Why do we avoid doing hard things?

At its core, we all want to do easy and fun things. But why do you think that is? Why do we want to avoid hard things?

To some extent, this is a game of dopamine. You do easy and fun things like checking your social media, or watching TV because you get high dopamine without much effort.

Look at this graph:

Here are some of the inferences from this:

1. You get high dopamine with less effort in Social Media / TV etc, hence it is the easiest to do.
2. In sports or exercises, if you put effort you will get dopamine; hence, you are still ready to do it.
3. Hard things like studying & working on presentations etc require intense work and you don’t get immediate dopamine. Hence it is the hardest to do.

So what are the ways to do hard things?

Dopamine detox, get rid of easy ways of getting dopamine and keep away from things like social media or TV. If you can’t completely avoid it, at least have regular intervals of detoxes so that you like doing hard things even to get a lower level of dopamine.

Now if you start getting rid of access to high dopamine, you will be bored, but that’s good because then you will look for harder dopamine and will start doing good things that matter in life.