I mean its so much better for the brain to be active working doing useful things stimulating your brain or working out, we all have a reward system and everytime we finish a task we feel a sense of accomplishment but everytime you should be doing something that you know will feel good in the end you just get this urge of doing nothing today and just relaxing,
shouldnt our brain be chasing this sense of accomplishment? Where does this feeling come from
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The environment we find ourselves in today is very different from the conditions that humankind has faced for the vast majority of our time on planet Earth. For most of our existence (and for most species alive today) a steady diet was not guaranteed, and malnutrition/starvation was a very real danger. If our far-distant ancestors found themselves in a safe place with plenty to eat & drink, one of the wisest things they could choose to do was *nothing,* which conserved valuable calories and exposed them to no new dangers.
Our brains are not suited for the environment we have created, because our technology made our situation change faster than evolution goes.
The reason for a lot of behavior that is bad for you is that it used to be good for you, or even if it was bad in too much quantity, we’d have another negative reinforcement to force a different action.
So before we had agriculture and civilization at all, we had to hunt animals for meat and gather plants for vegetables. When you don’t know when your next meal is coming, carbohydrates that can be burned now for energy or stored later as a fat for later conversion into energy when you don’t have food, are very good to have when you can get them. So over the course of our evolution, our taste buds evolved to give us hits of dopamine when we tasted carbohydrates, and thus why people like sweet things, generally speaking.
Similarly: too much activity can be dangerous to us. Run too long and you can trip and break something, or just fall and die, and even if none of that happens, you’re using some of that energy that you’re going to need later.
But, importantly: we didn’t have a stockpile of food that we can easily replenish without finding it in the wild and picking it/killing it ourselves. So the good feeling of relaxing was eventually overwhelmed by the hunger pangs, but instead of a 10 meter journey to the kitchen, we had to run after a single deer for 14 hours until it collapsed.
Nowadays, we have to understand with our higher brain functions that there is a reward at the end of the unpleasant stuff, and that our brain won’t tell us we’re going to die if we don’t do it and so it’s worth the pain to get there. Which we can do, but it’s harder because it’s at a more complex level of cognition than our “animal” brain that has all that instinctive stuff like “hungry -> go get food”
Nature doesn’t care what’s better for us. It cares about us reproducing. That is essentially the only thing that drives evolution. Laziness is a way to conserve energy. When food wasn’t plentiful, conserving energy was much more important than it is today (at least in societies that have a surplus of food). And in the eyes of evolution, starving to death at a young age is much worse than the potential negative effects of laziness on the brain. You can still have offspring if your brain is less stimulated.
Even when we’re “just relaxing” are we really not doing anything? My kids, when they’re “doing nothing” are either doing artwork or playing video games or watching movies. All those things are stimulating on some level.
I used to play a lot of video games, but recently I watch movies, read Reddit, cook and do things around the house. None of these are true idleness, in the old-fashioned sense.
There is a zone in your brain called the anterior singular cortex, this zone is a remain of our evolution and this zone basically command the 5 stuff needed for the human race to survive since they exist, those are the basic of our functioning. The 5 things we are craving for are (think like we are still 10 000 years in he past) :
-eating good food (the better the food, the moire chance to survive)
-reproduce (yeah a species need to reproduce to survive, that why we are obsessed by sex and that half the internet bandwidth is made of porn, specially in religious countries)
-our position in the social hierarchy (we want the big AUDI, the designer clothes, the diamond, to look like we are at the top, we want to be richer than rich because being at the top of the social hierarchy mean that you gonna have better food and better sex partner, so potentially better children)
-sharing information (that’s what we do on reddit), human race share information to survive (were is the good food, the good sexual partner, how to get to the top of social hierarchy, how to survive and else)
-rest / conservation of energy, no need to spend precious energy that can save you later, we are programmed to conserve it because life haven’t been like today in “rich” country
Note : even if those basic define the ideal of capitalism, human can be more subtle, so I don’t tell that ALL human are basic like this, I just tell it’s in our instinct to be like this, and after that some peoples stay just like this, other grow a more subtle and rich person
But those are the basic of human functioning, and resting to save the energy is one of them, it’s a basic of surviving
When your body has everything it needs, doing nothing is usually the best course of action where best is defined as least chance to die.
We evolved from contexts where being overweight was a pipe dream so gaining weight and the multitude of health risks from that were non-issues.
Another explanation for some “lazy” behavior is discouragement. We’ve faced failure before, and it hurt; and if we haven’t healed from that, we can be reluctant to try again.
That mechanism underlies a lot of anxiety and mental health challenges.
That’s just how mammals maintain homeostasis. Once you’re fed, you can chill mad hard. Work sucks.
Your assumption that everyone gets a sense of reward and accomplishment in their brain when they finish a task is not right. I use up all my dopamine planning and creatively imagining the task. Doing it is almost always just a slog, and when I finish it I just want to run away and forget about it, even if I’ve done a good job, and it’s something I’m really glad I’ve done. I’m trying to train myself to stop and actively appreciate the accomplishment so my brain will start to associate finishing the task with pleasure, but so far my brain still prefers the dopamine rush of deciding to do something else instead to avoid the stress. I need a full-time coach.
I honestly think it’s mostly just whatever you’ve conditioned yourself for…
When I had more free time I definitely preferred to just relax and be lazy. These days I spend 60-70 hours a week in the office with a consulting job on top of it, and in the free time I do have I feel like I have to cram something useful in to every minute. Like I genuinely can’t enjoy just sitting down and watching a movie unless I come up with at least *something* to do while I’m watching it…
So I think it’s just a matter of whatever your current situation has programmed your brain to do.
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