If You’re Paralyzed With Fear, It’s A Good Sign
In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield coined the term “Resistance” as a catch-all for the variety of forces—fear, self-doubt, anxiety, etc.—that prevent us from doing the work we need to do. While Resistance is largely problematic, in one way, it’s helpful. “Resistance is an indicator,” Pressfield writes. “It tells us what we have to do…Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance…So if you’re paralyzed with fear, it’s a good sign. It shows you what you have to do.” Some of the ways in which Resistance—fear, self-doubt, anxiety, etc.—is an indicator…that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
It’s Like Eating Bad Fish
At the age of 8, the future renowned singer-songwriter Jewel was abandoned by her mother. Her father, repeating a cycle from his own abusive upbringing, became abusive, and so at 15, Jewel left home. She lived in a car and eked out a living from odd jobs and street gigs along the San Diego shoreline. Her circumstances were perfectly suited to an existence of constant stress and anxiety. While Jewel was indeed often stressed and anxious, she said she learned to reframe those sorts of sensations as information. It’s like eating bad fish, she explains: “If I eat bad fish and I get food poisoning and I throw up, something’s not wrong with me; something’s right with me—my body is working properly. Anxiety, fear, stress, doubt are the same way. They’re a neon sign trying to tell me that I’m consuming something in my environment that my body isn’t agreeing with. That I’m engaging in a behavior, a thought, or an action that my body doesn’t agree with. Things like anxiety are your body’s way of communicating inner conflict.”
Fear And Preparation
In the documentary Free Solo, there’s a scene where a team of neuroscientists perform an fMRI and conclude that Alex Honnold’s brain abnormally responds to fear. “I find that irritating,” Honnold later said. “I’ve spent 25 years conditioning myself to work in extreme conditions, so of course my brain is different—just as the brain of a monk who has spent years meditating or a taxi driver who has memorized all the streets of a city would be different.” Before Honnold climbed El Capitan—a 3,000-ft rock wall in Yosemite—without a rope, for instance, “I’d drive into Yosemite, look at the wall, and think, ‘No way. Too scary.’” So before he did finally free solo El Cap, he climbed it more than 50 times with a rope. Fear and preparation are inversely proportional, Honnold says. The level of fear “depends on the level of preparation,” he says. The level of fear is an indicator of the level of preparation.
Why Do That To Yourself?
Paula Scher is today called the one of the most influential graphic designers on the planet. But in her first year at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, a design teacher told her that she “showed no promise as a designer at all” and questioned why she was even there in the program. “I said, ‘I want to be an artist.’ And he said, ‘Cooking is an art.’ True quote.” After she graduated in 1970, she moved to New York City with just her portfolio and $50. When she told her mother she was going to move to New York City to be a designer, she said, “Oh Paula, don’t do anything like that. That sounds like it takes talent.” Asked if she experienced any self-doubt as a result of being constantly told she had no talent and therefore wouldn’t succeed, Scher said, “Of course, but at a certain point, you do it because if you don’t do it, you’re going to be stuck doing something you don’t want to be doing. And I felt then as I do now that if something you want to do scares you, it’s a sign that you have to confront it and try to do it. Otherwise, eventually you’ll become bitter or you’ll regret not having tried. Why do that to yourself?”
A Cure For Resistance
Speaking of becoming bitter…For 30 years, Brian Koppelman was creatively blocked. In hindsight, he said he was just scared to listen to the voice inside that wanted to be a writer. That the fear of pursuing his writerly ambitions was strong enough to persist for 30 years should have been a neon sign showing him what he had to do. Instead, it was a source of inner conflict he couldn’t make sense of until he had his first child. Just after his son was born, Koppelman said, “I finally realized that if I allowed this creative impulse to die, it would be like a real death, and like any form of death, it would be toxic and that toxicity would ooze out of me onto the people I love.” When Koppelman shared this realization with his lifelong best friend, David Levien, Levien recommended he read the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In it, Cameron recommends a practice she calls “morning pages”—a form of stream-of-consciousness journaling. “Pressfield talks about Resistance, and Cameron has, I think, a cure for it,” Koppelman says of morning pages. Soon after he developed a “morning pages” habit, Koppelman and Levien began getting together every morning. Before they went to their day jobs, for two hours every morning, they worked on the screenplay for what became Rounders, a movie about the underground world of high-stakes poker, starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton. “A little over a year after I started doing the morning pages,” Koppelman said, “we had written and sold our first screenplay to Hollywood, and we both quit our jobs, and I was living my dream of being a full-time writer.”
Reverse Indicators
In his books and in interviews, the psychiatrist Phil Stutz talks about what he calls a “Reverse Indicator.” “Painful emotions,” he writes, “often have a positive value. Instead of indicating failure, they often actually indicate progress. We’ve all experienced the physical version of this in the gym—your muscles hurt during a workout, but you give that pain a positive value because it’s making you stronger.” Resistance, fear, self-doubt, anxiety—these can often be reverse indicators: while they feel bad, they are often pointing you in the direction of something good. It’s kind of like if you throw up after eating bad fish—something’s not wrong with you; something’s right with you.