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Social psychologist Ellen Langer suggests that it is possible to transform the experience of difficult, tiresome work into play. How?
Most of us when we sit down to do our work have to deal with a mindset that is deeply afraid of failure and dislikes having to experience pain and/or discomfort.
But as Langer points out in her book The Power of Mindful Learning most of the work we need to do is not inherently boring or unpleasant. Many of us come to see it this way simply because we feel like our performance will be judged and evaluated (and not in a positive way).
For example, let’s say you throw yourself into completing a project. You spend hours researching and writing it. You even stay up until the early hours of the morning thinking about it and refining it.
Then, your boss or teacher returns your work with the following feedback:
“This is not up to scratch. My 4 year old child could do better than this. What happened?”
Most likely you wouldn’t feel great. It would be a blow to your self-esteem.
So what many students do is they try to protect their self-esteem by distancing themselves from their work. After all, if they never do the work, what can others say about it? Nothing.
But when you live your life in this way, life becomes boring and predictable.
Developing a mindset of being less attached to achieving particular results is a start.
Studies have found that students are able to think and perform better when they are less concerned about their grades and more involved in the process of learning.
With a little creativity and imagination, you can also bring a piece of work to life and make it enjoyable.
For example, social psychologist Ellen Langer gives the example of learning anatomy (typically viewed as a tedious task). But there are several ways it can be transformed into an engaging activity. She states:
“…what if it [learning anatomy] were a board game or a jigsaw puzzle in which we got to assemble or disassemble people we knew? Or consider the cliché that students of medicine think they have virtually every disease they study. Once you really think you have a disease, learning its symptoms, etiology, and cure may still not be fun, but it certainly isn’t as hard”
It also appears that merely placing the label play on a particular activity influences how much we are able to enjoy the task and focus on it. A study by Sophia Snow and Ellen Langer found that when difficult activities were labelled as play as opposed to work, participants enjoyed the tasks more and their minds seemed to wander less throughout the activity.
So next time you have a task to do that you think will be boring, simply take a moment to think about how you’re relating to the task:
Just remember, no task is inherently boring. It’s our mindset that ultimately determines whether it is or isn’t.
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The other day, I was getting my haircut when my hairdresser told me something her 15-year-old son had said. His words took her completely by surprise. He said:
“Mum, I need to try harder this year.”
I hear those words a lot. Try harder.
I hear them from students who want to do better at school and from teachers who are trying to motivate students (“You need to try harder”).
But what does it actually mean to “try harder”?
The problem is that this advice is too vague and abstract.
If you don’t have a clear picture of what ‘trying harder’ looks like, you’re in dangerous territory because you’re attempting to motivate yourself towards an abstraction.
In the book Tiny Habits, Professor BJ Fogg explains the problems associated with motivating yourself to achieve a vague goal. He writes:
“You’ve probably seen a well-meaning public-health poster in the doctor’s office that shows lots of colourful vegetables with the headline: EAT THE RAINBOW!
At first glance, you think: Yes, I need to eat better food. But then you’re not sure what practical steps to take. How much green and how much red? That means salad and apples, right? It can’t mean mint ice-cream and red licorice, can it? You are motivated to “eat the rainbow,” but maybe you don’t know how. You feel frustrated and end up being a little hard on yourself.”
I didn’t want my hairdresser’s son to feel frustrated and annoyed with himself. He clearly had good intentions.
I asked my hairdresser, “What does trying harder look like for your son? If he’s trying harder, what is he doing?”
She said she wasn’t sure. So, I kept asking questions.
“Does it look like him sitting down and testing himself with flashcards before a test? Taking notes in class? Listening to the teacher instead of chatting with his mates?”
The answer was clear. She said, “Listening to the teacher! He needs to start listening to his teachers.”
I also mentioned that it would help if he learnt his teachers’ names (you’d be surprised how many teachers tell me their students don’t know their names).
Remembering a teacher’s name, staying focused on what they have to say, resisting distractions, taking notes and reading your textbook may sound easy, but these are skills that require continuous practice.
If you’re not used to doing them, they can feel hard.
Even with years of practice under my belt, understanding new ideas still feels hard. These days, reading feels like weightlifting for my mind!
After getting my haircut, for the next 24 hours, I kept thinking about those words “try harder”.
Something was bugging me about it because I felt it wasn’t helpful to tell yourself to “try harder”. . . and then, like a bolt of lightning, the answer hit me: my hairdresser’s son doesn’t need to try harder. He needs to focus on doing a few specific hard things.
By ‘specific hard things’, I mean concrete behaviours he can do right now (or at a specific point in time) to improve his understanding of his school subjects.
For example, if he wanted to start a home study routine, here are some concrete behaviours I’d recommend he try:
These are just a few behaviours that come to mind when I think about “trying harder” with your studies.
Doing these concrete behaviours just once won’t make you go from good to great. But you’ll be surprised by how much meaningful progress you can make in a single, effective study session.
We live in a world where comfort and convenience are increasingly normalised. We expect things, including learning, to be easy.
You don’t have to cook (thank you Uber Eats).
You don’t have to move (thank you car).
You don’t have to experience boredom (thank you social media and Netflix).
You don’t even have to use your brain anymore (thank you ChatGPT and Claude).
By outsourcing tasks that require physical and cognitive effort, we may save time, but there are hidden costs.
People are losing their skills, destroying their health, and atrophying their brains, all while being flooded with unhealthy levels of dopamine. I’d even go as far as saying that people are losing their lives and what it means to be human.
In every moment, we have a choice: we can do the easy thing that gives us a quick dopamine hit, or we can do the hard thing that gives us a slow and healthy release of dopamine.
When you wake up, you can scroll on your phone or do some physical activity.
At the end of the day, you can order takeaway that is engineered to light up the reward pathways in your brain, or you can prepare a healthy homemade meal.
When you’ve got a spare 30 minutes, you can watch some YouTube or go for a walk outside.
You can use ChatGPT to write your essay, or you can use your brain and build your skills.
You can talk to an AI chatbot and have a friction-free relationship, or you can organise to meet up with a friend.
Every time you choose the hard thing over the easy thing, you build your confidence. You can trust yourself to do hard things and survive them. Over time, as you build your skills, those hard things don’t feel as hard as they once did.
For instance, if the Internet goes down and you’re not dependent on ChatGPT, you know you’ll be okay. You can rely on yourself to think and entertain yourself (thank you brain).
This is why I’m committing to doing hard things this year. I’m challenging myself, and I know I’ll be better for it.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about self-harm or inflicting extreme pain on myself.
I’m referring to activities that bring up a cringey discomfort and make me think, “Ahhh, I don’t want to do this!”.
These include activities that require sustained focus and/or mental and physical effort, such as writing an article, going for a run, riding my bike to the shops, and meditating.
The simplest way is to ease into doing those hard things. Turn those hard things into tiny habits.
Here is a list of tiny habits for hard things I’m focusing on doing:
Some of these things may not seem like much, but all of these behaviours require mental and physical effort. Remember, there’s a much easier alternative: sitting, tapping, swiping, and scrolling on your phone.
For instance, I don’t need to chop vegetables and cook my meals. I could eat out or order food to my door. This would save me time and effort (cooking my meals can feel like a part-time job).
But I know I would suffer at some point (physically, mentally, and financially).
Chopping vegetables and cooking take effort, but it helps me cultivate calm. When done with a focused mind (not listening to podcasts or talking on the phone), I really enjoy these activities.
If I were to outsource these activities, I’d be going backwards, because I’d most likely lose my valuable cooking skills over time.
Similarly, writing articles like this one feels hard. But hard doesn’t mean bad. It’s satisfying to focus my mind, wrestle with ideas, and write.
Many of us mistakenly believe that an easy life is a better life. But it’s not. A life where you are constantly pursuing pleasure and taking the easy path can lead to anhedonia.
Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure in things that were once pleasurable (e.g., a homecooked meal or a sunset). Some people describe it as life in greyscale.
It turns out the more pleasure we pursue, the more pleasure we need and the more pain we experience.
It may sound counterintuitive, but pursuing hard things makes you feel more motivated and more positive about life.
As humans, we want to challenge ourselves. We’re wired for it.
Psychiatrist Dr Anna Lembke encourages us to take on difficult, even painful, activities as a way of “aligning our primitive wiring with our modern ecosystem”. She writes:
“We are survivors. We’re wired for struggle, especially of physical nature. Yet we live in a world in which we’re largely insulated from pain. And not just pain, but also discomfort of any kind. Everything is supplied to us at the touch of a finger. Now we struggle just to get up off the couch. Our modern ecosystem incentivizes inactivity. Inactivity breeds lethargy. Lethargy breeds anxiety and depression. We must fight against this.”
So, forget trying harder. Work out a few hard things you want to do and focus on doing them instead.
On these days, the temptation to procrastinate and distract oneself can be strong.
I recently spent a few days with my family in the countryside, where I enjoyed reading by a crackling fire. But when I found myself back home in my office, I struggled to get back into the swing of things.
I was experiencing a full-blown holiday comedown.
For some context, I had printed out the slides for an upcoming presentation that I needed to practise, but I felt resistance every time I looked at the slides.
My mind screamed, “Nooo! I don’t want to practise!”. Without even thinking, I kept pushing the slides away like a toddler smooshing their vegetables around on their plate.
But at some point, I caught myself in the act. Without berating myself, I managed to turn things around and ease into my practice.
In this blog, I’ll share a couple of simple strategies I use to get a better handle on my procrastination and overcome resistance.
According to Procrastination scholar Tim Pychyl, procrastination isn’t a time management issue. It’s an emotion management issue. If you can get a better handle on your emotions, you’ll have a better handle on procrastination.
Let’s unpack this…
Often, when we procrastinate, it’s because we’re trying to avoid experiencing negative emotions. The task we need to do brings up feelings of discomfort (e.g., boredom, fear, guilt, anxiety, and stress), so we avoid the task to make ourselves feel better.
But avoidance makes no sense when you think about it.
Oliver Burkeman explains the problems associated with avoidance in his book Meditations for Mortals. He writes:
“The more you organise your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems – and even if they don’t, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don’t want to go. It’s ironic that this is known, in self-help circles, as ‘remaining in your comfort zone’, because there’s nothing comfortable about it. In fact, it entails accepting a constant background tug of discomfort – an undertow of worry that can sometimes feel useful or virtuous, though it isn’t – as the price you pay to avoid a more acute spike of anxiety.”
Dutch Zen Monk Paul Loomans labels the tasks we avoid as ‘gnawing rats’. He says these tasks “eat away at you under the surface”.
Have you noticed that whenever you try to avoid a task, it’s usually still on your mind, using up your precious mental resources?
That’s what Loomans means by the task eating away at you under the surface.
Why does he use the peculiar term ‘gnawing rat’? Looman’s daughter used to have pet rats that would eat loudly under his bed, keeping him awake at night.
Loomans explains that if you can befriend your gnawing rats, you can transform them into white sheep. Just like a white sheep follows you around passively, once you transform a task into a white sheep, it’s a lot easier to make a start.
The question is, how do you transform a ‘gnawing rat’ (a task you are avoiding) into a white sheep?
The key is to approach procrastination from a place of curiosity.
Loomans suggests creating a positive, open relationship with the task you’ve been avoiding. You need to sit with it or visualise the task. Instead of giving yourself a hard time, get curious about why you have such a strained relationship with this task.
Loomans advises:
“… you’re not being asked to immediately do whatever it is that’s gnawing at you. The assignment is only to establish a relationship with it. You let all the various facets sink in and then let them go again.
The rat no longer gnaws at you, and it has settled down. It’s no longer trying to get your attention, but follows quietly behind. It now has white legs and curly fleece – it’s turned into a white sheep.”
I decided to follow Looman’s advice with this presentation I had been avoiding. To begin with, I pulled out my slides and I just sat with them.
I closed my eyes, tuned into my body and asked myself:
“Why am I feeling resistance towards practising this presentation? What’s going on?”
Within 30 seconds, the answer came to me. The resistance came from how I thought I’d feel after doing my speech practice: exhausted and emotionally depleted.
You see, when I practice a presentation, I typically go into turbocharge mode. It’s like I’m delivering the real thing: I gesticulate, project my voice, pace around the room, and rely on my memory and the pictures on my slides to remember the content (I don’t refer to my notes).
All of this takes a lot of mental and physical effort.
So, naturally, when I looked at my slides for this one-hour presentation, I felt flat and heavy.
I equated one hour of presentation practice with having a fried brain by the end.
But then I had a brilliant idea. I thought, “What if this practice session didn’t have to feel like a hard slog? What if it could be fun, light and easy but still effective? What would that look like?”
It immediately occurred to me that I had to shorten my practice session, which brings me to the next strategy . . .
To keep my practice session fun, light and easy, I settled on doing just five minutes of speech practice.
Instead of pacing around my office and practising in turbocharge mode for an hour, I sat myself down with a hot chocolate. I set a timer for five minutes, pulled out a mini whiteboard and started recalling the content (scribbling out and drawing pictures of what I needed to say).
When the timer went off, I checked my notes to see how I went (What did I remember? What did I forget to say?).
Then, I checked in with myself – “How am I feeling after that mini practice session?”. Instead of feeling depleted, I was feeling good! I felt less overwhelmed by this presentation. The resistance had subsided. As Paul Loomans would say, the presentation had transformed from a gnawing rat into a white sheep!
I felt excited, even a little inspired.
I could have easily kept practising for another 10-20 minutes, but I decided to give myself a break to re-energise (I got up and walked on the treadmill for 2 minutes).
This gave me insight into the need to vary the intensity and mode of each study session, depending on my energy levels and what I have planned for the rest of the day. Sometimes it’s good to go into turbocharge mode, but not always.
Not every study/work session has to be hardcore. Work sessions that leave you feeling completely drained by the end can be counterproductive. As Professor BJ Fogg says, “Tiny is mighty”.
Firstly, tiny study sessions are less scary for your brain. Five minutes of speech practice and flashcard practice feels easy. You think, “I can do 5 minutes!”.
In contrast, one hour of study feels scary for your brain, which means you’re more likely to procrastinate.
When you go tiny, it’s also easier to give your full focus to the task at hand. Here’s the thing about focus: focusing your mind takes a lot of your brainpower. And you have a limited supply of brainpower!
As you sit there and study, your brainpower gets depleted. But research shows one way to boost your attentional resources (i.e. your brainpower) is by taking regular breaks. If you study in short focused bursts and then take a break, you can stay refreshed and ensure your study sessions are effective.
But most importantly, tiny study sessions help to create momentum, and they leave you feeling good!
I tend to push myself to the point of exhaustion when I practise my talks. But I can see now that this makes it hard for me to want to practise in the future.
By dedicating just 5–10 minutes to the task and enjoying it, I’m more likely to do another 5 minutes (or more) of practice tomorrow. Doing five minutes of practice every day is infinitely better than doing no practice or cramming a long practice session in the day before.
You’re not going to go from good to great in one tiny study session. But you can make meaningful progress and create the momentum you need to keep going.
So, don’t turn your nose up at five minutes of flashcard practice or 10 minutes of doing a practice test. If done with focus and intention, that’s a solid study session that can set you on the path to success.
Image credit:
Toddler (featured in image 2): “Skeptical” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Rat: “Fancy rat blaze” by AlexK100 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
This is no accident. This is a deliberate design decision.
It’s the same reason why fast food logos are often warm reds, yellows, and orange tones. These colours jump out at us. They create a sense of excitement and urgency.
In his book Drunk Tank Pink, Dr Adam Alter argues colour is a hidden force in our lives that can shape the way we think, feel, and behave.
In this blog, I’m going to explore how you can use colour as a tool to help you study more effectively and keep your brain focused and engaged on the task at hand.
There is whole field of research dedicated to exploring the impact of different colours.
One fascinating study looked at the impact of a particular tone of pink (Baker-Miller Pink/Drunk Tank Pink) that appeared to sap people of their energy. Researcher Dr Alexander Schauss found staring at this shade of pink could lower people’s heart rate and pulse compared to staring at other colours.
A 7-month trial was conducted in which prison confinement cells were painted in this pink shade. According to Dr Schauss, when people were exposed for just 15 minutes to this pink colour in their prison cell, it made them more relaxed, less aggressive, and reduced the incidence of violent behaviour.
But before you race off to the hardware store to buy a tin of pink paint, you need to understand a few simple things about the psychology of colour.
The research suggests that colour can act as a powerful trigger. It can cue different emotions, thoughts, and behaviours. For instance, when you see a red Stop Sign or light, this captures your attention.
But how we react to colour also comes down to personal preference and particular contexts. Colour can have different meanings in different contexts (e.g., on Valentine’s Day red generally symbolises romance rather than “Danger! Look out!”).
The bottom line is this: when it comes to colour you need to experiment to see what works for you.
Colour can evoke particular states (e.g., a state of calm or alertness). It can also perk up your brain and transform a dry, boring subject into something that’s a little bit more novel and interesting for your brain.
Below I share 9 ways you can use colour to study and work more effectively.
There’s something about a brightly coloured post-it note that captures our attention. This is why I love using post-it notes to help focus my mind and stay on track.
On a post-it note, I create a list of no more than three things that I need to do. Once I’ve completed those tasks, I scrunch up the post-it and throw it in the bin. This action feels surprisingly satisfying! I’ll then grab a fresh post-it note (often in a different colour) to create a new list.
If I’m not sure how to get started with a task (e.g., Task: Write blog post on colour), I’ll grab another post-it note and I’ll scribble down the first tiny action I can take to kick-start the process (e.g., Tiny action: Open Word document).
If you have trouble finding your study materials for each subject and they all look the same or are scattered all over the house, you can use colour to make it easier for you to find what you need.
Try assigning a particular colour to a subject. This makes it easier to stay organised and identify your materials. At home, I assign a light blue to my exercise files and folders. When it’s time to plan my workout for the day, I look for my light blue files and folders.
A simple and cheap way to colour code your materials without investing in brand new stationery is to gather a collection of paint swatches from your local hardware store. You can repurpose these as labels by cutting them into smaller sections and sticking them on your files, notebooks, etc.
Testing yourself with flashcards is a highly effective way to study for a test and/or exam. You can create your own flashcard decks by purchasing index cards in a range of different colours.
Try assigning certain colours to different subjects. Alternatively, you can simply pick a colour you want to work with depending on how you feel.
There are no hard and fast rules. Feel free to mix up your flashcard colours to keep things fresh for your brain.
Creating a mind map on a topic is a simple way to combat study fatigue and inject a little colour and creativity into your study sessions.
Although using different coloured pens isn’t absolutely essential for mind mapping, it’s well worth doing. I use different colours to create the different branches on my mind maps.
I have dozens of colourful mind maps at home. Despite my lack of drawing skills, these mind maps look great and are fun to review primarily due to the different coloured branches.
It’s important that you feel good in your study environment. If you feel good in your study space, you’re more likely to sit down and study there.
I’ve decorated my workspace by putting up colourful posters, inspiring and funny pictures, and artwork on my walls.
If you don’t have access to artwork/posters, you can print out colourful pictures and quotes of things that make you feel good. The addition of a few indoor plants can also help to liven up your space as well as purify the air.
Fluorescent highlighters feel really good to use. It can feel both fun and satisfying to strike things off your to-do list. You can also use these pens to time block different tasks/events in your diary and draw your attention to important tasks that you need to do.
Word of warning: When it comes to studying for a test or exam, I don’t recommend highlighting your books and/or notes as a way to learn. I know it feels good but research shows it’s an ineffective way to learn.
Red pen is often associated with failure and criticism. This is why seeing a teacher’s comments scribbled in red pen can trigger negative emotions in many of us.
Generally, we don’t like reading comments written by others in red pen. It feels nasty! But it turns out if you use a red pen to correct your own work, this can help you to pick up more errors.
Dr Adam Alter discusses one study that looked at the difference between using a blue pen and a red pen to correct an essay. Students who used a blue pen picked up on average 19 errors. In contrast, students using a red pen picked up an average of 24 errors.
But using a red pen has its limitations! If you are trying to solve a problem or taking a test, using a red pen can backfire by activating ‘avoidance motivation’. This is a distracting state of mind that can impair a student’s ability to solve problems and increase stress levels.
As a rule of thumb, use a blue or black pen when solving problems and taking tests. But when you need to cast a more critical eye on your work (e.g., in the proofreading phase), switch to using a red pen.
A lot of us use our phones as an easy way to escape from the boredom and discomfort we experience when doing our work. The apps on our phones are like candy. They are designed to be highly addictive and hijack our attention.
This is where you can be strategic with how you use colour: you can make your phone look more like a tool (and less like a toy) by turning on greyscale mode.
Viewing your phone in greyscale is a completely different experience to using it in full-colour mode. As a year 8 student recently shared with me:
“When I made my phone greyscale, it made it really boring to use.”
Try it and see for yourself!
This strategy may seem juvenile. If it reminds you of being back in primary school and receiving gold stars, hear me out.
Too often we don’t stop to acknowledge and appreciate ourselves for accomplishing tasks. We finish one thing and we immediately shift our focus to the next task on our to-do list.
When you work this way, your work routine can quickly become soul destroying and your motivation can take a dive.
This is why every so often I pull out my fun stamps and colourful sheets of stickers. After completing a task, I pause and acknowledge what I’ve done by giving myself a stamp or a fun sticker. It’s a little celebration.
For some reason, my brain responds particularly well to quirky Japanese stickers featuring ogisan (Japanese grandfathers) exercising. We’re all different, so explore what stamps and stickers work for you.
Colours are lot of fun! Incorporating a little more colour into your studies and work life can take things to the next level and perk up your brain when it needs a little motivational boost.
But the colours that I like may not be the colours that you like. Your colour preferences may also vary from day to day. Notice the colours that make you feel good and have fun seeing how you can incorporate them into your study sessions.
