Almost everyday, I find it irritating to sit down and start working. I thought the resistance, and the procrastination that followed, meant I was a lazy person. But I recently learned that initial resistance to "hard work" is not only normal, but necessary.
Even if you love what you do, it's completely normal to resist getting started. The reasons why come down to how our brains work. I'll outline the three major neurological chemicals at play (let's call them "agents" for short) and explain how you can structure your work to reduce the discomfort.
Noradrenaline
Noradrenaline is the “alertness” agent. It tells our brain and body to be at attention when we’re ready to do focused, hard work. When our noradrenaline levels are high, we are alert and a bit uncomfortable. This is because noradrenaline is the same agent that fires when we're in fight or flight mode. The discomfort is by design. Our brain is trying to get us to act and resolve the discomfort by taking action.
This very post started with a lot of procrastination. Like a dog taken out for a walk, my mind was easily distracted. I opened up new HackerNews, Reddit, and Youtube tabs to ease the discomfort of noradrenaline.
Why is noradrenaline necessary?
Stamford neuroscientist Dr. Huberman describes noradrenaline as a necessary ingredient to learning. Both noradrenaline, and another agent called acetylcholine (the "focus" agent) work together to trigger the process of change in our brains (aka “learning”). The ability to learn allows hard work to become easy over time because our work becomes familiar. Our brains are designed to absorb novel information and make it familiar.
It goes something like this:
You’re at your desk, ready to start working hard on your project
Noradrenaline starts transmitting through your brain to make you alert
Acetylcholine is released to the specific neurons associated with what you're deeply concentrating on, whether it's a new idea you're learning or a blog post you're composing
Noradrenaline and acetylcholine work together to mark the necessary neurons for change
The day ends, you go to bed, and during deep sleep your brain processes those marked neurons for long-term memory
How to reduce the discomfort
Dr.Huberman describes dopamine as the counterbalance to noradrenaline.
Dopamine acts as the brain's reward mechanism, reducing our levels of noradrenaline to give us more runway for tackling challenging tasks. Our brain and body release dopamine when we achieve small milestones or when we feel we’re on the right path.
Based on this understanding, the trick to getting started and staying on track is to reward yourself for trying.
It’s why short, manageable milestones are crucial for achieving your long-term goals.1
One of my favorite real life examples of this in action is Jerry Seinfeld's tip to writers. He encourage writers to create an end time to their daily writing sessions. He admits that it’s torture to have open-ended writing sessions. “If you’re going to sit-down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you gotta get a reward for that. The reward is, the alarm goes off and you’re done. You get up and walk away and have some cookies and milk.”
My personal trick for structuring small rewards is the Pomodoro technique. If I'm not feeling motivated to start on a project, I convince myself to get one 20-min session in. Often, that one session gets me motivated to keep going. But sometimes, all I can muster is 2-3 sessions for the day and that's ok. My reward is making the attempt.
What if there’s no dopamine and our noradrenaline keeps increasing?
We quit.
When our brain hits its limit of noradrenaline, “it shuts down cognitive control over [our] motor circuitry and we quit,” says Huberman.
This makes sense. I remember countless times where I've sat at my desk trying to make progress on a big milestone. The tension in my body is real and overwhelming. If I feel that tension long enough, I want to get up and do just about anything else. And sometime’s I do when I hit that breaking point.
All this to say, be gentle with yourself. This post isn’t a panacea to work resistance but visibility into it. Willingness to show up and push through the resistance is a small battle everyone experiences.
Instead of berating yourself:
create manageable milestones
reward yourself along the way
remind yourself that resistance is by design
Good Beats
Love the disco vibes in this song. The Back to the Future reference is the cherry on top.
A 50¢ word (aka words that say a lot with less)
Neuroplasticity (noun):
the ability of the brain to form and reorganize connections, especially in response to learning or experience
For Your Thoughts
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
—Xunzi, third century B.C.E. Confucian philosopher
Yours,
-Rahul
P.S. a reminder you can reply directly to oldmanrahul@substack.com, or you can tweet me @oldmanrahul about this edition. Thanks for reading and supporting my writing :)
Scott Adams and James Clear have extensively written about this.