal was so deeply shitty that it finally brought her to coaching.
This is what internal resistance is: the experience of paying what feels like an unbearably, preposterously high cost for a benefit that is 100% invisible to us—but which a deep, forceful, non-communicative part of our brain believes is essential to our emotional survival.
If you take only one thing away from this email—besides the absurdity of trying to resolve internal resistance through habit-formation—let it be this: our brains do not do this shit lightly. They always, always, always have a profound and powerful belief that the resistance they are creating is to our benefit. If the belief wasn't deep, we'd already know about it. And if it wasn't powerful, it wouldn't have the force to push back on other things we want so much, like Megan's connection to her writer self.
Actually there is one other take away I want to share, and it's this: just because habit isn't the solution doesn't mean there is no solution. The first step is to ask: if this thing that feels like painful pointless relentless self-betrayal EVERY FRICKING DAY were actually my brain trying to protect me—then what could it be afraid will happen?
You might need help to find the answer, but also you might not. But either way, know that it exists.
Escaping internal resistance happens every day. Megan is writing. My other former clients are producing plays and coding drivers and passing their qualifying exams and moving to Italy and countless other things. You can find a way to understand and dissolve your brain’s hidden commitments that works for you. It’s out there. It just won’t be fucking habits.
PS. I'm down to the last few slots for the January 2024 intake of Blazing Talents, my 12-week small-group programme. Finding the hidden logic of internal resistance and resovling it for good is what we do in this programme all day, every day. And it works—guaranteed. If you want to know more, book a consult here.