Studying, working, going to the gym, or any other activity sometimes feels like hell. Whenever you start it, you either get bored, distracted or zone out because that’s your brain’s way of protecting you from stress. This is because you’ve already thought to yourself that the task will be challenging; therefore, your brain does whatever it can to protect you. So, how do people actually get work done that is hard or challenging?
Do not think about a task being hard
First of all, never think to yourself that the task is hard. Easier said than done, right? I can say this with experience, that not thinking about the difficulty of the work can make it a lot easier. Let me tell you a story. I absolutely hated Math in A-levels because I always thought that it was hard and very complicated. But ever since I came to university, I asked myself “If Math was really that hard, how is everyone else doing it?” So, I told myself that I will learn Math because I’m sure it’s not hard, and what do you know, it really was not that difficult. Sure, I had to put in effort and practice, but it wasn’t hard. It just required some time.
Find exciting ways of doing unexciting things
Secondly, you get bored and distracted as the task may be of a low dopamine reward. Dopamine is one of the “feel-good” chemicals. It interacts with the reward centre of the brain. This means that the lower the dopamine released by the brain, the less you feel good. Doing hard things sometimes comes with a low dopamine reward, meaning we just have to find a way to make those tasks more exciting and meaningful.
For studying, what I have started doing is that I think about the subject differently. For example, one of my course is; formal languages and abstract machines. This course can get very tricky very quickly, so what I did was I have started to think in a way I perceive a computer does. It dumbed down the whole process and made it extremely simple for me to understand the course. It also gave me a whole new perspective of how a computer actually works. So find ways to make things simple, exciting, or any other way you feel will benefit you. Be creative.
In the words of Logic “Break it down”
Thirdly, breaking down a challenging task can be one of the best ways to tackle it. What breaking down does is that you now have small chunks of a big task. Therefore, every time you complete that small chunk, dopamine is released as a reward. How I break down my 3-4-hour lecture videos is I started using the Pomodoro technique (https://pomofocus.io/). This basically means that I do focused work for 25 minutes and then break for 5 minutes. I repeat this process 4 times before taking a more extensive break of 15–20 minutes. So essentially, I get 100 minutes of laser-focused work done in small chunks and barely notice the amount of time that actually passes.
Doing hard things is a choice. It is up to you to take the easy road and live a simple life, or take the hard road and live a beautiful and exciting life. So, to make things simpler, not thinking that a task is hard, finding better ways of doing the difficult things and breaking the work down into small chunks will help you accomplish what you want. I really recommend that you try these out, and hopefully, they will work for you as well as they have for me, and if they do, please let me know in the comments and read my other blogs! https://shahnawazyasser.net/blog/