“I just don’t feel like it.”
Famous words when you can’t explain why you are not doing something you either need to do or want to do.
You wake up Saturday morning knowing you need to go to the grocery store. But you just don’t feel like it. So you don’t. You spend the day meeting with friends for coffee and diving into a new book you’ve been wanting to read. Saturday evening arrives. It’s dinner time and there’s nothing to put on the table. Partner and children are tired, cranky, and hungry. Chaos and hard feelings ensue. You end up overspending on delivered mediocre takeout and no one is satisfied.
Or, you wake us Sunday morning with a free schedule ahead of you. Plenty of time to dive into your pet project, you know, the one that will finally free you from the 9-5 grind. But for some unknown reason, you just don’t feel like diving into it. So you spend the day puttering around the garden, having a drink at the neighbor’s, and talking to your friends online. You change the subject when they ask about your pet project. On Monday when the alarm goes off at 6 am so you can get ready for your hour-and-a-half commute into the city, you silently demean yourself for ‘wasting all your time’ the day before.
You know that feelings don’t need to run your life. If they did, you wouldn’t be preparing for that commute. It is a collapse into a resistance you don’t feel you have to explain or is indeed self-explanatory. You fall back on the cultural belief that you must feel like doing something before you can do it, despite all the evidence in your life to the contrary.
Truth: “I just don’t feel like it” = resistance, pure and simple. That’s all. It’s a signal, not an explanation. And the thing it signals is itself.
But here’s the important reminder: Like all other forms of resistance, you are not required to find out why it is present.
It doesn’t matter if your resistance relates to fear of failure, perfectionism, or the bullying you experienced on the kindergarten playground decades ago. These are all just labels and are inherently meaningless to the resistance. Indeed, searching for a cause to the resistance, although feeling like that may be productive, is another form of resistance because while you are searching the thing still isn’t done.
You may never learn what yours is about. It does not matter. Resistance can be neutralized without ever being decoded, and once it’s gone the question of what it meant becomes uninteresting, because there is nothing left to interpret.
What neutralization takes is not analysis. It is objectivity, applied twice.
First at the belief. Seeing the belief as a belief. Not a fact about how action works, not a verdict on the task, not a message about who you are. Just a belief, present, arriving where there is something to avoid.
Second, at yourself. Watching the action happen while the belief is still sitting there. Noticing that the thing got done while the feeling was still there and did not require the feeling’s cooperation.
You already have the equipment for that. You can observe yourself while you are being yourself. This ability to be self-reflective is not a technique anyone teaches, and you did not earn it. It is standard human issue, and you have been using it your whole life without calling it anything.
That commute is the proof. You have already done it, every week, for years.
You just never did it on purpose.
Purposefully yours,
Alessandra