Being Scared: It’s a Good Thing

I have to confess, I’ve never been really into Halloween, although I do like the idea of putting on a persona and a costume and playing a role, which, when you think about it, is something most of us do nearly every day without even realizing it. Perhaps without as much makeup but we do a lot to get through the day and get stuff done.

That’s why I thought Halloween, a day of big scary things, would be as good a day as any to talk again about the big scary thing called resistance. I’ve riffed on resistance before. I read about it, I write about it and I live with it every day (having “three stars” on almost every Angry Birds level is my personal monument to resistance).

The by-product of resistance in my life

To recap, resistance is that insidious thing that keeps us from doing what we really want to do in life. Resistance is what we feel when our hearts say yes, but our practical minds say no. When we are feeling negative about something, anxious or depressed, it usually resistance in full action. Resistance is experienced in a million ways: writer’s block, procrastination, jitters. All that stuff rolled in to one annoying package.

Resistance is so powerful and prevalent that so much has been written on it. Steven Pressfield is the most prolific author on resistance, I think. Other great books that address resistance in creating: Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit, Jonathan Fields Uncertainty, Julia Cameron’s Artist Way series (any of her books) and Seth Godin’s Linchpin.

Knowing the great content that already exists, I choose to focus on how resistance appears in our mental state. It is very easy to overlook how resistance fuels our moods and colors our feelings.

It’s easy to say “I feel bored, restless, anxious, edgy, depressed, sad, tired” and not know where those feelings are coming from. Our consumer culture encourages us to just take a pill or buy something to make the bad feelings go away. We also tend to label these kinds of unpleasant feelings as the root cause of problems instead of being underlying symptoms.

As I’ve pointed out before, to great debate, I do not think depression is a disease that just happens without cause or reason, it’s a symptom that something is wrong with the way your are living. As we know, it’s not always easy to identify or admit that something is wrong or not fitting. Denial is a powerful defense mechanism, because it keeps us from admitting to things that scare us.

Resistance that it’s fueled by fear. Our “lizard brain” has the singular goal of keeping us safe from danger, so it interprets any kind of change as potential danger. So, stepping out and doing new (scary) things can feel very daunting. Fear not, it’s just your brain overreacting. The long term pain of staying small and not challenging yourself is so much greater that short-term fearful feelings, in the long run.

Resistance is also somehow directly proportional to the size of the challenge you are taking on. The bigger the deal it is, the more scared/anxious/nervous you are likely going to feel about doing it. So what happens when you do this big thing? You’ll feel scared/anxious and nervous and afterward, you’re most probably going to feel a surge of awesome, the “I can’t believe I just did that” feeling. Think of riding a roller coaster. If you’re anything like me, you are clenching on for dear life as it climbs, but when the ride is over, you find yourself laughing and saying, “that was so much fun, let’s do it again!”

If that’s how you feel when you do the big scary thing, what does it feel like when you chicken out and avoid doing the big scary thing? Well, it can take longer for the feeling of resistance to manifest when you are in avoidance mode, it’s a slower build-up, making it harder to spot. Feeling bored, feeling full of angst, or feeling guilty about things are but a few signs that you are dealing with full-on resistance.

When you don’t tend to those feelings by taking some action, these feelings don’t retreat, they just get bigger. Then you’ll find yourself “coping” aka doing all kinds of counter-productive things to stay sane. These counter-productive activities include: drinking too much, over eating/shopping/gambling/etc, creating drama in your relationships, making yourself sick, excessive procrastinating. These are signs you are trying to manage the intense feelings that resistance is giving you.

Author Julia Cameron gives the best piece of advice to writers. She says, “keep the drama on the page”, meaning if you are creating problems in your life and relationships that’s a clear sign you need to be writing. Even if you are not a writer, they are good words to live by and apply to your “thing” because as we know the ripple effect of creating drama distracts us further and further from pursuing goals and dreams that matter.

Aside from denial and feeling like crap, how else does resistance show up? Rationalization is a big flag of resistance. Rationalization is a defense mechanism where we use logic and “facts” to justify why we are taking or not taking a particular course of action, and rationalizations tend to almost always be nothing but pure bullshit. Have you ever said to yourself “I can eat this cheeseburger, because I went for a run today” (that’s rationalization and trust me, there’s more calories in that burger than you expended running, even though no one wants to believe that–denial). In less glamorous terms, this is also known as “excuse making,” so yeah, it’s something all of us do. Denial and rationalization go hand in hand. Think of the reasons why you have told yourself you cannot do THE THING you need to do and there’s your resistance.

If resistance is this big and badass, can it be conquered? Absolutely. It’s one of those things, kind of like eating, that has to be done on a daily basis, it cannot be conquered for once and for all. Think about it, you can’t eat once to hold you over for the rest of your life. But, the bottom line is, when you get used to combatting something on a daily basis, you get better at beating it.

The authors I mentioned earlier all have great tips in their writing on how to combat resistance in all of it’s forms: procrastination, excuse-making, anxiety, guilt. The thread that underlies all of this advice is that of INFRASTRUCTURE, which happens to be one of my favorite words.

By infrastructure, I mean, habits, rituals, ways of thinking and being that support your endeavors. Twyla Tharp says, “in order to be creative, you have to prepare to be creative”. In order to get past resistance, we have to let go of the mythical belief that things can only happen when we get inspired. No, you have to create structure to make the work happen. If we only worked out when we “felt like it” not many workouts would get done.

Infrastructure will vary for everyone. But first and foremost it involves knowing that you will never be 100 percent “ready.” The stars won’t ever align, you won’t ever been completely healed of all past hurts. You just have to start somewhere and do something. That’s the basis of your infrastructure. How you structure your rituals and habits is a matter of figuring out specifically what works for you, knowing that simply showing up is more than half the battle is key.

So think about something in your life that you know in your bones you know you want to do. That could be creating something, changing something, traveling somewhere, starting or ending a relationship, job, hobby, skill, business anything, the choices are endless. How do you feel when you think about doing this, what I call the “BIG SCARY THING”? You probably feel excited, pumped up, joyous when you simply think about it. But what do you feel when you start to take a small (or big) action to actually do the thing (like pick up the phone, open a blank document, fill out an application, for example)? Feel scared, nervous, jittery? That’s your resistance, and it is not a sign you should NOT do the big scary thing. Quite the contrary. When you feel this, you now know what you MUST DO.

It’s okay to be scared to death, in fact it’s preferable. BOO!

Happy Halloween!

Jackie Dotson is the founder of Jackie Dotson, LCSW in Sacramento, CA, as well as the co-host of The Powder Keg of Awesome Podcast.

Engage with Jackie on Twitter: @jackiedotson or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Jackie.Dotson.LCSW.

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