It is often that people have to do things they do not want to do. Those tasks are important and urgent for their wellbeing. Nevertheless, the brain has many tricks to avoid them if it feels averse to them: it could question the importance, distract you to do other, irrelevant tasks, perceive the chance of failure as higher than of success, or even simply "not feel like it". This essay explores such phenomenon of resistance and provides ways to counter it.
There are a handful of reasons for the brain's resistance toward exerting effort, and one of them is the need to conserve energy. Humans need energy for survival. They evolved to survive.* Since the dawn of their existence, humans have relied on efficient energy consumption, primarily to fight or flee predators and to gather food—more energy. Their brain is especially crucial in this case because it organises the usage of energy and conserves as much as possible for more important cases, like an encounter with a predator, or even a perceived one.† Whatever energy it can get, the human brain will save it.
From this, we can understand that the brain is rather tired. Its job of regulating the entire human body takes plenty of energy, so it is no wonder the brain uses around 20% of it.[1] This explains the tendency for people to operate by habit—that is the brain's default mode because it consumes less energy. Using energy taxes the brain, so it leans to resist exerting effort as much as possible. An exception to that is if a reward is worth striving for, but that is a topic on its own.
Another possible reason for such resistance is the mere-exposure effect. This phenomenon states that humans are attracted to familiar matters and averse to unfamiliar ones. The reason behind it is that the more familiar something is, the easier the brain processes it. This ease of processing is what stimulates the attraction toward familiarity. Since the brain conserves energy by default, it is not unreasonable to deduce that energy conservation is familiar and thus preferable. Opting for conserving energy strengthens its familiarity, which increases the chance of opting for it again in the future. In contrast, unfamiliarity—doing chores, for this case—is undesirable because it consumes energy. Furthermore, the brain struggles to assess the amount of reward it could reap from unfamiliar tasks, deterring it more from doing them. Continouously avoiding chores decreases their chance of being done.
One more reason is that, by virtue of time and space, humans operate in the immediate present. It is a matter of survival, since all of their life events happen readily in the present moment and the present environment. That is why humans generally do not foresee far in the future: they, evolutionarily speaking, never needed to. This broadly paints future reward as less pleasurable than immediate rewards, which is why the brain seeks the latter. Future reward often requires effort, too, and that is additional incentive for the brain to think not of it.
Now, with all of that said, people still have chores. They have tasks they ought to do for their well-being, and such tasks not only require effort, but they are often unpleasurable. The brain, being the energy-conserving organ that it is, will try to disalign us from our duties, all for the sake of energy conservation and a vague sense of reward. Below I list seven methods to guide your brain into doing the chores.
Before the list, I must tell you that these methods are applicable if the chores and their goals are clear. Lack of clarity in such will hinder your performance on the tasks. Moreover, the methods assume that each task would last an arguably reasonable duration, namely less than four hours. With that in mind, here are the seven methods finally listed:
Obviously, the list of methods I have presented is not comprehensive. If you find yourself with a list of still incomplete chores, I advise you search for other methods.
[1] Koeppen, A. H. (2000). Basic Neurochemistry. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, Vol. 174, 49–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-510x(00)00257-4
* Humans have evolved to survive, and they survive to produce offspring. Producing offspring passes genes onto the next generation, while not producing offspring does not. The behaviour of not producing offspring does not lead a species to evolve, so it does not pass onto the next generation. I do recognise that this reasoning is rather circular and oversimplified, but it is the best I could do.
† I add in the idea of a perceived predator to illustrate how powerful perception can be. Humans have had their threats present, so the mere perception of a threat can be enough to activate hostility, as if a predator was indeed present. People with PTSD, for example, may unconsciously find certain people to be predatory. Their past experience of hostility lingered with them, and so danger perceived is hardly different from danger seen.