While I always kept an eye on the amount of petrol in the tank, I also needed to pay close attention to my own personal energy levels.
It was important to avoid pushing myself past empty and depleting my energy reserves because if I did, I would end up feeling emotionally wrecked.
I clearly remember one day when I pushed myself too hard. Looking back, it seems comical now. But I wasn’t laughing at the time.
It was my 24th birthday. I had woken up that morning with great intentions, thinking “It’s my birthday! Let’s make it a great day!”
I was trying too hard to make it a “great day”. I was forcing it, and perhaps that’s partly why everything went pear-shaped. Here’s what happened . . .
I had a school presentation later that day, so I spent the morning preparing for it before driving over an hour to deliver the presentation.
The time slot for the talk wasn’t ideal—my talk was scheduled for the last period on a Friday afternoon—but I was thinking, “Hey! It’s my birthday. Let’s make it a great day!”
What can I say?
The session didn’t go well.
There were IT issues and the students’ minds were elsewhere. But you couldn’t blame the students. They were tired and I was the only thing standing between them and the weekend.
When I wrapped up the session, I felt tired and hungry.
But I foolishly ignored my body’s needs. On an empty stomach, I began the long drive home. I was desperate to get back and be in my own space.
Within 10 minutes, I found myself stuck in peak-hour traffic. But I wasn’t just stuck in traffic; I was also stuck in an anxiety loop.
Psychologist Risa Williams explains an anxiety loop as “a negative thought cycle that makes you feel stuck in a rut”. You can’t rationalise your way out of an anxiety loop. Logic doesn’t cut it.
I kept thinking about how the talk could have gone better, why my birthday had been such a flop . . . these annoying tunes kept playing over and over in my mind and they kept getting louder and louder.
I was about halfway home when something unexpected happened: I began sobbing uncontrollably behind the wheel of my car. I just felt incredibly sad.
I realised it was dangerous to drive while crying, so I pulled over and called my mum.
My mum and I would chat on the phone most days, but I remember this conversation especially well because my mum didn’t pull any punches.
Mum: What’s wrong Jane? Why are you upset?
Me: It’s my birthday and I wanted to have a great day but I just feel so awful. Everything has gone wrong today. The day has been a total flop.
Mum: Jane, have you had anything to eat?
Me: No.
Mum: You’re hungry! I know what you’re like when you’re hungry. You need to find a place to eat.
Me: But there’s nothing healthy to eat around here . . . there are no healthy options.
Mum: I don’t care. Order something. Anything. You need to eat. Go do that right now!
I found a café that was still open (it was 3:30pm) and ordered a burger from the menu.
When the burger came out 10 minutes later, I felt emotionally wrecked.
But after eating that big, juicy burger, I felt instantly better.
The world now felt like a new and different place. I had strength again. With tear-free eyes, a calm mind, and more energy in my system, I got in my car and drove myself home safely.
That experience taught me an important lesson. I learnt I had to stop pushing myself past the point of empty (something I’d done far too often for too many years).
I had to start listening to my body and the signals it was sending me.
Feeling hungry? Have a healthy snack.
Tired? Take a quick nap.
Thirsty? Have a few sips of water.
Sitting for too long and in pain? Get up and move.
Eyes and brain hurting from staring at a screen for too long? Take a break and look out the window.
It also taught me how engaging in small behaviours (tiny habits) can significantly impact how you think and feel.
All of these habits are designed to boost and conserve my energy. That’s the great thing about habits: they conserve your energy by automating your behaviour and combating decision fatigue. As Kevin Kelly states in his book Excellent Advice for Living:
“The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it.”
These 15 tiny habits are so deeply ingrained that I do all of them most days. I don’t waste time and energy thinking, “Should I go on the treadmill or stay in bed and read a book?” or “Do I do my gratitude practice or eat breakfast?” I have established a routine of healthy behaviours that work for me.
These tiny habits don’t take long to do, and best of all, they stop me from running out of energy and crashing. I also haven’t been sick in over three years (mainly due to Habit #13: Wearing a n95 mask).
You might be wondering why I’m still wearing a mask when covid restrictions have eased. There are a few reasons: I know several people with long covid (and they are suffering). Their quality of life is not what it once was.
I’ve also read a lot of the research on covid. Research shows covid can cause significant changes in brain structure and function.
This study found that people who had a mild covid infection showed cognitive decline equivalent to a three-point loss in IQ and reinfection resulted in an additional two-point loss in IQ.
Other studies have found covid can disrupt the blood brain barrier and cause inflammation of the brain. Since I rely on my brain to do everything, wearing a n95 mask (not a cloth or surgical mask) is a simple and effective habit I’m happy to keep up to protect my brain and body.
At the end of the day, cultivating healthy habits is about noticing the little (and big) things that make a difference and then experimenting with those things.
For example, Habit #3 (Moving on a treadmill first thing every morning) came about when I noticed the dramatic difference in how I felt on the days I ran on the treadmill compared to the days I didn’t (I felt mildly depressed on the days when I didn’t go for a run).
Habit #4 emerged after I noticed that eating a particular breakfast (overnight oats with berries) made me feel amazingly good compared to having a smoothie or a bowl of processed cereal for breakfast (which would spike my blood sugar levels).
Your health influences everything in life—and I mean absolutely everything. It influences how you interact with the people in your life, how well you learn and focus, your energy levels, and how you do your work.
As Robin Sharma explains in his book The Wealth Money Can’t Buy, health is a form of wealth.
Sharma writes:
“If you don’t feel good physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, all the money, possessions and fame in the world mean nothing. Lose your wellness (which I pray you never will) and I promise you that you’ll spend the rest of your days trying to get it back.”
One way you can build your wealth is by cultivating tiny healthy habits.
As I think back to my younger self, 24 years old and ignoring the warning signs my body was sending me, I can’t help but feel a bit embarrassed. But as Kevin Kelly says, “If you are not embarrassed by your past self, you have probably not grown up”.
I’ve grown up a lot. I’ve come to realise developing awareness and taking time out to step back and reflect are critical to living a healthy, grounded life. When you notice what makes you feel good and not so good, you can make tiny tweaks to improve your life.
If you aim to do more of the things that leave you feeling good and less of the things that leave you feeling depleted and fatigued, you can’t really go wrong.
In the words of Psychologist Dr Faith Harper, “Keeping our brains healthy and holding centre is a radical act of self-care”.
On that note, take a moment to check in with your body. What does it need right now? Could you do something small to treat your body and mind with a little more care? Step away from the screen and do it now.
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But if you keep making the same mistakes over and over, it can be demoralising.
In this article, I share 12 common mistakes students make when preparing for exams, and what you can do to avoid making them.
But let me be clear, this article isn’t just for students and it’s not just about exams. It’s for anyone who is up to stuff in life. It’s for anyone who wants to keep learning and growing.
My advice is don’t read this article all in one sitting. Treat it like a practice exam: print it out, put your phone away, and work through 1-3 points at a time. Then, get up and take a fun rest break!
Are you ready to dive in? Let’s go!
Without a doubt, this is where most students go wrong with tests and exams. They don’t give themselves enough time to learn the content properly.
They leave studying until the last minute and try to cram as much information as possible.
First, there are a few things you need to understand about how you learn:
Based on this, start preparing for exams before you feel ready, while you can still think clearly (i.e., you’re not panicking and freaking out).
Not all stress is bad. Stress can be a source of fuel and energy. It can help you focus your mind and swing into action.
But too much stress – the freaking out kind – can mess with your ability to focus and learn. If you’ve reached that point, where you feel like bursting into tears or curling up into the foetal position, you’re experiencing bad stress. You need to stop whatever you’re doing and calm your nervous system.
Start preparing early. The more prepared you are, the calmer you’ll feel and the better you’ll do.
Other strategies you can use to decrease bad stress:
“Be calm and know that you can do this.”
Many students spend all their time leading up to their exams creating beautiful sets of notes. By the time they finish their notes, they’ve run out of time to do practice exams.
Notes can be super handy, but it’s what you do with your notes that really matters. Are you testing yourself with them? Do you create flashcards from your notes and test yourself with those cards?
The best way to ace any exam is to practise pulling information out of your brain. You need to test yourself (i.e., use active recall strategies).
Take it from me, this won’t feel as nice or easy as simply taking notes leading up to an exam. But at least you’ll be grounded in the reality of what you know and what you don’t know.
When your only exam preparation strategy is note taking, you go into the exam with a false sense of confidence (experts call this an ‘Illusion of Competence’).
Sitting tests and exams is also a skill. Whether you do well or not isn’t so much a reflection of your intelligence. It’s more a reflection of your exam technique and how well you have prepared.
Practise in the medium you’re going to be assessed in: do lots of past exam papers (ideally under timed conditions using pen and paper).
Treat it like you’re training for a marathon. At first, you might just do a 30-minute ‘exam’ workout. As you build your strength and stamina, work your way up to 45 minutes, then an hour. Eventually, be brave and attempt the full 2-3 hours.
After wrestling with some exam questions, make sure you check to see how you went (what you got right and wrong). Take note of any gaps in your knowledge, and give that content a bit more time and focused attention.
Distraction is the enemy when it comes to learning. When your attention shifts rapidly from one task to another, you destroy your ability to memorise information.
Multitasking also slows you down (i.e., it take you longer to do your work), whilst speeding up your thinking. Fast and frenetic thinking is the opposite of what you need for deep learning. To deeply understand information, you need slow and deliberate thinking.
Before you sit down to study, deal with distractions from the outset. Put your phone away from your body, on silent in another room. Install an Internet blocker app, such as Cold Turkey or Freedom.
If you use social media, get someone to change the password on your social media accounts so you can’t access them during the exam period.
Do what you need to do to focus your mind for a short, intense burst of study (25-45 minutes).
“Put your phone and other distractions away while studying as this will benefit you in the future … however phones will destroy your future.”
The complex terms, jargon and the text-heavy nature of your syllabus can make it scary to look at. But don’t let those things put you off looking at this document.
Your syllabus is too important to ignore. Referring to this document will help focus your mind and save you hours of time.
Bypass all the jargon and head straight to the unit content section. This section tells you exactly what you’ll be assessed on.
Print this section out so you can easily refer to it without having to go on your computer (and potentially get derailed).
When you start a study session, choose a syllabus point and use an effective study strategy to make it stick (e.g., active recall).
You spent hours re-reading your books, highlighting chunks of information and re-writing your notes before the exam. You can’t understand why you didn’t do better?
I’ll tell you why: you weren’t using effective study strategies.
Swap ineffective ways of studying (e.g., re-reading and highlighting) with effective study strategies, such as active recall.
You can practise active recall in different ways, including testing yourself with a deck of flashcards, doing past exam papers, and teaching a concept to a friend.
You’ve also got dual coding (i.e., using words and pictures to help you learn). I’m a big fan of mind mapping. In fact, I mind mapped my way through my undergraduate degrees in Law and Psychology, and my PhD.
Dual coding is a great way to understand new ideas and how those ideas are connected. But to make those ideas stick, make no mistake: you’ll also need to do active recall practise.
To learn more about how I combine mind mapping and active recall, check out my short online course, Let’s Mind Map!
Entering the exam room (or any important situation) in a chronically sleep deprived state is a terrible idea. Expect to have trouble recalling information and focusing your mind.
Bottom line is: Sleep matters. It matters a lot.
This study found that students who participated in an ‘Eight Hour Sleep Challenge’ and prioritised getting 8 hours of sleep each night leading up to their final exams outperformed those who didn’t take the sleep challenge.
Make getting 8-10 hours of quality sleep a non-negotiable part of your study plan. Plug your phone into charge at least one hour before bed and don’t touch it until you get up the next day.
Remember, sleep is the ultimate performance enhancer. Everything you do, you’ll do better after a good night’s sleep.
“Sleep the night before. Don’t cram.”
By the time you get to your final exam, you’re feeling over it. You’ve lost all motivation to study. You don’t really care how you go. So, you do the bare minimum to prepare. You go in with a plan to … wing it. But winging it isn’t an effective strategy.
If you’re running low in motivation and energy, do little activities to re-energise and feel normal again.
One student shared this piece of great advice that made me laugh:
“Study early, study late, and somewhere in the middle treat yourself to an $11 Medium meatbox from Kebab Lads.”
Perhaps an $11 meat box isn’t the best way for you to restore your energy. But that’s beside the point. The point is you must do things to keep your spirits up during exams.
You’re asking ChatGPT to give you summaries of different topics and create practice exams for you, which you then do on your computer. Perhaps you steer clear of AI, but you type up your notes on your laptop.
The problem is if you’re working at a computer, you’re more likely to get distracted. As soon as it gets boring or difficult, you’ll find yourself running to the fun stuff (e.g., YouTube).
But there’s another big problem that often gets overlooked by schools that invest heavily in EdTech: the Screen Inferiority Effect. Reading on a screen and taking notes using a keyboard are not as effective when it comes to learning as using pen and paper.
As Dr Jared Cooney Horvath writes in his brilliant book The Digital Delusion:
“Learning doesn’t arise from the brain alone, it emerges from the rhythms, movements, and sensations of our entire physical selves.”
Invest in a printer and a big box of A4 paper. Print out your readings, past exam papers, the unit content section of the syllabus, any important emails, and your exam timetable.
By printing out these documents, you’ll shift from passively skimming to active reading. This will allow you to form a deeper understanding and stronger memories of the content.
Students who study in only one location (e.g., at a desk in their bedroom) sometimes struggle to recall information once they get into the exam.
Why would this be?
It’s because information is context-dependent. That means when we study in the same place, our memories become tethered to that environment.
Mix up where you study. You don’t need to abandon your desk, but don’t make it the only place you study.
Do some flashcard practice at the kitchen table, a past exam paper in the library, and explain a concept to a friend outside under a tree. You get bonus points if you can do a past exam paper in the actual exam venue!
When you practise in different settings, you train your brain to be able to recall information anywhere.
Stress is contagious. If you’re hanging around people who are freaking out about exams (saying things like, “I hardly studied! I’m going to fail!”), don’t be surprised if you start to freak out, too.
Before the exam, keep away from people or anything else (e.g., caffeine, too much sugar, and social media) that triggers anxiety in you. It helps to feel calm, steady, and grounded as you walk into the exam room.
After the exam, don’t waste time ruminating about it with your friends. This is a total waste of your time and energy. You can’t change what just happened. What’s done is done!
Instead, shift your focus to what you can control (e.g., taking a fun rest break and preparing for the next exam).
“Get in, do it, and get out!”
I once met a law student who didn’t read the exam question properly. She was visibly distressed as she told me she missed reading the part that said you had to write only two of six essays.
What did she do?
She wrote six essays in three hours.
This may sound extreme, but mistakes like these are all too common.
Read the question carefully. Take your time. It will be time well spent.
As you read the question, look for clue words such as explain, discuss, and compare. These words have different meanings. They determine the approach you need to take to answering the question. Some students find it can help to rewrite the question in a way that makes sense to them.
Not sure what the difference is between the words discuss and explain?
Use effective study strategies, such as dual coding and active recall, to understand and remember the meaning of each clue word.
No one expects you to be perfect at preparing for and sitting exams. Like any skill, this takes practise.
So, what areas could you strengthen? My advice is to focus on just one area.
If you need more sleep, then make getting to bed at a reasonable hour your top priority. If you want to start using more effective study strategies, spend 20 minutes creating a mind map or doing a past exam paper.
A few simple tweaks to your lifestyle and study habits can dramatically improve your ability to focus and learn, as well as how confident you feel walking into your exams.
Then another person told me he uses AI to read his email and tell him what he needs to do for the day.
I thought, “Why would you do that?”
Why have we stopped using our brains and completely outsourced our thinking to AI?
In a recent Guardian piece, author Dave Eggers shared what he advises young people when it comes to using AI:
“You’re one of one. You’re unprecedented in the entire line of human history. Only you have your brain. Only you can think of what you can think of. Only you can tell a story in a particular way. Why would you cede that to a machine?”
He went on to say:
“Once you have a machine think for you and write for you, you’re cooked as a species. That’s it. That’s the worse dystopian outcome there could ever be.”
As generative AI and tech force their way into almost every area of our lives, I’m finding that I want to use my hands more, and not in a typing-on-a-keyboard-into-ChatGPT kind of way.
I want to chop vegetables, roll out pizza dough, journal with pen and paper, cut things out with scissors and stick them down on paper, write letters to people, make mind maps, and read physical books.
These are small acts of resistance, but I believe they are vitally important to retaining our humanity and confidence. These acts signal to our brains, “You’re still in control”.
Generative AI may seem powerful, but let’s not forget the tremendous power that lies within our brains and bodies.
There is a freedom and confidence that comes from doing things yourself, whether that be with your hands, your brain, or a combination of the two.
That freedom and confidence are built through sustained practice and being able to push through discomfort. But research shows these things can be eroded very quickly by routine use and overuse of AI.
It’s easy to label those of us who are actively resisting using AI as old-fashioned, luddites or not keeping up with the times. But doing so overlooks some serious issues associated with AI.
When I first discovered ChatGPT, like most people, I was amazed. It had this mystical quality that pulled me in. But as I started to learn more about generative AI (specifically ChatGPT), the magic started to crumble away. I discovered generative AI had a dark side similar to social media. As investigative journalist Karen Hao writes in her brilliant book Empire of AI:
“…in the same way we once thought Facebook was merely a place for posting vacation pictures and connecting with long lost elementary school friends, or for sparking positive and transformative social movements, there is more to the sleek, entrancing exterior than meets the eye. Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources.”
As I started to see red flags around the environmental and exploitative human impacts of AI (e.g., the data annotators in Kenya who train AI are paid less than $2 a day), I also became alarmed by the ways ChatGPT affected my confidence. These red flags were impossible to ignore.
I distinctly remember this one experience where I used ChatGPT to draft a question to ask at a public meeting. Almost immediately after asking the question, I regretted it. I felt like a kid who had cheated on a test. I felt bad that I had outsourced my thinking to a machine.
Since then, I’ve heard several people say, “Using AI isn’t cheating! Don’t feel bad!” but I think we need to be honest with ourselves. We need to look beyond the AI marketing spin and take a good look at what the research literature says.
A recent study involving 1,923 adult participants found that people who were overly reliant on AI experienced decreased confidence in their cognitive abilities and reported feeling less ownership of the ideas. However, people more likely to challenge or reject AI’s suggestions reported greater confidence in their thinking and a greater sense of ownership of their ideas.
Keep in mind that this study was conducted with adults, not students. Students are still developing their cognitive skills and therefore are not in a position to easily challenge or reject AI’s suggestions.
Whilst I believe we are all vulnerable to becoming dependent on AI and using it to avoid thinking, young people are especially vulnerable. AI conditions us to expect immediate answers, which is problematic in a learning environment where we often have to sit with discomfort and work through challenges.
In fact, another recent study found that people who relied on AI were less likely to persist with a task than those who did not rely on AI. What was most alarming was that it only took 10 minutes of using AI to induce these negative effects.
This should set off alarm bells for all of us. Why? Because persistence is a key part of learning and skill acquisition. It’s also one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.
Until we have guardrails in place, it’s best to challenge ourselves to use our brains without AI assistance as much as possible.
Yes, using your brain can feel scary and uncomfortable. But in my experience, it’s also incredibly satisfying (like lifting heavy weights or running up a steep hill).
I was reminded of this recently when I had to get up and speak at a public meeting. Due to having very little notice about this meeting (only 5 minutes), I had no time to scribble out ideas on what I was going to say. There was no time to practice and deliver a polished presentation. All I could do was get up and speak off the cuff about this issue I care deeply about.
And you know what? I surprised myself. I delivered a solid presentation.
I felt proud that I could rely on my brain to pull together a coherent speech on the spot. No notes. No ChatGPT. It was just me and my brain.
This experience gave me a natural high that lasted for several days!
For me, the AI-reliant experience leaves me feeling degraded as a human and doubting myself. The other experience (relying on my unique brain) leaves me feeling fully alive and powerful.
When you use AI, even for just 10 minutes at a time, you need to be aware that it can change you (and not necessarily for the better). Every task that is outsourced to AI makes you less likely to persist with solving a problem. And unless you’re actively challenging the glitchy AI slop, you’re also crippling your confidence and cognition.
Our tech overlords want to create a friction-free experience where we don’t have to think at all, but they’ve overlooked one key thing about life and learning: it’s a struggle. But that’s how we grow and become stronger.
Be brave. Refuse to take the path of least resistance. Embrace the struggle. Use your brain as much as you can. Remember Dave Eggers’ words of wisdom, “You’re one of one. You’re unprecedented in the entire line of human history. Only you have your brain”. So, use it.
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.
