After Watching This Video, You’ll Never Be the Same — Trick Your Brain

This video may change the way you look at discipline and laziness. Think about those few seconds after your alarm goes off every morning. You open your eyes, and before the day has even begun, your hand reaches for your phone. You turn off the alarm and tell yourself, “I’ll sleep a little longer and do it later.” Hours later, the same question comes back: “Why do I have no willpower?” But what if the problem isn’t really a lack of willpower? Maybe your brain is already making a prediction about how something will feel before you consciously decide whether to do it. In this video, we explore why we constantly procrastinate on certain tasks while instinctively reaching for other things without even thinking about it. In 2012, researchers including Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister studied people’s everyday desires and experiences of self-control. Their research found that desires were experienced frequently, but not every desire automatically turned into a major internal conflict. So why does effort feel more tolerable to some people than others? Robert Eisenberger’s “Learned Industriousness” research suggests that rewarding effort can influence how effort itself is valued over time. In other words, our brains may learn to associate effort not simply with a cost, but with an experience connected to reward. And then things get even more interesting. A 1997 study by Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, and Read Montague presented an influential model of how dopamine neurons respond during reward learning. As signals predicting a reward become learned, the brain can respond to those signals rather than only to the reward itself. In this video, we’ll also explore: • Rewarding the effort instead of the outcome • Pairing rewards with the behavior you want to build • Shrinking the starting point to just a few minutes • Designing your environment instead of relying on willpower • Ending a task with a small win instead of a feeling of failure For example, the “temptation bundling” research by Katherine Milkman, Julia Minson, and Kevin Volpp examined whether pairing something people enjoy with a more beneficial but less appealing activity, such as exercise, could increase participation. The study found an increase in exercise during the initial period, although the effect decreased over time. Research on habit formation by Phillippa Lally and colleagues also points to an important fact: the time it takes for a behavior to become automatic can vary considerably from person to person, and missing a single day does not necessarily destroy the process of habit formation. So maybe you’ve been asking yourself the wrong question all these years. “How can I have more willpower?” Maybe the better question is: “What has my brain learned to expect from this behavior?” Watch until the end, because you’ll discover five methods you can use to change what your brain predicts about effort, instead of trying to force yourself into having more discipline. And maybe the problem was never that you were “broken.” Maybe you simply learned the wrong thing over and over again. 📚 Sources Used in the Video Hofmann, W., Baumeister, R. F., Förster, G., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Everyday Temptations: An Experience Sampling Study of Desire, Conflict, and Self-Control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Eisenberger, R. (1992). Learned Industriousness. Psychological Review. Schultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P. R. (1997). A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward. Science. Milkman, K. L., Minson, J. A., & Volpp, K. G. (2014). Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation Bundling. Management Science. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World. European Journal of Social Psychology. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) — discussion of habit and making the nervous system an “ally.”