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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I just don’t function well much before 10am. Whatever I do – work, go to the gym – doesn’t matter. My resistance hits between noon and 2pm. If I could work from 5pm to midnight or so – I would be so much more productive.
Steve
Continued thanks for your honesty and bravery in posting like this. It’s more help than you know.
I call mine “The Toad”. Slimy, greedy and very hard to catch.
What works for me is “Morning Pages” (ala Julia Cameron). The quicker I can get to those the better my day is going to be.
Andrew
It is a little spooky, but this reads as though you crawled through my mind, identified my Resistance, and spoke directly to me.
I run into the same wall every morning as my reluctant self conjures up barrier after barrier, unproductive task after unproductive task–every excuse in the world to avoid the work and words that matter.
Thank you for reminding me that my first duty is to assembling and shipping the words.
Thank you for hitting the nail right on the head!
Guy
GREAT post and exactly what I needed to hear this AM. Thanks!
Elaine
I think you’re on the money in your assessment of your gal pals. I say this because mostly I’m super happy in the morning, but sometimes I wake up anxious for no good reason. At least none I can fathom. That Resistance is a pretty slick fellow I must say, because even though I’ve read The War of Art, I didn’t recognise what was going on. It took this post to do that. Muchas gracias!
I’m an am gym person as well. I feel the years of sports injuries each morning and it doesn’t really go away until I hit the weights.
It is a good thing to run into people with bad dispositions in the a.m. I used to think opening my eyes was the saddest thing I could do each morning. My son of 22 had died on his motorcycle. My other two sons have wandered far away and my situation was looking very grim. So, I knew I had to change the way I was letting sadness and being ill with lupus for years, bind me to this obstinate mind-set. Now I have found a place for routine. I put my feet on the floor, and I lean forward and beg God to pull me through this new direction I have chosen for my life. You are a very good writer. Essays could keep magazines alive. Send this to Wired or GQ. It is truly not something wise to waste. Kitty Kelso
Great post Steven. In Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits, he calls them the Daily Private Victory.
They are those things we do, typically at the start of our day, that provide a micro sense of accomplishment.
We can then catalyze that satisfaction into fuel to beat Resistance.
As a singer and actress, I don’t get “stage fright”. I get what I call “stage annoyance”. At about 3pm, if the call is 6pm, I start whining in my head that I have to go to the theatre and sing in front of people. I mean, like… there’s so much good stuff on television that I’ll be missing. I trudge to the theatre, get into makeup and costume, warm up… and then can’t wait to go on. There’s a rational part of my brain that knows this is insane, but it happens every damn time.
I never thought of this as Resistance before, but it certainly walk like that duck. I’m in a show in May. I’m going to face my stage annoyance head-on and call it what it by name this time.
Thanks, Steve.
~A~
I found this pretty funny, Steve, because you explained exactly how I feel every morning. I had to laugh at myself for being so unnecessarily grumpy
.