The part that doesn't want to
We decide on a course of action—and in no time at all find ourselves doing the complete opposite. Is this a saboteur, a trick of the mind...or a part of ourselves sending an essential message?
Tomorrow I will finish work at 5pm, cycle to my yoga class, move through asanas for fifty five minutes plus savasana, and get home in time for healthy dinner at 7.05pm.
Except that at the end of the day, I will find myself moving from my computer to my sofa, picking up my phone, scrolling for a while, walking to the kitchen, eating leftovers from a plastic container, and then at some point meandering to bed via the bathroom where I will half-heartedly clean my teeth with my electric toothbrush.
What’s happened? Why, when I set my intention so clearly, does it evaporate only hours later?
We have different metaphors to explain this duplicity of mind. Jerry Seinfeld calls his ‘Night Guy’. Pop psychology names it ‘our saboteur’. Some interpretations of Buddhist teachings call it Mara, an undermining and doubting critical voice.
But what if this aspect of ourselves isn’t an enemy, or a trickster, or separate from us at all? What if it’s another part of ourselves, with a deep need and true wish?
What would happen if we listened to what it has to say?
Night Guy
American comedian Jerry Seinfeld names the voice that emerges at about 9.30pm ‘Night Guy’.
I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, ‘cause I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late.
What about getting up after five hours’ sleep? Oh, that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem. I’m Night Guy! I stay up as late as I want.
So you get up in the morning, to your alarm, you’re exhausted, you’re groggy: ‘Aw, I hate that Night Guy!"
See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There’s nothing Morning Guy can do. The only thing Morning Guy can do is oversleep often enough so that he loses his job, and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.'
Seinfeld articulates the different parts of ourselves as parts with contradicting motivations and opposing goals. Night Guy lives in the moment and doesn’t care for consequences Morning Guy is responsible and committed to his routine, even if he doesn’t enjoy it.
But all we can hope for, according to Seinfeld, is cycling between these two personas—bouncing back and forth between a day of drudged routine and a night of pushing for another moment, or fifteen minutes, or a few hours, of sub-par hedonism punctuated with a few dopamine spikes.
Night Guy and Morning Guy play out the phenomenon of revenge bedtime procrastination. The term originated in China (it’s “bàofùxìng áoyè” in Chinese), and refers to people staying up late into the night—scrolling their phone, watching one more episode, or clicking on another hyperlink—to ‘take back’ the time they feel they lost in the day.
Journalist Daphne K Lee described the phenomenon as when ‘people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late-night hours’.
Reasons for ‘retaliatory staying up late’ (an alternate translation) range from: grasping freedom back after a day of working for someone else; the desire to connect with friends, hobbies and creativity deprived in daytime hours; and the push to excel or keep up with the news cycle through reading every update in real-time.
In the Night Guy/Morning Guy approach, we have two parts of ourselves with completely opposite desires, who can’t talk to each other, and who will therefore always do what the other doesn’t want.
My Morning Guy wants to go to yoga every day. And every night, my Night Guy drags me to the sofa, or the phone, or the laptop.
If I stay at this level of analysis, I never make that class, and I’m stuck scrolling forever.
The Saboteur
Night Guy and Morning Guy have an antagonistic relationship, but the schema allows them to be equals, albeit with opposite personalities and goals.
To identify this voice as the Saboteur, however, is to polarise a part of myself. In this model, my true self wants to get up early and go to yoga. This pure, true wish emerges from who I’m meant to be: a healthy, positive-thinking spiritual aspirant, working towards achieving my potential. Anything that sidelines me from this goal is a saboteur.
By definition, the saboteur exists outside of me, but manifests inside. It wants the opposite of what ‘I’ want. This model makes use of the linear, progressive nature of my conditioning: I want to progress, to improve myself. To be a better version: the best I can be.
I’ve learned these terms through a mixture of meritocratic schooling, growth economic messaging and online optimisation culture. If I can identify and isolate any friction points, challenges or limiting views, then I can overcome them, and emerge as the biggest and best version of myself.
The saboteur, then, is meant to be either ignored, vilified or expunged. She is seen as an imposter and assailant.
But to relate to her in this way ossifies the relationship. When I put myself in opposition to a force or a person, I intensify the bond. I can occasionally triumph—through forcing myself out of the house and onto my bike, pushing through a series of yoga shapes because I said I would; through screaming at her to be quiet; through pretending I can’t hear her protest. But I cannot sustain the win.
She is always there, waiting again in the dark.
Mara: The Trickster
In the myth of the Buddha’s enlightenment under the bodhi tree, the story goes that as he sat in meditation, he was assailed by forces of greed, hatred and delusion. Personified as Mara, the Trickster, they showed up as beautiful dancing women luring him from his seat; as arrows being shot at his most tender parts; and finally, as doubt—calling him out for his right to claim awakening.
In this model, doubts and critical voices are given an external shape: Mara, a smoky figure who can take on various forms to undermine or devalue a course of action. Mara comes from outside, but gets into my head: he can speak in any voice, pick at any old wound, and take over my will.
Naming Mara helps me see this is not personal to me. Rather than the Saboteur, who is bespoke and, if yielded to, becomes a personal failure, Mara is universal. The doubt and indecision do not belong to me: they exist as forces to which all of us are susceptible. They only manifest in a particular shape in my own mind. I do not chose them. They come unbidden.
For a long time, this interpretation served me well. I could acknowledge and engage with the critical voices without assuming responsibility for them. It became my responsibility to bear these struggles, to see through Mara’s smoke and mirrors, and to continue to strive to eliminate the delusion.
But too many similarities to the saboteur meant I identified that critical voice as an external force. I set up a polarised relationship. I was always in opposition to, trying to defeat a foe, to eliminate a demon.
Demons do not need to be eliminated. They must be fed.
That part of you
In the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, Richard Schwartz built on the family systems theory of psychotherapy to describe how different parts of ourself function internally. Despite its name, IFS doesn’t work with external family dynamics. Rather, it uses the structure of family systems to apply to our internal world.
Each of us has inside us a multitude of parts. A scared part, a confident part, an over-responsible part, a rebel part, a protector part. Each one with its own story, its own mission, its own desires.
They do not want to be eliminated or ignored. They only want to be listened to, so they can tell their story.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Instead of a demon that must be vanquished, I come to recognise a part of me desperately wanting what it cannot have. It may have been trying for years, or decades, to protect me, or get me to notice it, or to be granted permission to rest.
In this approach, the part of me that stays on the sofa rather than cycling to yoga isn’t a duplicitous doppelgänger like Night Guy, a villain trying to throw me off my game like the saboteur or even an undermining voice like Mara. In fact, I don’t know what she is, because I’ve never taken the time to get to know her.
She might be tired—exhausted from the endless asks to do one more activity to prove I am maximising my time. She might be nervous—from the years I punished my body through yoga, insisting on one more backbend until my vertebrae cracked against each other and pushed a disc out of my lower spine. She might be hungry—for a quiet space where she does not need to do, to perform, to exhibit.
My responsibility, then, is to feed her.
This approach does not ask me to force her to go to yoga. Doesn’t tussle with the reason she doesn’t want to get on the mat. Doesn’t bargain with her to trade an hour of effort for the reward of rest.
Instead, I listen, and ask what she actually needs. And I won’t find out by spending hours scrolling or watching one more episode.
In order to discover what she most longs for, I need to give her silence, and time. To turn off my phone and screens. To sit still. Listen.
And then give her what she needs.