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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I believe I read somewhere that it sometimes has to do with procrastination. You’re brain isn’t willing to commit to the unpleasantness of whatever task you have to do, so it decides to avoid it by choosing laziness. So, even though the harder tasks often reap greater rewards, it’s the *process* of getting that reward that our brains hate and try to avoid.
I’m surprised no one has really touched on dopamine.
Dopamine is the agent involved in most brain signaling. Essentially, it acts on parts of the brain associated with ‘pleasure’ and ‘reward’, and it helps you feel satisfied. Abnormalities in dopamine signaling, such as perturbations to dopamine transport signaling, can lead to mental issues such as ADHD, autism, and Parkinson’s.
From an evolutionary perspective, the mechanism of dopamine is extremely useful. You kill a sabretooth cat; you feel extremely excited not only because you have food for a week, but dopamine spiked after the adventure. You burn ships’ worth of tea, dopamine spikes. You witness the overthrow of a Cheetoh-colored dictator, dopamine spikes.
But in modern times, our priorities change. Most of us don’t have access to hunting and voting is very infrequent, so we have to rely on more immediately gratifying events. Acing a test will do it; your favorite team winning will do it; but most people rely on drinks and memes.
So, accomplishing tasks is rewarding. There is as much evidence for that as for evolution. But vacuuming the house is not; mainly because it will just revert back within days. So, when faced with a choice between perusing Reddit and vacuuming the house, we will rationalize that Reddit is better because we are contributing to a conversation or keeping up to date with all the latest, while also rationalizing vacuuming would be a waste of time because it’ll just get dirty again (obviously a very reductionist argument); so we opt for ‘lazy’.
I do want to point out, ‘thinking’ is often misconstrued with ‘being lazy’. In this day, most of the tasks that took up a lot of time in the past are done in a shorter time. It leaves us extra time to do other things, be it gaming, reading, or just thinking. Baseboards are an annual thing, so once the house is clean I have no guilt with just sitting out back and thinking about stuff.
There’s no evidence that keeping busy is better for the brain, in fact the opposite is true. The misconception is based on societal pressure rather than science. Being “lazy” is relaxing, it lowers stress hormones, and feels good. High stress can lower your life expectancy by literally decades, so just takin ‘er easy can have massive quantifiable impact on longevity. Personally, I get that sense of accomplishment from being kind to myself and allowing myself to relax despite being conditioned to feel guilty for it.
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Just here to point out that not everyone has an effective reward system such as people with ADHD
While I don’t dispute the evolutionary explanations I feel like they are overlooking “conditioning” and “habit”. Many of us who have had their schedule completely full for a long period of time have difficulty doing nothing. Habit is a very strong motivator, it’s the reason people can become mentally addicted to doing things when there is no physically addictive property.
I actually have this exact conversation with other parents who are business owners or executives, we simply can’t do nothing anymore. And I do mean “can’t”. While I used to be able to sleep in, now I’m up at 6am or after 6 hours of sleep, whichever comes first. Even smoking pot is different because of how I am conditioned to always be productive and doing something. I used to be happy smoking and watching TV, now if I do that I’ll find myself compelled to at least respond to emails, do ordering and QuickBooks. I literally can’t do “nothing”, in fact it would be torture to try and I would either start doing chores or pull out my phone and at least start researching my plans for my business or home.
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