How to Trick Your Brain into Doing Hard Things

Do you find ever yourself in a vicious cycle of procrastination despite your best intentions?

Yeah? Same here.

I always struggled with getting myself to exercise, write, and study to reach my goals.

It was like that SpongeBob episode where he couldn’t finish an essay.

“Yeah, I’ll go to the gym right after I finish one more Kurzgesagt video.”

“I study better in the evenings, I’ll just wait till then.”

Then of course, it never ends up happening.

It’s challenging to get the hard things done when there’s way more pleasurable things to do.

For the sake of my future, I had to stop.

Or in this case, start.

So I thought —

Is there a way to make hard things fun?

Ironically, I was procrastinating on a writing assignment when I went down this rabbit hole.

My search brought me to investigate one of the godfather’s of behavioral psychology.

B.F Skinner.

Skinner was this Harvard psychologist that decided he wasn’t satisfied with the direction traditional psychology was going at the time.

So what did he do?

Skinner created a controlled environment where he could experiment the effects of stimuli on rats.

In plain English—

He gave the rats food when they pressed on a cool button.

This 30 second video makes it easy to understand: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOgowRy2WC0]

From this he found that behaviors are modified through rewards.

They called it— operant conditioning.

So why does that matter to us?

It shows that you can condition yourself to do anything.

Including the hard things that you don’t want to do.

You might remember those fundraisers back in elementary school where you would earn prizes for selling things.

Like a bouncy ball for selling $1000 worth of magazines.

Even though it was all kinda sketch, they were essentially reinforcing a habit (selling magazines) with a reward (bouncy ball).

Habits are more or less, learned behaviors.

Let’s say you want to write everyday for 30 minutes (the habit).

Now think of your favorite things or comforts (the reward).

I like black coffee, dark chocolate, and rage music.

Pro tip: It’s best if the things you like are semi-healthy or at bare minimum don’t kill you.

Now attach the reward to the thing you want to do.

1. You sit down your desk (ideal environment)
2. Set a timer for 30 minutes (auditory cue)
3. Write for 30 minutes (the hard thing)
4. When the timer rings, enjoy a piece of chocolate (the reward)

Your brain automatically links doing the hard thing with the external reward.

Just like one of Skinner’s rats.

And if you don’t have the timer or the environment, that’s okay.

All you need is a hard task and a reward.

You get the best results when you keep the reward proportional to the task.

So if I wrote or studied for 30 minutes, a piece of dark chocolate was good enough for me.

If I hit a new PR in the gym, I’m gonna be wanting a lot more than that.

When it comes to rewards and conditioning, it all about finding a balance.

If you’re struggling with procrastination or just hate getting through that difficult thing— give it a try.