Writing Wednesdays
My Head in the Morning
By Steven Pressfield | Published: April 18, 2012
When I get up in the morning, I’m almost always in a foul mood. I’m irritable, I’m short-tempered, I’m irascible. Coffee doesn’t help. I can’t watch Matt Lauer. If I have to drive anywhere I’m always pissed off at the other cars and muttering under my breath. I’m not happy with myself, I’m not happy with the world, I’m not happy with anything.
It’s all Resistance.
The perennially pissed-off Yosemite Sam. This is how my brain feels in the AM.
Why Resistance takes this form, I don’t know. Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you wake up peppy and cheerful. Maybe I’m demented. But this is what my day feels like out of the box.
I have to counteract it right away. The worst thing I can do is lie in bed. If I let myself remain horizontal, my head starts spiraling off into dangerously dark places. The day can get out of control in a hurry.
It took me years to understand that that voice in my head is not me. It’s Resistance.
Hovering before me as I wake up is the work I know I need to do that day. Inevitably that work is daunting and inescapably it brings up fear. Ineluctably I don’t want to do it. This fear and this avoidance combine to create the witch’s brew that boils and bubbles in the cauldron of my brain.
I must take action to counter it.
Two things work for me. They might not work for you, but they do for me. One is exercise, the other is getting out of the house.
I’m a gym person. That’s my medicine. You’ll see my car pulling in before dawn and me trashing what’s left of my body on the treadmill or under the bar in the squat machine.
The gym isn’t about exercise for me. It’s about beating Resistance. The purpose of working out, for me, is to give me a “little victory” (my friend Randy Wallace’s phrase). Momentum. Something I can build on.
From the moment my soles touch the floor in the morning, I am seeking to manage my emotions for that day.
There’s an analogy you see a lot in ancient texts like Plutarch or Plato. The analogy is to the driver of a chariot. The charioteer has four horses. Each one is strong and willful and each one wants to gallop in a different direction. The horseman has to channel that powerful, unruly energy and make it go where he wants it to—without reining it in so much that he stifles his chargers’ fiery spirits.
The chariot race from "Ben-Hur." We want that horsepower.
We want that spirit. We want that horsepower. We just don’t want it dragging us all over the arena and eventually crashing head-on into the wall.
If you’re like me, you work by projects. For me it’s books. My life isn’t a one-day-one-thing, the-next-day-another affair. I’m almost always working on some long-term enterprise. Resistance loves long-term enterprises. They’re so easy to sabotage. Resistance can derail them at the start, at any point in the middle, or at its favorite ambush site—the end.
Maybe that’s why I wake up so grumpy.
Resistance has seen me coming. It knows exactly where I’m going to be. It can take up a concealed position beside the road and wallop me broadside as I trot past.
What I’ve found is that if I can get past my bad-tempered, pissed-off self early, I can make the day go my way.
Once I’m working, I’m fine. In the groove, all moodiness vanishes. I’m cheerful, I’m upbeat, I’m ready to contribute and primed to help.
I have two friends, women, each of whom has confided to me recently that they wake up with severe anxiety.
I wonder if this is Resistance.
I wonder if my friends are like me, only their Resistance takes a slightly different form. Both women are artists. Both have high aspirations and both care deeply about their work. Both define themselves, to some extent, by their art and their enterprise.
Maybe I’m projecting my own stuff onto my friends, but if I were either of them, the first thing I’d tell myself is that that anxiety is not you … it’s Resistance. It springs from your fear of the day’s work and your passion to make of it something great.
Don’t dwell on that anxiety. Don’t overthink it.
Get up. Get moving. Do whatever you have to do to seize the reins of that chariot and to take command of those four unruly horses.
Fiery chargers are good. Horsepower is what we want. We just have to learn how to gain control of those magnificent, passionate beasts and to get them to take us where we want to go.
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Exactly what I neded to read this morning. Thanks, Steven. I’ve always thought of myself as an OK morning person. I don’t get grumpy. What I CAN do however is drift into internet land (like I’m doing now!) instead of starting the day properly for me (writing in my journal, meditating, going for a run) and if that takes over, I can feel the poison settling in. So, if you’ll excuse me…I have some resistance I need to put in its place.
Just the ass-kicking pep talk I need today – thank you
I need to manage those horses better and stop letting them roam all over the place.
So true! For me, putting both feet on the floor and going for a run, especially when I don’t feel like it, changes the day. Thank you for the reminder! Needed that today!….and “The War of Art” is just wonderful. Looking forward to your new book.
so true to!
if you wake up miserable, then you probably have not had a near death experience. ive had at least 3 in 62 yrs, the first when i was 16. i was hit head on by a drunk driver at 45mph. cars didnt have seatbelts back then so im Still amazed and quite Happy to wake up every day since the 1960s!!!
I wonder if Resistance cuts you “near death” folk some slack or simply avoids you completely, figuring you’re too chipper to be worth the effort?
Interesting thought, Angela. My wife, the woman I turned my life upside down for some years ago, almost died a year later. (We were told it was inevitable, but someone, she inevited [is too a word].)
For some time after she recovered (a process which took 18 months physically and 3 or 4 years to approximate her old self psychicly) I, the artist in the family, fought the good fight. Published 9 books. Wrote 150+ songs.
Then crashed. Resistance was, as the man says, hiding in a ditch to waylay me. For 6 months I’ve studiously avoided some very creative things I desperately want to ship, simply because I’d lost sight of the inestimable gift of one more day with my Best Beloved.
Last month we realized we needed to start fresh; new home, new life. Last week, we drove 1200 miles to a house we rented sight unseen, filled with loaned furniture from local friends.
And we’ve both been on fire from the day we decided.
Was Resistance biding its time, or was it just because I put down the missile-quenching shield of life-altering appreciation?
Dunno, but I’m writing like mad and practicing music every single day and I’ll take what I can get.
someone s/b somehow; d’oh
Beautiful, Joel. Just beautiful! Love is so expansive, Life so precious. You have a real testament to share with people – so many wait…& wait…& wait.
It was a joy to see this link in my Facebook timeline as I almost got caught in the web of social media distraction(resistance). Great article!
Love that you referred to Social Media as resistance. No doubt! I’ve had to learn, as Steven puts it, to get on that horse, charge toward the river, drink for a short (best predetermined) while, then get back on the trail. Otherwise, there’s a strong chance of drowning!
Steve, I was on my way back to bed and thought – oh I’ll see what Pressfield has to say and that will keep my head from the ‘dangerously dark places’ I go too. I had fully justified this… Now- I’m going for a walk…thanks. rlo
The chariot metaphor is extremely accurate…
I so agree about not overthinking the anxiety. When I used to do this, Resistance would tell me, “you wouldn’t be having this anxiety if you were doing a different project”. If I did the different project, Resistance would say, “maybe you need the first project after all to work through this anxiety”. What BS! Now I just start my morning ritual and get to work.
Brilliant post Steve, and very inspiring. My work first thing in the morning is writing, and that helps me beat the resistance.
The issue is that most people prefer to flow with their resistance, because they don’t even know it exists. Thanks for introducing us to this powerful and invisible force, and for providing us with the ways to beat it.
This help is immense!
Good stuff. Good to know that I”m not the only one for whom the first step is always so daunting. My first step is to get to my coffee shop, open my mac and put down my 750 words.