Feeling Like Shit Isn’t the Problem

Hey there,

This weekend I failed my belt test for martial arts. I couldn’t practice, and I had to sit through the next class feeling like I was making no progress in any part of my life. My mind was beating me up, thinking about how many times I had practiced, and then it kept building into every other part of my life that isn’t going the way I want it to right now.

The only thing I wanted to do was leave.

And I didn’t practice — but at least I chose to sit and stay and not walk out the door. That was one admission of honoring my intention, even on a bad day.

One of the problems with participation trophies is that they make you feel like it’s always supposed to be good, and that you’ll feel alright. But feeling bad is not a signal that you’re doing life wrong.

Failing at things does not say anything about you as a person. Feeling hopeless doesn’t mean you’re regressing. Feeling tired of putting yourself out there isn’t an indictment on you.

There’s no version of adulthood where you feel good all the time.

Feeling like shit isn’t the problem.
Losing momentum is.

Now, this doesn’t mean you always need to be taking some big, bold action. Momentum doesn’t always mean action. Often it means not collapsing further into the darkness. Sometimes it means not taking two steps back — or at least being aware that you’re doing it. Sometimes it means not turning the extra pain you’re feeling into self-attack.

It also doesn’t mean that if you wholly need rest, and do so choicefully, that you’re withdrawing. Sometimes the real answer is a choiceful pause.

So often when we’re in a situation, life throws up a big “oh shit” signal. And when that happens, a natural tendency in pain is to withdraw. You check out. You don’t want to engage as much. Then we try to figure out ways to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

So we replay the stories in our head — what went wrong. Then we connect dots: “Well, this happened, and when…” and suddenly it’s just like when I was 12 and that girl didn’t like me, which was just like when I was five and my dad didn’t bring me a present.

Then we start assigning blame — to ourselves, to others, to the world. That makes everything heavier, but the task remains the same. And yet our minds have conditioned us to feel a certain way.

It’s not weakness that you do this. It’s literally how our minds try to make the world more understandable.

Some days we do need to have a rest day. More importantly, we need to sit with it. But how you sit with it is what actually matters.

Because there are really two ways of doing nothing.

The first way — which is far too easy — is to collapse. We numb ourselves with food, porn, Instagram scrolling. We escape into fantasy, or we try to create stories. We blame other people and think that if we could just leave where we are and start a new life in Colombia, everything would be better.

Sometimes we collapse through self-loathing. We flagellate ourselves and think that if we were a better human, then all these things would be better. Or we sit there just waiting to disappear into it all.

All of these are real. They hurt. And they are all collapsing.

But there’s another way to do nothing — and that’s honoring the stillness.

You feel the weight of it. You recognize it’s pain and how much it affects you. You don’t dramatize it. You don’t say the world is crushing down on you or that everything is against your back.

Maybe you notice your mind automatically doing that, but you don’t choose to listen to that story. You don’t make it mean anything. It’s just hard that day.

And you honor it and let the day pass — choicefully, in stillness — without quitting.

Can you sit with pain without turning it into a story? Because when you can do that, that is a new form of strength. In this way, choosing stillness is leadership.

Now, I’m a big fan of action. I teach behavioral activation to my private practice patients and my coaching clients. And if you listen to all the grinders out there, they treat it like forcing activity or grinding through misery, ignoring any limits you have.

That’s a surefire way to stay stuck and tired.

What behavioral activation really is, is acting when you can and how you can. Being choiceful with the activity you’re in. Sometimes it’s resting without self-attack when you can’t do anything else. Sometimes it’s resuming the task without resetting the story.

Even if you’re doing the task poorly.
Even doing the task badly counts.
Choosing not to self-destruct also counts.

I’ll come back to the Sisyphus story — not as existential dread or the meaningless of life — but this: the task of pushing the boulder is there. The boulder doesn’t change. The hill doesn’t care. What changes is his relationship to the effort.

It matters to him because it is his life task. Some days pushing looks like effort. Some days it looks like not letting go. But both are the same — they keep him going, and they keep him alive.

On hard days, don’t give yourself the extra impossible job of trying to fix a feeling. Don’t judge the day based on whether you felt good or not — some days you’re going to feel fucking bad.

Don’t use those days to rewrite who you are.

Instead, ask a simpler question:
What would it look like to honor myself today?

What would it look like to hold this man who is suffering, and still try to live as best he can?

Instead of drinking yourself silly or masturbating to some fake AI woman, maybe you just go to bed without numbing. Instead of hoping someone reaches out to you, maybe you send one message: “Hey, I was thinking of you. How are you?”

Or maybe you do nothing — but you do it consciously.

No matter what your mind tells you on these days: you’re not broken. You’re not behind. You’re just human. And as long as you’re still human, you’re still in the game.

Be well, my friends.

Drew Carr PhD