It feels like yesterday that we were setting goals and resolutions for 2024. They probably got you excited about the year to come, felt like stretches without being unachievable, and checked all the typical, “SMART” boxes.
If you’re like roughly half of us, you started strong but things just didn’t stick. You even gave it a few tries…but couldn’t stay consistent. This is reality for most people; they enter the process with the best of intentions, but they’re fighting an uphill battle against the brain. The Law of Effect helps us understand why it’s so hard to build new habits or achieve new goals:
What’s rewarded is repeated.
What’s punished is avoided.
The Law of Effect is supported by modern neuroscience research, which has found that people move into action more rapidly when given a reward, and inhibit action more effectively when threatened with a punishment. This takes us to an immediate problem: many of the things we enjoy in the moment (and therefore experience as a “reward”) aren’t aligned with our long-term goals, and many of the things that do support our long-term goals feel like punishments. Think of common resolutions like exercising regularly, quitting a form of substance use, or reducing how much time you spend on your phone. They’re double whammies: the person is trying to replace an enjoyable behavior (e.g., chilling on your phone) with one that feels like a punishment (e.g., exercising). No wonder it’s so hard to stay on track.
This issue is heightened by the hidden model most people carry around about productivity itself: that it sucks. That it’s uncomfortable, frustrating, and painful to consistently apply ourselves day after day. We learn how to become more efficient in large part so we have to spend less time doing something we don’t actually want to be doing, or we learn distress tolerance skills so we can keep doing the unpleasant thing for longer periods of time. Most questions around productivity, motivation, and goal attainment boil down to: “How can I start this thing I don’t really want to do, or get better at doing this thing I don’t want to do?”
That’s the wrong question. The right question is, “How can I make this thing something I want to do?”
Most of the time, this means going out of our way to hunt for the reward, or to put it simply, make it more enjoyable. We can do this by either:
Identifying what’s already enjoyable about what we’re doing.
Finding ways to deliberately make it more enjoyable.
Learning how to do this means coming face-to-face with one of the brain’s most problematic features: the negativity bias.
Your Brain is a Downer
Our experiences are made up of many parts. Think of drinking a cup of coffee (or tea if that’s your preference): there’s the warmth of the cup, the texture of it, the feeling of it against your lips, the movement of the liquid in your mouth, the flavor, the ways the flavor changes over time, and so on. In addition to those somatic sensations, there are the associations you have with the activity: the model you have of yourself as a “coffee drinker,” the link you feel between coffee and work, and memories of other times you drank coffee. Some of those parts are enjoyable, and some might not be.
Let’s break these parts into two categories:
Category A: These parts are directly in our experience without us needing to focus on them.
Category B: These parts can be called up into our experience by deliberately focusing on them.
When I drink a cup of coffee, I usually don’t really notice the feeling of my hand against the cup, the weight of it as I bring it to my mouth, or the flow of it over my tongue. I mostly notice temperature, taste, and smell. Out of the hundreds if not thousands of different parts that made up the experience, only a tiny fraction of them ended up falling into Category A. This is true of every experience, which means an enormous variable is how the brain chooses to allocate its attention. What ends up being a Category A part, and why does the brain pick some parts over others?
Your brain highlights the aspects of your experience that align with its core goals. Those goals are:
Keeping you alive.
Conserving energy.
Passing on gene copies.
It’s important to notice that happiness, fulfillment, and so on don’t make the list. The brain’s evolutionary emphasis on surviving to pass on genes is one of the reasons it has a negativity bias: it “attends to, learns from, and uses negative information far more than positive information.” The prioritization of negative information has plenty of adaptive advantages, particularly when it came to keeping our distant ancestors alive in the harsh environments they had to survive. Pursuing rewards like food or sex were important, but it was much more important to avoid potential consequences. If you don’t get a reward today, you might get one tomorrow, but if you fail to avoid a major consequence it could be game over.
As a result, the brain routinely:
Scans for bad news.
Focuses tightly on it, losing sight of the big picture.
Overreacts to it.
Fast-tracks the experience into emotional, somatic, and social memory.
Becomes sensitized through repeated doses of the stress hormone cortisol, so it becomes even more reactive to negative experiences. This increased reactivity creates a vicious cycle: more cortisol leads to more reactivity which leads to more cortisol.
To quote Rick Hanson, the brain is like “Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.” During a normal day hundreds of things happen to us, most of which range from neutral to slightly positive. Enjoyable experiences like getting something done at home or work, snuggling into bed with a book at night, planning for something you’re looking forward to, leaning something new, having a pleasant interaction with a coworker, or that good cup of coffee happen all the time. But what do we think about when we’re lying awake at night? It’s probably that one asshole that cut you off in traffic.
The neurological machinery that kept us alive thousands of years ago comes with major consequences for quality of life these days, and you can see this happening in real time if you take a close look at your mind. In the flow of experience with all its many parts, what does the brain put in Category A? For most people, it’s the negative stuff.
The good news? The brain’s tendency to slot the painful parts of our experience into Category A while pushing what’s enjoyable into Category B means there’s probably more good stuff going on in your life than you realize.
Deliberate Enjoyment
Most evidence-based approaches to therapy have similar goals. A few of the major ones include learning:
How to get some separation from the flow of thoughts through the mind, so we see ourselves as “having” thoughts rather than “being” thoughts.
Which thoughts tend to lead to more suffering, and which ones don’t.
Ways to get “beneath” a thought, identifying the source material that created it. Seeing that source material clearly helps us understand it’s context, often allowing us to create new thoughts or disidentify from our current ones.
Attentional control, which gives us the ability to deliberately incline ourselves towards some thoughts and away from others.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are also some of the goals of mindfulness practice. People often frame mindfulness as a kind of passive witnessing of our experience without judgement or discernment, but the Buddha was very clear that one of the objectives of practice was refining our ability to identify which thoughts bring us suffering. We can then learn how to incline the mind away from those thoughts and toward more useful ones.1
The word mindfulness comes from the Pāli word sati, which can be translated more directly as “memory” or “recollected-ness.” I like thinking of mindfulness as a kind of remembering, where we’re deliberately recalling the whole of our experience without being so captured by any one part.
Life is full of forgetting. We forget what works for us. We forget why we can’t consume that thing or talk to that person or go to that place we used to like. We forget all these small, pleasant things that happen to us throughout the day. We forget that we get to influence where our attention lands. We forget what really matters to us, and why we’re here. Forgetting is normal. Growth isn’t about not forgetting, it’s about shortening the time it takes to remember. Remembering the parts of an experience that are more fulfilling, useful, or enjoyable is what allows us to pursue it more consistently. And if you can truly find nothing there to enjoy? Maybe that thing just isn’t for you.
Enjoying in Practice
Let’s use a common goal - exercising more regularly - as an example. For most people, here’s the framework of that goal in terms of what we’ve learned so far:
Law of Effect: Replace time relaxing (reward) with time expending effort (punishment).
Negativity Bias: Painful aspects of the experience (physical discomfort, fatigue, etc.) are pushed into Category A.
Loose Thoughts: Lack of attentional control + pain = difficult thoughts and emotions (anxiety, shame, etc.). Self-criticism tends to rise to the top of the mind.
I want to take a moment here to highlight that this framework isn’t “wrong,” which is why it’s so compelling. Again, our experience is made up of many parts, and some of those parts are painful. But plenty of other parts exist too. One of the ways to tell that you’ve fallen into the brain’s traps is if you feel a rigid attachment to things being exactly this way and no other way. Exercise is punishment, it is uncomfortable, and I will hate it if I do it. This is sometimes known as splitting, or more commonly as black-and-white thinking, and it’s one of the many tools the brain uses to conserve energy and keep us safe from harm. In this particular case, it’s also getting in the way of our goals.
One of the most useful questions we can ask when working with the mind is, “What is also true?” Let’s take a look.
I used to dislike moving my body. I was a fairly awkward kid, had a lot of self-consciousness about how I looked, had absolutely brutal acne, and was bullied and teased regularly during gym class. Toward the end of high school my sister asked me if I wanted to take a dance class, and this sounded both like an awful idea and like something that would probably be good for me. So I gulped, and made one of the better decisions of my teen years by saying yes.
I was bad. I was REAL bad. Worse, I was awkward, uncomfortable, and found it easy to lapse into intense self-criticism. My body hurt, I didn’t know what to do, and for someone who had built a solid two thirds of their identity on being “the one who knows,” this was decidedly not my idea of a good time. But amidst all of that, other things were true too. Something about moving itself felt good. There was a feeling of release in it. I didn’t have the words for it back then, but it was like I could feel my character armor cracking in useful ways.2 I had a music background, and I liked connecting the feeling of movement to what was going on in whatever song was playing. The artistry of the whole thing began to appeal to me. As I stuck with it, two incredible experiences began to appear more regularly. First, I began to have more experiences of competency, which both made going to the studio more enjoyable and unlocked some natural intrinsic motivation.3 Second, and far more importantly, I was proud of myself.
Regardless of the goal you’re pursuing, some aspects of it will probably be painful…and some won’t. Beyond the suffering that the brain is incentivized to highlight, what else is true? What are the aspects of this activity that you can authentically enjoy? Does it bring you closer to goals that would feel amazing to achieve? How could you deliberately nudge your thoughts towards those enjoyable aspects, and away from ones that are less productive? Is there a part of you that’s more supportive or nurturing in addition to parts that are more shaming and self-critical?
Enjoying, Simplified
I’ve spent a lot of words here, so let’s simplify things down to what really matters. Over, and over, and over again, look for what there is to enjoy. Make a habit of it. Look for the aspects of experience that are rewarding while you’re doing the things that matter. Don’t let yourself be a prisoner to the brain’s whims.
When you find something to enjoy marinate in it. It’s common for people to be prudish or self-conscious about enjoyment and enthusiasm, about finding the fun in life. Fully feel the experience, make it big in your mind, and tune in to any pleasant somatic sensations that accompany it. If jumping up and down or giving yourself a high-five or whatever else once you’re done with something makes it more enjoyable to you, do it. Yes, people might look at you sideways or roll their eyes. Who cares? Life is short.
Along similar lines, find a way in that works for you. People often take bites that are too big, and then get mad at themselves when they have a hard time chewing. Returning to our exercising example, some people are just never going to go to the gym consistently. It takes too much time, costs too much money, and is too painful in other ways. There’s too much friction to realistically succeed. What’s a much simpler, much easier version of this thing that you really could commit to? How can you make it too easy to fail?
Let’s say you do all of this. You’re pursuing a meaningful goal, you’ve found some ways to make it digestible, and you’ve gotten to a point where taking the actions needed to achieve that goal feel pretty good. If one day you still find yourself stuck in a pattern of frustration or self-criticism, it’s probably time to take a break. At that point you’re just practicing suffering, and tying that suffering to the activity through repetition. Just put the stone down for today, it’ll be there tomorrow.
What do you think? Leave a comment down below, and let me know what’s helped you lean in to the enjoyable parts of building a new habit.
Dvedhavitakka Sutta: Two Sorts of Thinking. https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.019.than.html
Character armor is an idea developed by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who believed that our behavioral patterns and internalized ways of thinking could consolidate into a particular way of holding and moving the body that served as a kind of “armor” against painful experiences.
This principle comes from Self-Determination Theory.
Thank you for breaking down these points so thoroughly! I landscape so I'm not working right now but I'm trying to find new ways to expand my gardening talent. I've been feeling a bit stuck that the things I feel I need to do (have more of a social media presence, reach out to more people, etc) are not always comfortable to me. I will work on reframing my focus to positive experiences and being gentler with myself when my brain focuses on negative associations. :)
Thank you so much Forrest for your podcast and your very well written letter. It helps me to understand better and share that understanding in my meditation and yoga classes. Hi five to you!