When Pushing Hard Doesn't Help

Why bracing against a bad mood tells your body to keep the alarm ringing.

This morning I woke up irritable and uncomfortable, with no peace in me at all.
I don’t usually wake up that way.

But some mornings are just hard right from the start.

There are people who can settle into a hard feeling and let it be their home for the day.

I am not one of them. When I feel bad, I struggle toward feeling good. I push. I try to fix it, name it, out-think it, do something about it.

This morning I did all of that, and the bad feeling only dug in deeper.

The Harder I Pushed

Then I noticed what I was actually doing. I was fighting the feeling, and the fighting was making it worse.

Your body can’t tell the difference between a real danger and your own resistance to a bad mood.

When you brace against what you’re feeling, your body reads the bracing itself as one more thing to be afraid of. So the very effort to force your way back to calm is what keeps the alarm ringing.

When you push against the fear the pushing manufactures more fear. Sigh.

Making Room

What finally helped was the thing I least wanted to do. I stopped trying to get out of the discomfort and let it simply be there.

That is harder than it sounds, and it doesn’t feel like winning. It feels a little like giving up.

But something happens in the allowing.

The body, no longer fought, slowly stops sounding the alarm. And in the space that opens when you’re not struggling anymore, there’s suddenly room for something to come that you could never have forced.

For me, this morning, what came was a verse I hadn’t gone looking for, from the thirtieth Psalm. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5, if you ever want to find it.)

Joy Comes in the Morning

I love that verse, and I love that it doesn’t lie to you. It doesn’t say the night gets easier, or that you should hurry up and feel better.

It says the weeping may endure. The night is real, and you have to to sit through all of it.

The old Hebrew word underneath “endure” is even gentler than the English. It’s the word for a traveler who lodges somewhere for a single night and is gone by morning. The weeping doesn’t have to move in. It has no lease. It can check out at dawn.

And the morning doesn’t just bring relief. It breaks open. Joy comes, not because you summoned it or fought your way to it, but because you finally made room.

Then it came on its own, the way the actual sun was coming up outside my window while I sat there.

This is what I’m learning, slowly. Allowing the discomfort is not the opposite of faith. The allowing is what makes the space where God can get in.

If David Were Here

The man who wrote that line was no stranger to a bad night. He’s the one who said he was so worn out from crying that he flooded his bed and soaked his couch with tears. He didn’t write the morning song because he skipped the night. He wrote it because he lived all the way through it.

Sometimes I imagine David as a friend, sitting down beside me on a morning like this. I think he might say something like:

I know this night you’re in. I’ve watered my own bed with tears till there was nothing left in me, and I never once cried my way out of it by force. I stopped trying to be fine. I let God see my whole mess.

And then the morning came, the way it always does, and He turned all that mourning into dancing. So go ahead and feel the worst of it. You’re not doing it wrong. The dancing is already on its way to you, and you won’t have to manufacture a single step of it.

That’s the friend I want on a hard morning. Not the one who tells me to cheer up, but the one who’s been in the pit and came up singing.

You Don’t Have to Win

So if you’re in a hard morning of your own, fighting to feel better and only feeling worse, you don’t have to win against how you feel. You’re allowed to let it be there, as uncomfortable as it is, and trust that the night is a guest and not a tenant. The struggling was never the thing that saved you. The space was.

I’m still building this work, and learning how to say something this big to women who have never heard my name. So if any of it landed in you, even a little, would you send it to one woman who’s lying awake fighting a long night? That’s how this reaches the people who need it. One woman handing it to another.

The night is hard. But we can have faith that joy will come in the morning.

Tender hugs,
Kristin