When Resistance Works Against You
Less resistance, less struggle
One day, you happen to be walking through the Sahara. Suddenly, the ground beneath you isn't solid, and your legs sink into a hole. You can't move your feet. You're stuck in quicksand.
Quicksand can be found around oases, where underground pools of water meet loose sand. This is a potentially lethal situation. Not because the hole will swallow you, but because the sun burns hot and slowly dries you out.1
So how do you get out again?
Your instinct tells you to fight it, to resist with everything you’ve got. To kick your legs, to somehow “swim” to solid ground. But that would be a bad idea, because the more you fight it, the more it pulls you in.
Instead, if you trust this YouTube video, the number one rule is to keep calm. You sloooowly try to move your chest toward the solid surface. And then you can sloooowly pull the rest of your body out and crawl to safety.
It's not just about sinking sand, it's everywhere. The more you fight exhaustion, the more drained you feel. The more you battle your own emotions, the more they overwhelm you. The harder you try to force yourself to be productive, the more procrastination pulls you back.
In all of these cases, resistance makes things harder. But what if, instead of fighting, you leaned into the experience? What if, like escaping quicksand, the way out wasn’t by force, but by stopping the fight?
Resistance makes it worse
Quicksand tells us something about life: Resistance makes it worse.
At the most basic level, everything is just a sensation or “sense-data”. Only your judgment makes it “good” or “bad”. For example, a pain in your leg feels bad when someone kicks you (how could they?!), but the same pain can feel quite pleasant when it comes from exercise. Your reaction is what causes your suffering.
Instead, when you say “yes” to an experience by stopping to fight it, you remove the struggle. Because when you stop resisting something, your relationship to it changes.
I’ve noticed this the most with procrastination. There are these inevitable moments when you don’t want to do something, and so you procrastinate. But you can’t really enjoy it because there’s this guilt in the back of your mind telling you that you should get back to work. So you’re in that limbo where you’re resisting the procrastination, and you’re resisting the work. The more resistance there is, the more unpleasant it becomes.
But if instead, you allow yourself to procrastinate without guilt, the struggle disappears. You take that nap, you read that book – and before long, motivation returns on its own. By giving space to the part of you that wanted to procrastinate, you dissolve the resistance. And when the resistance fades, the work becomes easy.2
Resistance amplifies, acceptance dissolves
Resistance happens when a part of you is in conflict with either reality or another part of you. For example, you may not like coldness, but the water in your shower is freezing. So you get tense and it’s all just very unpleasant.
But it doesn’t have to be like that: Maybe you’ve also experienced that when you stop resisting the cold water, your body suddenly relaxes and the water is “just cold”. Accepting reality removes the struggle.
The problem is that we often fight instead of resolving the conflict. But blindly pushing through isn’t always the answer either. The trick is to recognize that there’s resistance, and knowing when to let go and when to push through. And the only way to learn that is through experimentation.
Try it out
Since the default coping mechanism is to resist, I invite you to try out what it feels like to actively accept and resist. The next time you feel resistance, try this:
One time, push through for 5 minutes. Does resistance fade or intensify?
Another time, fully give in for 15 minutes, guilt-free. What happens?
Then compare: Which one helped you more? Which made things worse? With enough experiments, you’ll be able to see your own patterns.
So the next time you feel resistance – whether it’s towards emotions, discomfort, or quicksand – pause for a moment. Instead of fighting, try saying yes and see what happens. You might just find that the struggle disappears.
✏️ Retro
(As always, you can download the Notion template to take structured notes)
What goals did you set for yourself last month, and how well did you achieve them?
Make a list of your goals (even if they were only implicit) and score them from 1 (low) to 10 (high). You are not allowed to pick a 7. Take notes as you go.
Is there something that is blocking you?
What held you back last month? What can you do to avoid this next month?
What did you learn?
Did you learn something about yourself, your environment, or about the work you do?
🔭 Planning
What are your top 3 priorities next month?
Why are they important to you?
What goals do you set for yourself in light of these priorities?
To beat procrastination, make sure to split every higher-level goal into small subgoals.
What are potential obstacles or challenges you may face?
How can you prepare for them?
🌈 Bonus
What are you resisting?
Try out the exercise from the article above – what happens when you resist completely vs. give in completely?
🙏 Thanks!
Thank you for being part of Mental Garden. I sincerely hope you found this email useful.
As you may have noticed, Mental Garden has a new home on Substack. This means that you can now comment directly on the posts and also share them with friends more easily. I'd appreciate it if you'd share Mental Garden with a friend or two, just click the button below:
Since I have a bit more on my plate at the moment, I'm also changing the frequency with which I publish new essays. Initially, I plan to release about one article per month. So see you in a few weeks!
Wishing you a great new month.
With gratitude,
Marc
The density of quicksand is >2 times that of the human body, so it’s almost impossible to sink deeper than your stomach.
Of course, if it were that easy, no one would write about procrastination anymore. Sadly it isn’t. But it might work, and we never try – because we never give in.