“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” — Jessica Hische

The Nature of Resistance

Resistance is an internal force that prevents us from doing the work we’re meant to do. Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, defines Resistance as the invisible, self-protective force that opposes any act of creative or meaningful work. It is not laziness, nor a lack of discipline — it is something more primal, rooted in the fear of vulnerability, uncertainty, and the potential failure inherent in pursuing what matters.

It can be categorized as fear, procrastination, self-doubt, self-sabotage, distraction, arrogance, perfectionism, and rationalization.

(Pressfield 2011)

“The enemy is Resistance.”

“Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.”

“Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel.”

“Ignore false negatives. Ignore false positives. Both are Resistance. Keep working.”

(Pressfield 2003)

“Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate; it will seduce you. Resistance is insidious. It will assume any form, it will deceive you. It will lie. It will promise anything to get a deal, then break it the minute your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”

“Resistance by definition is self-sabotage.”

“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.”

”Resistance will bury you. It will bury you under a mountain of guilt, fear, self-doubt, and shame. You will live a shadow life. You will live the life you are not meant to live. You will feel unfulfilled. You will feel like something is missing. You will wonder what it is. That is Resistance.”

Pressfield’s rule of thumb is brutally honest: The more important a task is to your soul’s evolution, the more Resistance you will feel. By this logic, Resistance is not a sign you’re on the wrong path — it’s a signal that you’re precisely where you need to be.

Sludge: The Systemic Friction

Beyond internal Resistance, there is also sludge ¹ — the external, systemic friction that makes doing the right thing unnecessarily difficult. Coined by behavioral economist Cass Sunstein in his book Sludge, this concept describes the administrative and environmental barriers that drain our time and willpower: confusing paperwork, convoluted workflows, excessive choices, poor interface design.

At the personal level, sludge can take the form of:

• Overly complex planning systems
• A cluttered workspace that discourages starting
• A phone bloated with endless notification distractions
• Decision fatigue from too many micro-choices before the real work begins

Reducing sludge — simplifying your environment, automating decisions, removing unnecessary steps — is a force multiplier for getting the work done.

“Accept the initial agitation.” by Andrew Huberman

Andrew Huberman offers why starting feels so hard. When we attempt to engage in focused work, the brain releases norepinephrine and adrenaline — the same chemicals involved in the stress response. This creates a feeling of agitation, discomfort, and mental chaos. Most people interpret this feeling as a sign that they’re not ready, not capable, or not in the right mood — and they stop.

But Huberman reframes this entirely: The agitation is not a barrier to focus. It is the gateway to focus.

I think we need to get comfortable as a culture in trying to understand our species and how we work, that the early stages of hard work and focus are gonna feel like agitation, stress and confusion, because that’s the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in. None of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift, or, you know, a performer go do something without warming up. The brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are gonna be active. And it’s unreasonable for us to think, “Oh I’ve got an hour, I’m gonna plop down and write beautifully for an hour my best work.” We need to accept that there’s a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated states.

The agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something and when you’re trying to lean into it and you can’t focus is just a recognized gate. You have to pass that through that gate to get to the focus component. And then if you can reward the effort process you really start to feel joy and low levels of excitement in the effort process. That’s that buffering of adrenaline. That’s that feeling like, yes, I’ve got a lot of adrenaline in my system but I’m on the right path. It feels good to walk up this hill, so to speak. And when you start to bring those neural circuits together you really start to create a whole set of circuits that are designed to be exported to any behavior you want. So if it’s writing a book, great, if it’s podcasting, great, if it’s building a business, great. If it’s, you know, building a terrific relationship, great, then the circuits that mother nature is designer incredibly generic so that we could adapt to whatever it is that we need to do. And I think the misunderstanding around how these circuits work, has led to this idea that there’s some secret entry point maybe marked flow on the door and there’s a trampoline up to that door and you just open that door and you’re gonna be in it. And nothing could be further from the truth. And anyone who’s done well in any career or athletic pursuit knows this, but unfortunately there’s a kind of obsession with the idea that it’s all supposed to feel good and it does feel good but there’s a whole staircase in which it feels kind of lousy.

What people don’t realize is that mental focus follows visual focus. Now in blind people, it’s slightly different, it follows auditory focus, but in most people, your visual focus as you bring that into really sharp relief, that image of your book and you stare at you’re gonna feel some agitation and your mind’s gonna be jumping all over the place. But if you wait just a couple minutes, the rest of the world will disappear. I think this is sort of like the flow state people are looking for. But remember the gate of entry is one of which you have to wade through some sewage before you can swim in clear water. That’s the way I always think about it.

The brain, like a muscle, needs a warm-up. Expecting to sit down and immediately produce brilliant work is like expecting to walk into a gym and hit a personal record on the first rep. The first few minutes — sometimes the first 10–20 minutes — will feel like “wading through sewage before swimming in clear water.”

The key insight: The feeling of resistance and agitation is not a signal to stop. It is a sign that the focusing circuits are activating. If you can endure the initial discomfort, the mental fog clears, the world falls away, and the work begins to flow.

I sometimes say to myself, “Forget how you feel right now” when I’m feeling unmotivated, uninterested, or low on energy. That’s the mindset I always return to.

Feelings are fleeting. Motivation is unreliable. The desire to do the work will not always precede the act of doing the work — in fact, for hard or meaningful work, motivation almost always follows action, not the other way around. This is what the research on behavioral activation confirms: Action precedes motivation. By committing to the physical act of sitting down, opening the document, writing the first sentence — regardless of how you feel — you trigger the very motivational circuits that were absent a moment earlier.

I used to set a timer and force myself to stay in the chair, enduring the initial agitation. But over time, I built the endurance to work for long, uninterrupted hours of stretches. The initial agitation, once dreaded, becomes familiar — even welcomed — because you know what lies on the other side.