Sometimes, in the morning, a person's 'head' (i.e. thinking) is operating at a low level. The mind is essentially in a state of siege and panic. The world is summarily scanned for threats and sources of offence, and the mind appears to be reacting to these but is really projecting its own rage and anxiety onto these. The source of this rage and anxiety? The usual problem: the sense of separation from God promotes a sense that something 'wrong' has happened (= sin), for which 'one' is responsible (in true acknowledgement of the power of the mind), and this automatically generates guilt and fear. This is the ego's baseline state. There are two options here: the doomed approach is to attempt to analyse the darkness to convert it into light. If you have ever tried to achieve vision by simply staring at and trying to discern the dark objects, you'll know how little that achieves. The job instead is to switch on the light or open the curtains. The ego's defence then runs: But you're in denial! You're just pretending that things are OK! Once you turn the light on, or open the curtains, you realise it's just a room. Nothing more. The darkness is gone as though it never existed, and the forms seen in the darkness bear little resemblance to those forms when seen in light.
One major aim of prayer, meditation, and contemplation is to raise consciousness to a higher level, without being distracted by the emanations of the lower level and without being tempted to remain at the lower level to somehow 'clear up' what is going on there. Apparently, the ego can never be gotten rid of completely (although I concede the possibility of dormancy or conversion into an entity that works to the good, more on which another day, perhaps), but it can be transcended, left behind, one day at a time. It would be pointless to try to retrain the ego to look without fear on you or on the world. Its whole being is predicated on separation, and sin, guilt, and fear are corollaries of that. It cannot be retrained, so do not try. Much ill-advised inventory consists in attempting to remain at the ego level but to reconstruct it to be less painful or more productive but without challenging its underlying premise. This underlying premise—that we are separate beings—is false, and so all propositions that flow from this premise are also false. So transcendence is the only option, and prayer—understood as residing in higher truths—is the only means. This means that saying set prayers or contemplating higher spiritual texts (avoiding 'lower' ones, those which borrow from higher realms but are chiefly concentrated on material application or remain rooted in separation-consciousness) is infinitely more useful in the preparatory stages of a prayer session than free-form prayer, which can easily descend into talking to oneself and become circular, self-reinforcing chatter.
From the higher plane, right action (serving God) is self-evident, as is truth. This truth cannot be arrived at by journeying (i.e. logical progression from below to above). There is no line of communication between the two realms. Trying to find such a line buries a person deeper in spiritual error. When a person is reading and becoming absorbed in prayers, the ego will first of all object that this is a form of denial and delusion (which is dealt with above) and will then object that this is a waste of time because it is not constructive. This is not only crafty (because it is using the desire of the higher self, to be useful to God, to confound the higher self's very purpose) but also an example of upside-down thinking: it is ego-prompted activities that are not constructive, as time-consuming, elaborate, and worldly as they may appear to be, and it is prayer which is the single most constructive activity, enabling, as it does, access to the only two commodities worth having: knowledge of God's will for me today and the power to carry that out today. The higher up the skyscraper you go, the more these resources are available. Prayer is the lift (= the elevator). Prayer requires little effort in itself. It is, as it were, our natural state. It merely requires remaining in the lift and not alighting at an intermediate floor (i.e. giving in to distraction). Practically, this means continually drawing oneself back to the prayer whatever temptations arise. When knowledge of God's will for you today plus a surge of energy become available, you know it has worked. Until that has happened, keep praying.