How To Stop Fighting Against Yourself, and What To Do Instead
Have you ever done something that you were completely afraid of doing? Like, you're terrified of heights but you got talked into paragliding? Or you're terrified of dark water or the ocean, but you got talked into taking surfing lessons?
There's a process to the feelings (in my experience), where at first you are completely a mess, fighting against the thing, when terror has you completely in it's clutches. You're trying to get up on the surfboard, but you keep falling off and getting battered by the waves, which just intensifies the overwhelming feeling of wanting to quit.
Then one person in your group gets it, and you really start judging yourself. Defeating thoughts start to creep in, like, "this is stupid, I'll never get it". The falling off isn't nearly as bad as you thought it would be, and you're actually just fine, but the fear has you. And the fact that someone else just got up on their board, and you didn't, justifies what you were afraid of in the first place: embarrassment, shame, failure. And maybe this time, you let those feelings win and go sit on the beach, mad at yourself, disappointed, ashamed. . .and also vindicated by the fact that you couldn't stand up on the surfboard.
But.
Let's imagine instead that you don't quit. You don't give up and sit on the beach, and instead choose to stay at it for the entire lesson. You keep falling. But you keep getting back on. You look around and see that everyone else is dong the same thing - falling and getting back on - and then someone gets it! And this time, instead of letting that defeat you, you cheer for them, and watch them, and review in your mind what they did. Then someone else gets it. And another. You watch. And you think, "I'm just going to try what they did, and see what happens..."
And this time, when you try to stand up...
IT WORKS. You're standing! Your internal alarms settle a bit and you start to enjoy it. You're still scared, but alongside the fear, there is excitement, joy...! You're doing it! For 3.7 seconds!!! You hear others cheering for you. Exhilarating!
And then you fall.
But you're a little braver now. You still have a ton of evidence that it won't work, but you also have the tiniest bit of proof that you can do it now... so you go again.
This time, when you fall, you get hurt. You hit a rock. You get tumbled a little too hard, your soft body meets the reef. Not bad hurt, but there is pain, maybe scrapes and bruises. And that faith you felt just moments ago falters. You start to think that you could go again...but maybe you shouldn't. Your imagination runs wild. You create monsters out of the littlest things. You imagine a dolphin on the horizon is a shark who has decided you look like a tasty snack, and corals made of glass shards are reaching up for you from below the dark water. The fear settles back in, potent, debilitating.
This is the moment that you choose:
Will you sit on the beach again, defeated by your own thoughts, feeling guilt, feeling shame, feeling disappointment, and making up stories in your head about why it's ok to quit while you’re ahead? How it’s safer on the beach and, actually, it’s the smarter decision? That THIS is why you didn’t want to go in the first place! How everyone else who keeps going is stupid for one reason or another...
Or will you paddle your surfboard back into the waves?
. . .
Internal conflict. This is something that I’ve battled with my entire life. It seems like one minute I have complete clarity, and the next, a conflicting desire comes in and suddenly I’m in a gridlock of shame, self-criticism, and fear. I will beat myself up like this for a long time before I finally find a resolution, and the resulting damage could eat away at my self-trust and confidence for years.
In fact, this blog is a perfect example of that.
I’ve spent about 20 years now starting blogs and deleting them. If we go back that far, the only social media that existed was MySpace. I used mIRC to message friends. I had a (mostly empty) LiveJournal because I experienced deep shame and overwhelming fear that I would write something that someone would think was wrong, and tell me that they thought - no, KNEW - I was a hack, a stupid, no-good, idiotic, worthless hack.
I was writing articles and scrapping them. Starting books and abandoning them. 20 years. I let myself be more afraid of what strangers on the internet could say rather than doing THE THING for t w e n t y y e a r s.
Because I was afraid of falling off my surfboard. Afraid of the sharks in the water, real or imagined. Afraid of getting banged up on the reef. I was more scared of that than sitting on the beach. And oh, did I ever rally against the calling like my life depended on it. I sat my butt on the beach, telling myself all sorts of stories. Sometimes, the guilt and the beckoning was too loud and I’d walk over and dip a toe…and then the fear would send me back to the beach again, crumbling a little more each time I let it win.
If this sounds familiar to you, you may be wondering: how do we stop, and what do we do instead?
Why We Fight With Ourselves
Neuroscience shows in study after study that the bulk of our daily lives is not directed by conscious thought, but by following routines programmed by repetition. That sounds a little unnerving, when you consider that nearly 50% of what we do everyday we do without even thinking about it, but this evolutionary quirk serves an important purpose: we are continuously bombarded with sensory stimuli in our environments, and our brains have to filter out that which is not directly tied to our imminent survival. Allowing habitual patterns of behavior to become a program, that frees up more brain power to focus on more important things, like oncoming traffic when we’re crossing the street, etc. Half the time we are conscious of our behavior, and half the time, we’re just following our internal protocol, created by the stuff we’ve done often enough to wear a little neuron trail in our gray matter.
As we all know, the habits that we create are not always in our best interests, and reasons for these self-limiting, and sometimes self-destructive, patterns always feel nuanced, don’t they? But at the root, we fight with ourselves because we have two or more conflicting feelings about a situation. It might look like a “head vs. heart” (logic versus emotions) conflict, or the “Self vs. Others” (what I Want versus an obligation to Others), or as simple as conscious vs. unconscious - our desired behavior running up against our programmed behavior.
And we all know what it looks like when it happens: self-doubt, negative self-talk, self-sabotage, stories that keep us stuck, no matter how much we want to break through the membrane to bask in the light of triumph… but we can’t. The fear keeps us chained to the metaphorical beach.
So what do we do?
Breaking the Roots Apart: Interrupting the Self-Abandoning Patterns
When you transplant a potted plant, one of the things that you have to do is break the roots apart a little so they can grow into the new space. They’ve gotten used to the container they were in and started choking themselves, so you have to tease them loose to get the plant to stop hurting itself and grow into it’s new space.
Allowing ourselves to live in a too-small container looks like self-destructive and self-abandoning habits. We give up on expanding and create limitations, or build a metaphorical container - a system of habitual patterns - that keep us the right size for that smaller life. And habits are hard to break, but not impossible to break.
I personally think the first step is to make a pact with yourself to change. Now, if you’re used to breaking promises to yourself, this might be the most difficult part, and you might have to find an Accountibility Buddy. Keeping promises to someone else can feel easier if you are afraid of letting them down, and that extra emotional tie can keep you focused on the goal at hand.
That said, I highly recommend working on this tendency to break your promises to yourself at the same time. Reason why: Because if you always outsource your power and personal authority to others, how will you ever learn to be accountable to yourself? How will you ever build trust with yourself? How will you ever build the kind of confidence that comes with knowing that no matter what, you will show up for yourself? That no matter what happens in life, you will be able to get through it because you know that’s just the kind of person you are?
The patterns that belittle you, keep you small, allow you to justify failing yourself… those are the first patterns that needs interrupted, and replaced with the kind of belief that You Got This. For real. You are strong, and when you feel weak, you love yourself enough to reach out for support, but no matter what, you don’t give up on yourself.
That’s where it all begins.
Creating New Patterns
To break well-worn patterns of behavior, and create new, desired habits, neuroscience gives us many strategies to employ.
One of the most prominent, science-backed ways to build new habits is to use the Cue, Routine, Reward Habit Loop. This one is simple to understand through something that has permeated our entire existence in the 21st century: social media. The cue? The app sends you a notification that someone interacted with you. Routine? You open the app, view the content. Reward? Likes and Hearts (validation and faux connection), triggering a dopamine bump. Rinse and Repeat.
The exact same system can be applied to anything. Want to start walking every morning? Set a cue: your alarm will go off at 6:30am. Create a routine: you immediately go to the bathroom, where your workout clothes are waiting for you neatly folded on the counter, so you can pee, change, brush your teeth, lace up your Nikes, and walk out the door. Reward: when you get back from your walk, you get to make a fancy smoothie with all your favorite fresh fruit and fancy new protein powder!
The key to the Habit Loop is to minimize friction at the time of the cue and make the reward good enough to come back for. If your workout clothes aren’t clean and you have no idea where your Nikes are and you didn’t even buy fresh fruit when you went grocery shopping, you’ve failed before you’ve even begun. No new neural pathway will be forged this day.
One does not simply “walk”. . .
Fine-Tuning Tactics
Neuroscience also gives us some fine-tuning tactics to reinforce the Habit Loop.
Notice we didn’t say your alarm goes off, you get up and walk one time, and your life instantly changes. That would be so nice, but it’s not how our brain works. We need to keep this stuff up a while. And that takes effort. Getting out of our own way is the effort. The tactics make it easier to get out of our own way, to stop fighting ourselves, to take ourselves out of the chokehold of ingrained behavioral patterns and empower us to create the change we want to make.
Tactic 1: Simplification
In other words, “Start Small”. Focus on one thing. Don’t try to make yourself a morning walker, change your entire personal style, start a new career, take on a home improvement project, buy a new car, read 5 books this month, AND join a gardening club all at the same time, for Pete’s sake! Recognize that the new habit itself - taking a morning walk - requires a whole set of associated actions that will take up time and brainpower to execute. Allow yourself the space, and brainpower, for them. Each time you succeed at this, you build up more confidence and trust in yourself, which helps you keep your word to yourself in the future.
Tactic 2: Optimization
For your cues to work, they need to be effective. The most sure-fire way to make them effective is to make them simple and easily repeatable. Adding them onto an already-established habit is the easiest way to do this, such as putting your walking clothes in the bathroom, where you’re already going first thing after getting out of bed in the morning anyway. Putting on your walking clothes acts as another cue and triggers your brain into the next step in the sequence: shoes. Then the shoes cues the next piece, which is the walking. . . and then your success is secured, and the reward is imminent, which your brain knows, and gets excited about, and that anticipation propels you through the walking so its more enjoyable.
The key to this one is making the cue really simple and specific.
Tactic 3: Gamification
Why do we play games? To win, of course! Creating a reward at the end of the Habit Look works because it links the activity to our inherent human motivators - acheivement, competition, and reward. While you may not be competing with others on your daily walks (or hey, maybe you are!), you can always track yourself and compete against previous times and distances to gain a sense of #Winning over time. The reward for that is the dream smoothie that your favorite TikTok influencer made last week, or maybe for you, it’s a little egg muffy from Starbucks on your drive to work. What I think is best is if the reward is apparent, almost immediate, and can be directly linked to the action taken.
Reward stacking can work, if you have that kind of discipline already in place. Reward stacking is the saving up, or reserving, little rewards for the investment in a Bigger, More Desireable Reward. An example of this is, if you would be getting yourself a cute lil egg muffy on your way to work, but you really want an upgraded pair of walking shoes that will upgrade your performance and make the whole thing more enjoyable, you can forgo your muffies, save up that money, and then when you reach the milestone, buy your shoes!
This is a bit more complex of a tactic and requires more involved emotional strength to pull off, so I don’t recommend it unless you’re a whiz at creating a tracking system, sticking to the plan, and really allowing yourself to feel all the way into the celebrate when you reach your goal.
Tactic 4: Modification
This is the part where you adjust your surroundings to support your delicate fledgling of a habit. Maybe you start storing your blender on the counter. Maybe you start putting your Nikes in the same spot by the front door. Maybe you add a little bench or shelf in your bathroom specifically for your workout clothes. Maybe you clean the fridge and designate one specific spot just for your smoothie ingredients.
Here’s where the spiritual comes in: make this part a sacred ritual. Put heart and care into it. Intention and relationship are the things of great stories, and your new habit is the building blocks of the next iteration of Your Great Story.
This part really is important, and should be shown the reverence and attention it deserves.
Tactic 5: Visualization
You can use the typical visualization technique by imagining yourself as the person you will be when you reach your goal, over and over again. Build it into the framework of your habit. Let’s say that everyday after your smoothie you take a shower to start getting ready for work. You could use that time to visualize the more slender, energetic body you’ll have when you’ve met your walking goal.
If that sort of thing is difficult for you, you could create a vision board and post it on the wall behind your bathroom door, that way every morning when you are changing into your workout clothes to prepare for your walk, you’re looking at all the reasons WHY you’re doing it in the first place.
If you’re more tech than traditional, you can create a digital vision board and set it as your phone wallpaper. That way you see it all the time, which allows the vision of the outcome to sink deep into your subconscious.
The key to visualizations getting into your subconscious to create those new neuronal grooves is by creating an emotional connection. So if you’re relying on vision boards, be sure to use images that really stir up your emotions.
Bonus: Embodiment
This one isn’t on traditional neuroscience lists, but it is one of the most powerful of them all.
Embodiment practices all have a signature component: they recognize that the mind and body are interconnected, intelligent, and part of a unified whole. Your body has memory and can imprint knowledge into cells, the same way the brain does with neurological pathways. In self-development and some spiritual systems, there are many schools of thought on Becoming to fully embrace a change. In other words:
You will not get up and walk every morning until you become a person that walks every morning.
Did you sense any resistance rise up when you read that?
It seems so simple, and yet, so many people only understand it cerebrally, so let’s unpack it a little.
When the habit is new, your brain knows that this is not a habitual/programmed behavior. In other words, this is not who you are and your brain will be confused. It will try to stop you from doing this thing because it knows that it is not a thing that you normally do, and it pulls you away from the programs that are on autopilot. It will try to get you back “on track” (back into the normal programming) in any way that it can, including lying to you. Creating a bunch of stories around how the only place for you is locked into the familiar algorithm of habits that it knows.
The trick to prevent your brain from sabotaging you? Embrace as truth that you ARE a person who walks every morning.
You can do this through making each part of the habit fun, exciting…something you LOVE to do. And that requires a lot of telling yourself that you love washing your workout clothes, you love folding them and lovingly setting them on the bathroom counter for your future self, you love putting your Nikes by the front door, you love creating gorgeous, Gram-worthy smoothies that make your friends jealous of the treat you get to have every day, you love setting that alarm for 6:30am every night when you lay down, you love the thought of getting up and getting to soak up the fresh day and morning sun each day, you love drifting off to sleep with the peace of having no question that your health, your life, and your goals are important to you and there’s no question of “deserving”, because of course you do, because you love taking care of yourself like this, and afterall, it’s a small thing…but it’s really such a big thing, and you love it. . .
Do you see the pattern?
Embodiment is, at the root, self-love.
There really isn’t a secret to it. There is only that. If you loved yourself the way you ache to, you would get up and walk in the morning. And you realize that you are the only one preventing yourself from loving yourself like that, that there really isn’t anyone else in your head keeping you from yourself, and it’s like, “ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I can just, do those things, because I am that person already when I don’t act against myself.”
Simple…when we aren’t fighting against ourselves.
And this leads us back to the moment that we get to choose. . .
Sit on the beach, or get back on the board?
I have faith that we will get to bask in the glory of your glow when you find yourself standing on the surfboard and riding the waves.
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