Morning Monsters

On how to not believe everything you mind tells you, especially pre dawn

The Two Fridas, Frida Kalo, 1939.

Maybe you’ve had this experience.

You’re winding down for the evening and you tuck yourself into bed feeling so present and aligned with your life, aligned with your desires for what you are calling in. Maybe you even put your phone on the dresser, in a land far far away from you and your bed, you’ve just read a chapter of The Artist’s Way, which you’ve been struggling to read for years and are now actually completing. You are soaking in the beauty that is feeling the forward motion of your efforts and your own life, experiencing a peace so real and so deep, that for once, you can actually fully exhale. Maybe this is just a normal day for those with normally regulated nervous systems. Congratulations to you.

Anyway, Thomas Edison is supposedly known to have said, “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”

So, when I’m not feeling plagued by overwhelm or avoidance or hormones, I try to listen to old Tommy and also my old softball coach who was obsessed with visualization, and go to bed setting intentions for the day ahead. If there are some unknowns, people I’m waiting on or undecided scheduling items, I run through different ways those could look, with the goal of building confidence and trust into my bloodstream so I can ride these 432 Hz Deep Healing waves into not just a soft slumber but also a great tomorrow where I can handle anything thrown my way with ease.

It’s giving Sandra Bullock’s character in Oceans’s 8 getting thrown into solitary in order to run through every possible scenario of the job

So I was just as surprised as Debbie Ocean, who mapped every detail of stealing Le Toussaint and still couldn't have known the necklace had a lock on it that only a Cartier guard's special magnet could open. All that planning, and the thing itself was sealed shut. The difference between me and Debbie is that her lock was new information. Mine has been under meticulous construction for years, built out of constant self criticism, consistent measuring and comparing to ensure I wasn’t enough, and whatever else my brain has been quietly doing to keep me safe since adolescence. As I pulled open the drawer to find a pair of socks, I realized this morning’s arrival of heckling likely wasn't right or random. It was a whole ensemble so beautifully rehearsed and committed. And completely unbothered by the intentions I had so carefully laid out the night before.

The show (of self-destruction) must go on!

---

Not so fast! I refuse to tolerate such radical negativity, especially not first thing in the morning. Sure, every once in a while I’ll let the destructive thoughts freak flag fly and dip out of my life for a bit and into a season of a new show or two hours of TikTok. I’m only human after all. But as a devout morning person, my early hours are sacred and they are to be treated as so. In high school I used to wake up to Dance, Dance by Fall Out Boy. In my first ever apartment I had a mini trampoline and tried to recite Camus passages from memory as I bounced up and down first thing. Ruin my morning and I’ll ruin your life.

But this was my own doing! Talk about an inconvenient truth. Nothing inspires me to work harder than whenever I realize I am the source of my own suffering. But have no fear, I’ve been in this industry for 30+ years. My LinkedIn headline reads: Self Criticism | Intrusive Thoughts | Fluent in Catastrophizing

Should have added ‘Available for Morning Shifts’.

Anyway, like most jobs performed daily, you get really good at knowing how to get things done and understanding what it is that is causing the problems you’re having. We learn to stop wasting time on what doesn’t work. I can usually move through these anxious spirts by using my own version of PEMDAS to interrupt the spiral before it picks up speed. They don’t really have to be done in a specific order so I guess it isn’t so much order of operations as is it is an acronym but I just wanted to show Algebra some love. I present you with “GEMS”.

GEMS

• Gratitude

  • When trapped front row at my own shame concert, the temptation is to sing along. To chant the whole chorus of i’ll never be enough, enough, how dare you, what were you thinking. I have to be careful not to let myself sing that song because muscle memory is real and that’s the song I’ve sang the most throughout life. So instead I try to zoom out and change the frequency. Self-obsession is still a form of tunnel vision. It keeps me sealed inside my own head and disconnected from everyone outside it. So I think about the people who would love to trade places with me. Not as a guilt trip and not to minimize what I’m feeling, but to honor the fact that what I’m catastrophizing about is, to someone else, a luxury problem. That reframe loosens the grip enough to be able to breathe, get heart centered, and carry on with my day.

• Entitlement

  • I think about the average man who has never once paused to question whether he’s qualified enough, ready enough, or worthy enough before going after exactly what he wants. He doesn’t audit himself before asking for the promotion. He doesn’t convene an internal committee before starting the business. Not because he’s done the work and earned the confidence but because it genuinely doesn’t occur to him that he might need to. The baseline assumption of belonging and that wanting something is reason enough to pursue it is the medicine nobody prescribes to young girls. There’s some kind of Alice In Wonderland x Children’s book opportunity here but I’ve gotta keep it moving. Suggested Reading: this Atlantic piece on Marc Andreessen’s (chilling) claim that he doesn’t believe in introspection. Lol.

• Martha

  • As in Stewart. When Martha Stewart was asked mid keynote interview whether she’d ever suffered from imposter syndrome, she laughed and said “No...no...you shouldn’t even know that exists.” And it’s brilliant. It makes sense that someone who was hired as the only female trader on Wall Street, for a company that didn’t even have female bathrooms, simply wouldn’t have time to ponder such ridiculous accusations. It connects back to the Entitlement piece, and how you shouldn’t have to spend time worrying if you could just be doing. Anxiety lives in the gap between thinking and doing. The moment you move, the gap closes. Martha’s instinct to execute directly is in diametric opposition to what anxiety actually needs to survive, which is hesitation.

• Science

  • Remember your brain is just doing its job. Just not the job you need it to do right now. The brain’s primary function is keeping you safe, not making you great. It prefers the familiar, the proven, the comfortable. So when you’re challenging destructive thoughts you’ve had for decades, or finally going after a dream you’ve spent years avoiding, your brain doesn’t register that as growth. It registers that as threat. Bear incoming. In The Rock Warrior’s Way, Lanny Bassham writes that the mind is a survival machine first and a performance machine second. You have to consciously override the protection program to access what’s underneath. Also, timing matters. The night version of you is reflective, expansive, integrated. We often go to sleep thinking about our values, connected to our vision. The morning version, especially on little sleep and spiked cortisol, is in survival mode. The brain’s first order of business isn’t ‘what do I want to build today’ but rather ‘what could go wrong.’ Your brain can’t tell you the truth when it’s running threat detection.

WWMD? (What Would Martha Do?)

More often than not, understanding becomes its own trap. The need to analyze, to locate the root, or to fully comprehend before making a move is its own kind of self-destructive trap.

My therapist once told me: ‘En la acción no hay duda.’ Translation: in action there is no doubt. As Martha clearly showed us, doubt lives in the space between intention and movement. It needs stillness to survive. The moment you act, really act, not just plan to act or think about acting, doubt doesn’t get a seat at the table. This isn’t about being careless but rather about knowing when understanding has done all it can do and the only next move is through.

While sharing the drama of my morning to a friend, she said she felt the same and shared her relationship to action as the only real strategy for dealing with it:

English translation below for my monolinguals

When I have that feeling I often get paralyzed and postpone what I want to do :( but the only thing that helps me get through it is having an accountability partner who I tell “I’m going to do this” to. I don’t feel ready but they hype me up, or when I know it’s something I have to do I count to 3 and just do it hahaha I’m dying but I start 1, 2, 3 and hit “send” on the email and then I go into airplane mode and scream. 1, 2, 3 and I post what used to terrify me and I get off social media. 1, 2, 3 and I say yes to something and then I figure out how to solve it later. 1, 2, 3 and I book a flight. 1, 2, 3 for everything.

“Action is the only thing that has helped me build a bit of confidence.”

This is an important note: confidence builds with repetition.

What’s your point?

This is getting scattered, but per usual I am rushing to finish and get out the door. My point is, my morning voice today wasn’t the voice of reason.

Our undermining voices aren’t the truth speakers, the wiser self correcting naive nighttime optimism. It’s a more frightened self scanning for threats before you’ve even had coffee. As someone who struggles with self-trust, I often feel like I’m a bantam weight newbie sparring with these heavy weight champion anxious thoughts. It’s much easier taking the morning verdict as more truthful than the evening one because mistrusting myself is the thing I know best. It feels more truthful because fear and doubt feel like comfort and what they are used to. But a frightened assessment isn’t usually the clearer one.

Now that doesn’t mean to ignore it completely, because although much of my anxiety does comes from my past, as is true with most life scenarios, there is still some useful data to be collected. The question I care to ask isn’t “was the morning voice right?” but rather “what specifically is it worried about?” and “will I feel that way when rested and calm?”

I’ve often found that the specific fear is either easily addressable or ends up dissolving away on its own. This way it’s more like a science experiment (action, fun!) and less like a death sentence (passive, not.)

Okay that’s our show! Don’t let your brains trick you today. xx nmp