Sometimes you just need to enjoy being lazy
What is laziness
Dictionaries define laziness as “the lack of desire to act, work, the tendency to idleness” (Ozhegov), “the unwillingness to work or make any effort” (Cambridge). Scientists clarify – even though a person has the ability to act and make efforts.
Lack of desire is the key point. If you don’t want to work because you don’t have the strength, this is not laziness, but exhaustion, and you need to rest. As the American psychologist Donald Laird wrote back in 1934, “true laziness… is mental, not physical. It is caused by ideas and emotions, not work or poor physical condition.”
In scientific terms, laziness is preferred behavior. You could do something, but you don’t want to. Or you want to, but you just don’t want to spend energy, for example, on housework at the weekend, instead of which you want to lie in bed, take a walk or watch a movie. After all, nothing terrible will happen if you don’t do it today.
Laziness is by no means necessarily harmful to us; moreover, it is often very useful. This is its evolutionary meaning – laziness allows you to conserve energy, save effort, choose less costly ways to solve problems, and ultimately survive.
“Laziness is deeply embedded in our nature,” wrote the founder of behavioral economics, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. “The general ‘law of least effort’ applies to both cognitive and physical efforts. It states that if there are several ways to achieve the same goal, people will tend to gravitate toward the least laborious course of action.”
“I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because he will find an easy way to do it,” said Bill Gates.
In 2018, an interesting study of 300 mollusk species that inhabited or continue to inhabit the Earth over the past 5.3 million years was published. Scientists concluded that most extinct mollusks had a higher metabolic rate than those that continue to live. It turns out that organisms with lower energy costs have a better chance of survival.
The new theory was immediately ironically called the “survival of the laziest”, as opposed to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” (or, to be precise, “survival of the most adapted”).
But people are not mollusks, we are more complicated.
Laziness as a social construct
A colony of gastropods will not accuse individual members of being too lazy and doing nothing for the common good. The human society is a different matter. A study conducted by University of Copenhagen psychologist Thomas Madsen dedicated to studying laziness as a social construct based on narratives and ready-made templates like the “lazy student” who could get higher grades but does not try, or the “lazy unemployed” who does not have a job simply because he does not want to look for one. And in this sense, people often define other people and themselves as lazy if they consider their behavior or their own behavior not to meet the expectations of a society in which diligence in achieving goals is seen as unconditionally approved behavior.
You could have been a better student, a successful businessman, a famous artist, but you did not make enough effort. Other circumstances (poverty, lack of resources, lack of access to education, etc.) are often considered secondary, the main thing is to strive, aspire, be persistent and ambitious, that is, not to be lazy. Society condemns the lazy, so a lazy person tends to condemn himself.
Laziness as a deadly sin
The concept of laziness was also of interest to Christian theologians, because the Bible calls laziness one of the deadly sins. At the same time, the definition changed over time. The oldest one, called by the Greek word acedia (ἀκηδία), denoted rather despondency, melancholy, a deep existential crisis, in which a person does not see the point in making efforts. Saint Thomas Aquinas defined laziness as “aversion of the mind not to any spiritual good, but to the divine good to which reason is directed,” that is, indifference to one’s duties and obligations primarily to God.
Orthodox Christianity holds similar views on laziness, considering it a result of despondency and idleness, unwillingness to pray, work, strive for good and light. “Despondency means the same laziness, only worse… You don’t want to work or pray; you go to church negligently; and the whole person weakens,” wrote St. Ambrose of Optina.
But in Protestantism the concept of laziness changed, giving rise to what the German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber called “Protestant work ethics”. In it, any work, including earning money for one’s own benefit, is an unconditional virtue and a direct path to salvation, while being lazy and indulging in weaknesses is unworthy.
Protestant ethics had a great influence on American business culture, in which a person must be enterprising, responsible, focused on self-realization and development, able to find resources within himself to realize his potential. Success replaced Christian Salvation, only a person must seek it not in the afterlife, but in everyday life – both in work and personal life, writes anthropologist Christen Marie Bovbjerg.
Are you really lazy?
First of all, study your laziness by applying mindfulness techniques. Is it laziness at all? Are you not confusing it with fatigue, boredom, burnout, apathy, and other emotions and experiences that feel similar?
Do not just state “I’m lazy”, try to honestly answer the questions: What exactly are you too lazy to do? Why are you lazy? When are you lazy? How often are you lazy? How do you feel about laziness? The answers will help you understand if you are dealing with laziness or something else. Here’s what people very often confuse with laziness.
Fatigue
The most common case. As mentioned above, you may be too lazy to do housework on the weekends and scold yourself for being lazy, but it’s all just about fatigue, depletion, lack of energy. Don’t rush to blame yourself – most likely, you just need to rest. Remember when you rested last time, did that rest help you, how did you feel after it.
Listen to the experts’ advice: rest not when you are completely exhausted, but a little earlier, plan rest in advance, try to change the setting, look for novelty, whenever possible, prefer active rest to passive rest. And to choose the best way to rest, figure out exactly what made you tired.
Procrastination
Laziness does not equal procrastination, which the Canadian psychologist Piers Steel called “the voluntary delay of an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay.” In other words, we don’t want to work even though it will inevitably cause problems for us. We have described procrastination in detail in a big guide – you will find recommendations on how to deal with it there.
Specialists call procrastination a form of “self-harming behavior” (although there is no consensus on this issue), while laziness is harmless, but only for short periods of time and in reasonable doses. But if you are always too lazy to do anything – this is no longer laziness.
Depression and burnout
If you are too lazy to do almost everything very often, consult a specialist: you may have depression or other serious psychological disorders. Doctors claim that laziness cannot be considered a symptom of depression – laziness is a conscious choice of behavior strategy, and you cannot “choose” to be depressed.
Depressed people may seem lazy due to the core symptoms of depression, such as lack of motivation and energy. But depression is a mental disorder accompanied by many symptoms, such as deep sadness, inability to feel pleasure, desire to isolate oneself, apathy, etc. In the short term, laziness and depression can have the same consequences for your life (you don’t want to make the bed, leave the house, work, and so on). Laziness usually goes away on its own, depression doesn’t.
Depression is usually accompanied by biochemical changes in the body that can be detected by tests (although there is no clear protocol, and doctors usually make a diagnosis based on talking to the patient) – laziness cannot be detected through examinations, during laziness our body functions completely normally.
Sometimes laziness is confused with burnout – an extreme degree of exhaustion and fatigue, which may also be accompanied by depression. If you suspect you have burned out (paid or free tests can help you understand this), first organize proper rest and, if necessary, seek professional help.
How to overcome laziness
If you have excluded the above conditions and realized that you are dealing with laziness, all that remains is to choose the right way for you to overcome laziness.
Remember: the brain approves of laziness
In 2018, researchers from the University of Geneva were looking for an answer to a question that seems paradoxical: why are people inclined to avoid physical activity, knowing full well that it is very beneficial for health, and a sedentary lifestyle is harmful. To do this, they observed the brain using electroencephalography (EEG). The scientists came to two main conclusions.
The first: people try to minimize energy expenditure and avoid unnecessary physical exertion, unconsciously considering this behavior to be the most profitable. The second: this behavior is supported and approved by the brain, in which processes of two different types collide – controlled and automatic.
“Controlled processes are initiated intentionally, require a lot of cognitive resources, and operate within consciousness. Automatic processes are initiated unintentionally, consume fewer cognitive resources, occur outside conscious understanding, and can create problems by conflicting with controlled processes,” the researchers note.
Your desire to exercise is a controlled process that requires a lot of resources and needs to be consciously monitored. Being lazy is a much less costly behavior that requires no consciousness and turns on almost “by default”.
The scientists’ recommendation is that if your brain approves of minimizing energy expenditure, don’t argue with it, but help it. The less conscious effort you need to spend on exercising, the more the brain will like it. Add routines, automation or rituals – this will reduce cognitive load and allow you to spend less energy.
This works not only for sports: routine is the first way to fight laziness.
Apply routine and rituals
Remember: when you wake up in the morning, you don’t think about what to do next. You have a ready routine that you follow daily with minimal changes: wash, brush your teeth, drink coffee or tea, eat breakfast (sandwiches, porridge, scrambled eggs), read news feeds and social media. You do this automatically, you almost don’t need to make a conscious effort.
The easiest way to create a routine is to do the same repetitive tasks at the same time. For example, if you always clean up on Saturday at 12 noon, you don’t need to think about doing it today or tomorrow (or sometime later). You can organize a similar schedule for a wide variety of tasks: workouts, reading news or books, walking, preparing breakfast or dinner, working, taking work breaks, meditating – you will be surprised how many things can be made into a routine or habit.
Routine allows us to do a huge number of things automatically, that is, spend much less cognitive resources (this is what our brain loves, and it will encourage such behavior). You can also turn your routine into a more “advanced” thing called ritual, the main purpose of which is the same – to make your life easier, free you from the need to expend extra energy.
Minimize choice
The prefrontal cortex of our brain is responsible for planning and decision making and gets very tired from the huge number of decisions that need to be made in the modern world, says Yale School of Medicine psychiatrist Mark Rego, author of the book “Prefrontal Fatigue.” If we keep the brain in an overloaded state, it may respond with inexplicable, at first glance, laziness – simply to conserve resources.
To combat this problem, you can use methods that may seem paradoxical. For example, designate one day a week, preferably on weekends, when you will not make any decisions. Or if you are too lazy to go to the gym and once again decide to postpone it until tomorrow, just start training every day – you will no longer have to choose, and this is how you will defeat laziness.
Break tasks into small parts
Insufficient motivation or lack thereof is another very important cause of laziness. Laziness can come to you at any moment: for example, you managed to convince yourself to start something, but you don’t have the strength or desire to complete what you started.
Psychology knows the “goal gradient effect”, which establishes a relationship between the strength of motivation and the distance to the goal. Let’s say you are running a long distance: at the beginning you are full of motivation and energy, but they gradually fade away. It gets harder and harder to run, you want to give up. The sight of the finish line alone will give you a surge of energy, but how do you stay motivated for a very long plateau before the “almost finish”?
Break the distance (task, work, whatever) into smaller parts. Now your goal is not to run 5 or 50 km, but only 1, then another 1 and another 1. Not to write the whole script or book, but only five pages of it (and then another five). Former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf recalled on Joe Rogan’s podcast the “hell week”, a kind of entrance exam for this branch of the military. For five days, candidates undergo a variety of physical and psychological trials, they hardly sleep, spend a lot of time in cold water, instructors yell at them continuously – but you can quit at any time. “At some point I realized there was no way I could take five days and I should just leave now. But then I remembered that no matter what, we were supposed to be fed every six hours. And I thought – I can last six hours,” says Andy. Of course, he made it to the end.
…or temporarily abandon them
Any goals, even clearly formulated ones, can turn out to be useless if achieving them does not make you happy, believes Mark Manson, author of the bestseller “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”. Earning more money looks like a good goal, but if you don’t answer why you are earning it, it will be difficult for you to find motivation to work hard and long. And lack of motivation almost inevitably will make you lazy.
To combat lack of motivation, you can use an even more radical method – to completely abandon short-term goals for a while. This method was proposed by calisthenics enthusiast Kyle Boges to be used for sports, but it can be applied in any area. When starting to exercise, people set clear goals for themselves: lose weight to a certain level, increase muscle mass or number of reps. But these goals are quite difficult to achieve, so people quit exercising. Instead of setting goals for yourself, especially extremely ambitious ones, focus on maintaining stable behaviors and habits that will lead you to the desired result, Boges advises. Don’t get ahead of yourself, go to bed on time, eat more protein and less processed food, reduce alcohol consumption, don’t forget to walk. Over time, all goals will be achieved, and such behavior does not require huge efforts from you – and therefore you are much more likely not to be too lazy to do all this.
Find an ally
Laziness is contagious, French scientists have found out. People are not only able to pick up on their surroundings’ attitude to such things as laziness, impatience and caution, but often imitate it. If your surroundings prefer not to take risks, do not like to try for long-term prospects and prefer quick benefits, you are very likely to behave the same way. According to one version – due to the desire to feel belonging to the group, according to another – because people initially learned behavior from group members.
Do not try to overcome laziness in the company of lazy people, it is better to find a person who has already learned to deal with it, and learn from him, or find an ally who has set a similar goal. If you decided to start going to the gym, it is better to do it with someone else: we are made in such a way that it is harder for us to ignore the interests of another person than our own.
Visualize achievements
Let’s take the same decision to start running in the mornings as an example. Getting out of a warm bed and going outside, where there is rain, snow or cold is unpleasant. Overcoming this understandable laziness will be helped by a method called Functional Imagery Training (FIT).
As scientists from the University of Plymouth found out, the brain essentially does not see the difference between real memories and mental images created by a person – they activate the same areas of the cerebral cortex. A person can remember taking drugs or imagine themselves leading an absolutely healthy lifestyle, and the brain considers these mental images to be equivalent.
But the images must be very realistic, it is not enough to simply visualize alternative experience, it must be “multisensory”. You need to focus not only on thoughts or intentions, but also on sensations. Example: when the alarm clock rings, you have no desire to go running as you promised yourself in the evening. What to do? Imagine and literally feel the sound of rain, the cool wind on your face, the sound of your footsteps on the sidewalk, the warmth in your muscles while running, and the taste of sweat on your lips. Feel how good you are after a morning run. How nice the warm shower is. Do not just imagine, but feel the joy of achievement. And it will be much easier for you to make yourself get out from under the covers.
Should laziness be fought at all?
This is not as simple a question as it might seem. Yes, if laziness interferes with achieving your true goals, does not allow you to enjoy life, and ultimately makes you unhappy.
At the same time, laziness itself is one of the greatest pleasures in life, wrote the English writer Tom Hodgkinson. Moments of idleness are the only time we dedicate not to someone or something, but exclusively to ourselves. But idleness is a tricky thing. As with tasty food, moderation must be observed with idleness. In addition, the world is constantly trying to distract us from ourselves with urgent matters.
To be lazy without consequences requires good preparation. That is why Hodgkinson created the Idleness Academy, which teaches subjects that a lazy person may need to convince others that he is busy: philosophy, oratory, ukulele playing, singing, astronomy, calligraphy, and (just in case) collecting. The curriculum includes books like Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness”, Veron