Why are we lazy?

Greetings friends of Project Hope.

Everyone sets goals and purposes, especially when a new year begins. And many of these purposes have to do with increasing our activities, perhaps getting more exercise, learning a skill or starting a business. However, this requires a lot of effort, and although laziness is common and even natural, for many people it is sometimes a serious problem, since excessive laziness has the potential to slow down our personal growth.

Sometimes you have to fight that desire to stay in bed. Image credit: pxhere.com.

Even though sometimes we firmly set a purpose or goal; many times these are sabotaged because we prefer to spend the day sleeping, watching TV, playing video games or simply surfing the social networks. And let's be clear, success is not a friend of these habits.

But you haven't asked yourselves, why are we sometimes unable to be more active when we have the purpose to do so?

On the one side, there seems to be a conflict between reason and emotion, a fight that arises between our intentions to lead a healthier life or work more for something, and the impulses that are contrary to these. To explain this conflict, experts have put forward theories such as the one that explains that our social behavior is due to a joint action of reflexive and impulsive processes, called the dual process model. According to this theory, the reflexive system generates behavioral decisions based on the knowledge of facts, while the impulsive system organizes the automatic and instinctive part[1]. And it is the latter that can facilitate or prevent our reflexive system from carrying out our intentions.

That is, sometimes we want something, but we need the motivation to do it. Think for a moment:

• An Olympic athlete can train more than eight hours a day, do you think he does it for pleasure?

• A student who is studying hard, don't you think he would rather be at a party?

• An entrepreneur who spends 10 or 12 hours working, do you think he sacrifices time with his family on purpose?

In these cases there are three different but clear motivational goals: to win a medal, to achieve professional fulfillment and to set up a business. And although they are different, all three are based on a great desire to improve. Perhaps a medal is not something that motivates you to practice a sport activity, you just have to find that it would motivate you to do it, so that your impulsive system is in tune with your reflexive system.

And on the other hand, it seems that there is also a natural tendency to minimum effort, according to a study where the cortical activity underlying the tendency to avoid the stimuli that represent physical activity was investigated, it was found that more cortical resources are required to avoid sedentary behaviors[2]. Therefore, there is a natural attraction to sedentarism.

When we are comfortable, there is a natural tendency to minimize effort. Image credit: pxhere.com.

The one thing that can be understood, when there is easy access to resources the tendency is to save energy. If there is an elevator we will not use the stairs or if we have a vehicle we will not walk.

Therefore, in this world that offers great opportunities for sedentarism, greater motivation is needed to overcome that attraction that is ingrained in our brain.

More efficiency and less laziness

But don't think we've evolved to be lazy, so don't be justifying yourself, as we've also evolved to be more physically active. When our ancestors became hunters and gatherers, physical activity intensified, you had to travel long distances to find food.

And natural selection was in charge of preserving the genes of those individuals capable of developing more activities and dosing their energy. And in these individuals, physical activity was associated with the secretion of pain-relieving hormones[3]; and these hormonal processes are still there in our organism.

There is to give the maximum, we also have as. Image credit: pxhere.com.

So my friends, the first step to a more active lifestyle is to be aware of the forces that are within us; some of them drive us to save energy, but others are there waiting for us to turn to them to overcome the countless opportunities for sedentariness and laziness that surround us.

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So you know, don't be lazy and get motivated to achieve your goals.

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References

1. Fritz Strack and Roland Deutsch Reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior. Pers Soc Psychol Rev (2004)

2. Boris Cheval, and col. Avoiding sedentary behaviors requires more cortical resources than avoiding physical activity: An EEG study.Neuropsychologia (2018), Volume 119

3. Kelli F.Koltyn, and col. Mechanisms of Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia. The Journal of Pain (2014), Volume 15.