Learn more about personaldevelopment with this collection
Understanding the psychological rewards of bad habits
Creating new habits to replace old ones
Developing self-discipline
Mental effort is tiresome
Studies show that some people would rather endure physical pain than use their brainpower.
The idea that people will avoid exerting mental effort is not new. It has been discussed since the days of William James, a 19th-century psychologist. We know intuitively that mental effort can be exhausting. But the aversion to mental tasks can also stem from the anxiety of getting something wrong.
63
614 reads
MORE IDEAS ON THIS
Seeking cognitive effort
Off course, some people will also seek out cognitive effort, rather than to avoid it.
A study found that participants who reported finding mental tasks "intrinsically rewarding" were more likely to seek a cognitive task over pain than those who ...
46
559 reads
CURATED FROM
CURATED BY
Related collections
More like this
Automaticity
William James described in the the late 19th century how mental processes that are abundantly practiced and rehearsed escape our awareness and begin operating autonomously and without conscious intentionality.
This post-conscious automaticity that James studies ensures that with pract...
City Life and Mental Health
New studies show that our physical surroundings affect our mental health as well, in a greater degree than previously known. The people living in big cities face a nearly 40 percent higher risk of depression, a 20 percent higher chance of anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia than people ...
Read & Learn
20x Faster
without
deepstash
with
deepstash
with
deepstash
Access to 200,000+ ideas
—
Access to the mobile app
—
Unlimited idea saving & library
—
—
Unlimited history
—
—
Unlimited listening to ideas
—
—
Downloading & offline access
—
—
Personalized recommendations
—
—
Supercharge your mind with one idea per day
Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.
I agree to receive email updates