Your Self-Sabotage Has A Name
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance
”
In his 2002 book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield defines what he calls “the most toxic force on the planet.” He names this force ‘Resistance’, and trust me--every runner is plagued by it. And most will never know it.
Resistance is probably best defined through example. How many times have you justified skipping a run due to weather, or because you were hungry, or because you were more tired than usual? That nameless, shapeless force inside you that convinced you that skipping was okay? That’s Resistance. It emerges during runs as well. It appears as some nefarious voice that haunts you mid-race, or when the pace gets tough. And it’s not even usually an actual voice--it’s more like a pang of helplessness. A physical “welling up” that stunts higher performance, like some sort of sudden paralysis. It’s in these moments of great effort that Resistance loves to show up and tell us we’re not good enough; that we’re doomed to fail.
The cool thing is that we don’t have to be helpless victims of Resistance. A big step in learning to conquer Resistance is the act of framing it as what it is: a force inside you that wishes you to fail. Whether this is a psychological force or a spiritual force or whatever kind of force doesn’t really matter. It will be there nonetheless. And merely taking the step to recognize that there is this force within you will help you to neutralize its power. When you actually know that it’s a specific thing, and not just some nebulous fog of anxiety, it becomes a little easier to see through and around the source of the problem, and things start to feel more possible.
Another important aspect of Resistance is understanding that it does not affect you only. Runners who experience this type of anxiety often fall into the trap of thinking that there is something uniquely “wrong” with them; that other runners don’t feel this way or struggle with similar feelings. This is just false. As Pressfield points out,
“Though it feels malevolent, Resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same laws as the stars. When we marshal our forces to combat Resistance, we must remember this.”
Resistance doesn’t occur because there’s something wrong with you or your mind. Everyone encounters Resistance. It rains on the rich and poor alike, as they say. What differs from person to person, is how Resistance is dealt with. And the saddest part of it is that our own beliefs and mindset are, themselves, the very things that fuel Resistance in its triumph.
“Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.”
These are wise words. So how do we “master that fear”?
It comes from that change in perspective. Think of all those decisions you made to skip a run, or quit a workout early, or times when you seized up during a race and didn’t make that big move. The times where you timidly toed the starting line, already resigned to defeat. Resistance won in those cases because you didn’t even know what it was. The power lies in realizing that, in all of these instances, there was this force inside you that wanted you to fail. But now that you know that’s what it is, it’s a little easier to brush it off as just that--just that toxic force that subsists on our demise. It’s just Resistance. And the powerful thing is that, as Pressfield reminds us, that is often all that stands between “the life we live, and the unlived life within us.”
If you want to delve more into the subject of Resistance, and how to combat it expertly, check out Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art today. This is training for the brain. You won’t regret it.
