Doing it the Hard Way

Learning to play a musical instrument is hard. So is trying to run a marathon, writing a term paper, and caring for a sick child. These things involve frustration, pain, and disappointment — yet we do them anyway. This week, in part two of our look at the allure of suffering, psychologist Michael Inzlicht explains what we get from doing things that are difficult, and why the things we think will make us happy often do not.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Hey there, Shankar here. I'm crisscrossing the country for a series of live shows this summer. I'll be sharing seven key insights from the first decade of Hidden Brain. These ideas have made my life better. I think they'll do the same for you. Stops on what I'm calling the perceptions tour include Clearwater and Fort Lauderdale in Florida, Portland and Denver, Minneapolis and Chicago, Austin and Dallas, Boston, Toronto, Phoenix, and more. To see if I'm coming to a city near you, please visit hiddenbrain.org/tour. If you've heard my voice for years, it's going to be fun to come see me in person.

• 0:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Again, that's hiddenbrain.org/tour. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Human beings are wired to seek pleasure. We all want lives filled with joy, comfort, and ease. At the same time, many of us are also curious about some forms of discomfort. We go on scary roller coaster rides, eat food so spicy it makes us cry, and we shriek in terror as we watch horror movies. Last week on the show, in the first part of a mini-series, we explored the attraction of some kinds of suffering.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  We do like pleasure, but we also like meaning, and we like struggle. We want to be moral, and all of that makes our minds a lot more interesting than if we were simply seek out pleasure.

• 1:34Shankar Vedantam?

  If you missed that story, you can find it in this podcast feed. It's titled, "Ouch, That Feels Great." Today on the show, we explore one specific dimension of the pain-pleasure continuum. Doing hard things is hard: learning to play a musical instrument, caring for a sick child, trying to run a marathon. These things involve frustration, pain, and disappointment. Unsurprisingly, if given the choice, many of us say, "No, thanks." Why that might be a mistake, this week on Hidden Brain.

• 2:30Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:15Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:25Speaker 02

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• 3:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Have you seen those ads for vacations that tell you that all you need to do is show up? Everything after that will be taken care of. You'll just lounge by the beach or by a swimming pool. Delicious food, massages, and entertainment await you. The most effort you'll have to expend is to reach for that frozen margarita or apply a little sunscreen. Sounds blissful, right? Well, sure. But it turns out, this is not the whole story. At the University of Toronto, psychologist Michael Inslick studies the science of motivation, effort, and reward. He's found that what we think will make us happy often does not. Michael Inslick, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me on, Shankar.

• 4:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Michael, social science has managed to identify only a few so-called laws of human nature. One of these was developed a little more than a century ago. It's called the law of least effort. What is this law?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  This is funny because psychology, we like to say, is a young science and we don't have very many laws. I found three accounts of this law of least effort. Sometimes it's called the law of less work, sometimes the law of least effort, sometimes it's the principle of least effort. And three independent scientists discovered this. And this law suggests that all else being equal, every organism we ever tested, every animal we ever tested, prefers to work less than to work more for the same reward.

• 5:31Shankar Vedantam?

  So the notion that people, given the choice, will take the less effortful path has been shown over and over again, both in real life and in psychological experiments. When we look in our own neighborhoods, for instance, we find that people routinely ignore neatly laid out streets and walking paths and instead take shortcuts. I expect this must be the same on your university campus. There must be neatly laid out streets and you have students cutting across the grass to take the shortest path to their classes.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Yes, in fact, it is a universal feature of all parks and fields across the world. And apparently, it's not just humans that carve these paths, animals will carve these paths, too. And the idea here is that even though there's a beautiful path laid out by a landscape architect, people and other animals like sheep, for example, they will carve out their own path with their feet, connecting two spots between A and B.

• 6:26Shankar Vedantam?

  I remember talking to the behavioral economist, Richard Thaler, some time ago. He said the one rule that he's seen over and over is that people, in his words, are lazy. Given the choice, we will choose the path of least effort. And economists, in fact, have deployed this assumption to reshape the way we all save for retirement by making it automatic rather than something we have to think about.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  That's right. So economists, behavioral economists famously use nudges. They use what they call choice architecture to make the virtuous option the easy option. So for example, if you struggle to save for your retirement, what about if a certain amount of money is withdrawn from your account, put into a savings account automatically without you having to lift a finger? So an interesting area where behavioral economists have discovered and have used the law of least effort to save people's lives is in the context of organ donation. So even the simple choice that people need to make about whether they should opt into organ donation,

• 7:32Speaker 03

  it can be made easier where the lazy route, you know, the default is that you donate your organs. And then you need to expend the effort to opt out, to not donate. Giving them the easy, the lazy, the effortless route means that more people do it and more people then donate organs later.

• 7:58Shankar Vedantam?

  So the appeal of working less shows up in our books and popular culture almost everywhere. There are books like The Four Hour Work Week, for example, and they become bestsellers because they promise we can work a few hours a week and then kick back and relax. Do you see other examples of this in the culture, Michael?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Everywhere. I will never forget. So I'm born and raised in Canada, and I grew up with a commercial for a life insurance product that was advertising, you know, not just life insurance, but also a way to save for retirement, and they called it Freedom 55. And the idea was that at 55, he saved enough, you could live a life of luxury. And the commercials always had someone on the beach kicking back with a, you know, a pina colada in their hand. And I remember seeing that as a child and was just in awe. I want that life. I want to have that life. So definitely people, you know, when they think about a future that's desirable, that's fun, enjoyable, it's about relaxation. It's about being lazy.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  It's about being at the beach and just kind of sitting. So we see this all the time.

• 9:09Shankar Vedantam?

  During the pandemic, Michael, we all heard the trend of quiet quitting and lazy girl jobs. Did you come by these memes yourself?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Oh, definitely. Quiet quitting, the great resignation. The labor force was so tight that people wouldn't necessarily get fired, even if it only worked not quite to their full potential. So yeah, you saw this trend where people were not working as hard. In kind of a way, we might say half-assed their job. And because, you know, employers didn't have many options, this was seen to be a trend. Hey, you too can just, you know, have your job and not work so hard. And of course, we don't want to work so hard. We don't want to expend effort because effort is something we don't like. We are lazy.

• 9:55Shankar Vedantam?

  I wonder whether you've seen this in your own life. Do you see the law of least effort playing out in the choices that you make, Michael?

• 10:01Speaker 03

  I see it regularly. So I just returned recently from a trip to Japan, and it was toward the end of our trip. And one thing that I've, my wife and I have wanted to experience really our entire lives are the cherry blossoms that occur in the spring in Japan. And we had a long day and we'd seen a few blossoms already. And I, at that point, just, I just wanted to get back to the hotel room. What did I want to do in the hotel room? Not much. I just wanted to relax. I want to surf the internet, read the news, doom scroll a little bit. My wife wisely, who just loves, is moved by beauty and plants and trees, she wisely

• 10:42Speaker 03

  decided to go to Yoyogi Park in Tokyo to witness beautiful cherry blossoms. And apparently they were the most beautiful that we had seen on our entire trip. And I missed it. For what? For really for nothing.

• 10:55Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand this also plays out when there are social occasions at hand and you have to decide whether to go to a party or a gathering?

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Yes. And I should say that I'm a, I'm a very extroverted person. I, in fact, I have plans right after this to go out for beers with friends. And I find myself, despite being social, despite truly enjoying social occasions, almost invariably, I tell myself, ah, I wish I didn't have to go out tonight. I wish I could just stay in and watch, do what? Watch television, doom scroll again. I have the impetus. I had this laziness in me to like not want to go out.

• 11:38Shankar Vedantam?

  The notion that people will choose the easiest, least effortful option seems to be a law of human nature. But as we have seen over and over again on the show, humans are endlessly complicated. When we come back, the effort paradox, why so many of us deliberately violate the law of least effort, and the curious relationship between pleasure and meaning. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 12:26Shankar Vedantam?

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• 13:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 13:19Speaker 02

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• 13:48Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Michael Lindzlich is a psychologist at the University of Toronto who studies how we think about effort and why we often gravitate to the path of least resistance. He also looks at what happens when we choose to work hard at something. Michael, we've seen that we have a natural bias against exerting effort, a bias that is then reinforced by our culture in all kinds of ways. You point out that the unpleasantness of doing things that are hard sometimes leads us to overlook the unpleasantness of doing nothing at all?

• 14:22Speaker 03

  That's right. So doing nothing leads us to feel bored. We find this experience unpleasant. And in fact, sometimes we'll do really bad things to ourselves and other people when we're bored. There's a famous experiment where people who are left in a room with nothing, other than a shock machine, for a few minutes, they decide to shock themselves instead of just being alone, doing nothing. We ran a study, in fact, where we gave people an option of exerting a little bit of effort, not much effort, but a little bit, or just sit there, take a 10-second holiday and do nothing.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  And what we found was that it was not clear that people wanted to avoid effort all the time. In fact, people preferred exerting effort if the contrast was doing nothing at all, because doing nothing is boring, and boring feels meaningless, feels purposeless, and people really don't like it. But the key to our study is that people made this choice over and over and over again. And they got to experience what the effort was like, what boredom was like, and it turns out they preferred doing something than doing nothing.

• 15:44Shankar Vedantam?

  So in addition to staving off boredom, exerting effort has other benefits. What is the relationship between effort and success?

• 15:53Speaker 03

  There are many benefits. So people who do this regularly experience more rewards. So for example, if you want to learn the piano, the more you practice, the more you try and do the dull repetitive work of playing your chords, practicing your chords, the better you get at piano, the more rewarding that will be to the extent that you again value piano. The more you study, the higher your grades and the maybe greater entry into various vocational opportunities will be available to you. But now, this is really interesting. This is true not just for humans. So animals that exert effort end up flourishing more.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  So insects, animals like penguins or fur seals, the more effort they exert to forage for food, to hunt for food, the healthier they are, the more varied their diet and the more likely they are to pass on their genes to the next generation. Ants, ants show this as well. So there's a connection between a willingness to exert effort and the rewards that you get. So it makes sense. Exerting oneself makes sense just in the sense that probabilistically, you will likely get better stuff.

• 17:19Shankar Vedantam?

  You've looked at the relationship between exerting effort and a feeling of competence and mastery. Describe the studies that you have conducted for me, Michael.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  So what we needed to do was to kind of give people dull tasks, boring tasks even, and see if the extent to which they work on them and exert effort on them, they will feel like it was worthwhile in some way. So for example, we'll give people a four-digit number. And we'll have them add three to each digit of that four-digit number. Boring, meaningless, yet effortful. In contrast, we'll give another group the same four-digit number, but this time the task is not effortful. They have to add zero to that four-digit number, which of course is the exact same number. They just have to remember that number and spit it back to us. Afterwards, we ask people to what extent that task was important, to what extent it was meaningful.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  And what we find is that people will imbue these silly, you know, objectively meaningless tasks as being more important and more meaningful. And then afterwards, we might ask them, um, like, what other feelings did this task generate in them? And what we found is that it led, at least in some cases, for people to feel like they're learning something, that they're mastering something, that they're kind of attaining some competence in something. And this is actually really important because one of the ingredients of feeling self-actualized is feeling like you're competent in the world, feeling like you can master certain domains. So perhaps exerting effort allows people kind of to play with this feeling,

• 18:56Speaker 03

  to attain some of these feelings that you wouldn't otherwise get.

• 19:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Is this a reason why when I finish building my IKEA bookshelf, I feel prouder of the bookshelf than if I just bought a bookshelf, you know, straight off the bat?

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Yes, there is a reason. The reason for that is that, at least after the fact, we tend to find working, exerting effort, despite it being costly, or maybe because it's costly, we find that thing to be more meaningful. We even might cherish that IKEA furniture a little bit more. And there's a classic study called the IKEA effect, whereby people who are assigned to build their own little IKEA box, they tend to value that box more. They think it's better and they demand more money for it than another box built by an expert. And what's funny about this is that... I'm sure you've built some Ikea furniture in your life, Shankar.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  And you then know that oftentimes you'll build something. And hey, I've got a few extra screws here.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Right?

• 20:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Absolutely.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Right, so the things we build are not perfect, they're often imperfect. Yet we think they're masterpieces and we are attached to them. And part of that story might be because we've exerted effort on them. And we then imbue value and meaning and purpose to it.

• 20:28Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you had one such experience years ago on a trip to Turkey, Michael. What did you do there and what did you end up learning about yourself?

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Yes, this was many, many years ago in my twenties. And we went on a hike somewhere off the Mediterranean coast in beautiful, beautiful parts of Turkey. They called the turquoise coast. And our tour guide was someone new to the job. And didn't know the route himself that well, but was an experienced hiker. So my wife and I, my girlfriend at the time, but now wife. We decided to go on this hike, which we expected to be a two to four hour hike. It ended up being like six plus hours in the burning heat. And I remember feeling it was torture, not too much the physical strain. Because, okay, I could, I could walk a few more hours. It was more, we felt like we were lost.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  And we felt like we didn't know where we were going. Or we felt like, you know, we're exerting all this effort and I just want to be on the beach right now.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  I want to be sitting and relaxing. And by the end of it, we just felt mentally exhausted. But I also remember, you know, the next day at the very least, if not like, you know, immediately after. I felt like, wow, I can do that too. I too can go on a trip like this without great shoes, without great clothing, without all the sun gear that I needed. And I felt like I'd learned something about myself. I'd learned that like, okay, I'm resilient. I'm a bit tougher than, you know, tougher mentally than I thought. And I felt like, okay, uh, maybe, you know, maybe I couldn't do Survivor, but maybe I'm not quite as weak as I, I thought I was.

• 22:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, I mean, in some ways, you're learning that you have capacities inside you that you actually didn't know you had before. And that has to be, you know, maybe pleasurable is the wrong word, but it is sort of deeply satisfying.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  It's definitely satisfying, meaningful. And it was, pleasurable is definitely not the right word because it was painful and physically, mentally, I mean, the anguish. I remember looking at my wife being like, we were the kind of like, oh, my God, what are we doing here? But having gone through that, that pain and that effort, if it was easy, if it was just a walk on the beach, we wouldn't have left that moment with any lessons whatsoever.

• 22:57Shankar Vedantam?

  So you've run a number of studies where you ask people to think of a number of different tasks, routine tasks that they do in their daily life. And you find there's an interesting, in some ways, distinction between the amount of pleasure and joy that people take from tasks and the amount of meaning and satisfaction they derive from those tasks. Can you talk about this work, Michael?

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Yes, so we, well, we've done a number of studies. I've already mentioned one of them where we've kind of, we give people these arduous tasks that are really meaningless. And then we find that afterwards, people ascribe meaning to them. They don't necessarily think they're fun, but they, they do think it's meaningful. And then we also, what we did is we want to see to what extent this plays out in real tasks, not just these made up tasks that we give them. And what we did is we kind of gave people a list of 40 to 50 kind of everyday things you could be doing, going to a party, doing your taxes, doing your homework, working out, what have you, bathing. And, and then we, we gave people this list of tasks.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  And then we asked them how effortful each of these tasks are typically. We asked them how pleasurable, how much joy they derive from each of these tasks. Then we also asked them how, how meaningful, how important, how significant, how purposeful each of these tasks are. And what we found was very, very interesting. We found that the more effortful a task was, the less pleasure we seem to derive from it. But at the same time, the more effortful a task was, the more meaning we derive from it. Effortful tasks are not necessarily pleasurable.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  So remember my hike in Turkey? That was not pleasurable, especially by hour six. But later on, I described it as being meaningful and important. So joy and meaning sometimes go together, but effort breaks that apart. And it seems like effortful things, we seem to imbue them with meaning and purpose. We have this extra value that things that are merely pleasurable don't have.

• 25:16Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if this might explain some of the seemingly paradoxical data we get. When we ask parents how much they enjoy parenting. So if you ask parents every few hours, especially parents with small children, you know, are you having a good time now? Are you having a good time now? What about now? People will often say they're not very happy. You know, they're doing chores, they're picking up after their kids, they're sleep deprived, they're exhausted, they're stressed. But then if you also ask people, how meaningful is it to you that you have this child, that you're caring for this other human being? People reported being an incredible source of meaning. And here's another example of something that's very effortful, takes a lot of effort, might not be pleasurable on a moment-to-moment basis, but is deeply meaningful.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. That's a classic one. So I think sometimes there's revisionist history going on where we might, you know, cognitive dissonance pushes us to describe the arduous task of parenting as being meaningful and important. And that's a way for us to kind of save face to some extent, to kind of say, that effort was worth it. Right? So I think sometimes the connection between effort and reward might be an illusion. It might be something, a trick we do to kind of keep us going. But not always, because oftentimes there actually are real rewards that are connected with that effort later.

• 26:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Is it possible that your trip to Turkey was also the same thing here, Michael? Which is that, in fact, it was pretty horrendous. But in retrospect, cognitive dissonance is basically reshaping your memory of the event to make it more meaningful.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Absolutely, I think cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug. I think we want to be consistent. You know, I could have been sipping Mai Tais or Arak in Turkey, but instead I was hiking under the hot sun. So the connection between effort and value is multiply determined. I think some of it is like a bit of a trick, an illusion. But I also think there are real sources and points that are attached to that as well.

• 27:14Shankar Vedantam?

  And I suppose even if it is a trick, or what you're calling a trick, you know, if it is cognitive dissonance, post hoc rationalizations, you know, I can't believe I made myself go through that six hour hike. It must have been a really meaningful and important thing. As far as your mind is concerned now, it is now a meaningful thing, regardless of the mechanism that produces that meaning.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely, and that's really, really important because of course, as you know, we're constantly facing choices about what to do and what not to do. So if I've now encoded that really arduous and difficult hike that I did in Turkey as being worth it, as being valuable, now I have a connection in my mind that effort and value go together. And so now when I make, I have a new decision to make. I'm like, yeah, I think it's difficult, but oh yeah. Effort can also be valuable. It can also be important. So I start learning the value of, you know, doing, of hard work, for example.

• 28:15Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, as a college professor, you must deal with students now who have figured out that there are very easy ways of completing their assignments. They can ask ChatGPT or another AI to basically help do the work for them. And at some level, it is the case that these systems are very, very good at coming up with high quality work. But I think the story that you're telling complicates what it means for the student to actually have an AI do their homework for them.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely, I think it complicates it a lot. In fact, we've run a study with comparing people's experience of writing an essay themselves versus prompting ChatGPT to write one for them. And what we found is, I think, quite extraordinary. What we found is their essays were middling. They were, I don't know, when we graded them, they got, I think, somewhere in the high 60s for their little essays. And then when they prompted ChatGPT to write, ChatGPT wrote much, much better essays, more like in the 80s. But then afterwards, when we asked these participants about their experience, people who wrote for themselves found the experience more meaningful, more important. So what this suggests to me is

• 29:28Speaker 03

  part of the experience of writing an essay is the experience of writing an essay, of doing it. And you might find that meaningful and important, and then you might want to do it more. And you're not just doing it just for the end goal of getting a grade. You're doing it because you're cultivating some skill, and cultivating skill is intrinsically rewarding, as I mentioned earlier. It's meaningful. You feel like you're alive in the world when you're doing something like that. It's more like you're just outsourcing it to a machine. So, yes, it does complicate things for students.

• 30:00Shankar Vedantam?

  So there's something of a paradox in all of this work, isn't there, Michael? Which is, we go to great lengths to avoid effort, to choose the path of least resistance. But as you've shown in multiple ways, doing hard things can produce benefits. It gives us pride and meaning and satisfaction.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And a number of years ago, my colleagues and I, we talked about this paradox. We coined the term "the effort paradox" to describe this very thing. Where on the one hand, you've got economists like Richard Thaler, but many others, who look at effort as something we need to avoid, or something that people avoid, and as a result, you know, design tools and products that maximize our laziness. But at the same time, we do things all the time that require effort. In fact, effort seems to be the only point of doing it. And it just seems odd that both of these things exist at the same time.

• 31:03Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, one woman's vivid encounter with the effort paradox. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 32:51Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We are all compelled to do difficult things from time to time. Sometimes those things serve a clear purpose. You push through years of grad school to get a degree. You go to the gym to get stronger. You eat the broccoli, even though you hate broccoli, because you know it's good for you. But there are some things we do that don't seem to serve a practical purpose. They are hard for the sake of being hard. And yet, we do them anyway.

• 33:24Shankar Vedantam?

  At times, we may even surprise ourselves with the lengths we'll go to in order to finish those things.

• 33:31Speaker 07

  My name's Mary Pan. I am a family medicine physician who lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

• 33:40Shankar Vedantam?

  I met Mary on a trip to the Pacific Northwest. She and some colleagues were going on an early morning hike, and they were kind enough to let me tag along. As we made our way through the hilly hike, which was slushy in some places, it is Seattle, and it rains a lot, Mary told me a story.

• 33:58Speaker 07

  Yes, so I've been running my whole adult life. It's a great way for me to de-stress and also get some exercise, get outside. And a few years ago, I wanted to do something different. I was just going through a lot of difficult season in life, and so challenging myself to try something new, something different, seemed like a good thing to do.

• 34:23Shankar Vedantam?

  And so what did you have in mind?

• 34:25Speaker 07

  So I signed up in the fall for the next trail run that was available. And a trail run is, you know, on like a hiking trail, often in the middle of, you know, around here in the Pacific Northwest, lots of trees, nature, a place where people would go hiking, but running on that path. So it's much more uneven. It's beautiful often, but it's a nice way to get out into nature, out of the city. And that's how it's really different than a lot of the races I had done previously.

• 34:59Shankar Vedantam?

  The trail run was in December. As the date neared, Mary began watching the weather. The night before the race, she saw that snow was forecast. This would make the run even more challenging.

• 35:12Speaker 07

  I woke up in the morning, looked out my window here in North Seattle where I live, and there was no snow. So I thought, OK, great. I'm going to still bundle up, get on my trail running shoes, you know, get my gloves, headband, headed out to across Lake Washington to where the start of the race was. So as I was driving, though, about 20 minutes away to the suburb of Seattle suburb, I realized there was some more, I was seeing more and more snow as I was driving. And I went to the park and ride where the shuttle bus was picking us up to take us to the, all of the runners to the trailhead. And I realized there were patches of snow at the park and ride. And I thought, OK, well, I'm just going to keep, I'm still going to do this.

• 35:58Shankar Vedantam?

  Mary got on the bus. As she and the other runners were taken out to the trailhead, she looked out the window with apprehension.

• 36:05Speaker 07

  As we're moving up to the trailhead, there's more and more snow. And once we get up there and I get off the shuttle bus, I realize it is, there's several inches of snow on the ground. And I wasn't prepared for this. I'd never really run in snow. I run in the rain a lot in Seattle, but not in the snow. And the other runners, no one else seemed as concerned as I did. Some of them had brought, you know, spikes to put on the bottom of their shoes. Maybe they were more experienced in running in the snow, but I wasn't. But it was beautiful and I thought, I, I'm just going to do this. I've got my gloves, I've got my layers, I'm gonna, gonna start the run and see where it goes.

• 36:46Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if some of your trepidation was because you are a doctor. And in some ways, you see people coming into the hospital after they have, let's say, not had the best run of their lives. Could that have been part of your trepidation, Mary?

• 37:00Speaker 07

  I'm sure it was. I tend to be a pretty cautious person and, and because I've seen so much illness and injuries in my life and in my work. And, you know, I exercise a lot, but, you know, early to mid 40s, I didn't want to twist my ankle or break my leg. And as I mentioned before, trail runs are different in that they're very uneven. And so you've got to, got to pay attention to that, even when just hiking.

• 37:26Shankar Vedantam?

  Did the possibility of just getting back on that shuttle bus and going back to your car occur to you?

• 37:35Speaker 07

  It didn't at the start.

• 37:38Speaker 07

  I will tell you.

• 37:41Speaker 07

  I had, you know, I had bought in anticipation of this race some running shoes that are more for trails, but not for snow. And I had, you know, my gloves, I run with gloves in the winter regardless. But I sort of looked around too, and I think I thought, well, these people don't seem too concerned. They, some of them have the similar, you know, just running shoes, gloves, hat that I had. So I also, I think, thought, okay, maybe I shouldn't be too concerned either.

• 38:11Shankar Vedantam?

  This sounds like the classic story of peer pressure. So tell me how the race began. What happened?

• 38:18Speaker 07

  So I started the race and I realized right away, I was very tentative. Again, I'm not used to running on the snow, so I'm running much more slowly, I realized, than I normally would, much more carefully, paying attention to my steps. There were hills, uneven terrain. The snow was very slushy at parts, other parts are very icy. So I did slip a few times, but I'm with a big group at the start. We're sort of all bunched together and, you know, I start running and I think, okay, there's, I can do this. I'm going to be slower than I thought, but I can do this. I didn't know how far I'd gone and I realized I was already soaked through. My feet were, you know, toes were numb, fingers numb. And I hit the first aid station and I don't know how far I've gone.

• 39:02Speaker 07

  I think, oh, I must have gone at least, you know, six miles or more. And I asked the poor teenager there who's handing out water in these gel packs, well, how far is this? Can you tell me how far I've gone? And he asks around and he says, I think it's about 5K. And I am just dismayed because, you know, I've only run a little over three miles. I know it's taken me much longer. I'm already exhausted and freezing and my muscles are aching, I think, because I'm using different muscles to balance on this snowy trail than I normally would. And again, at that point, you know, I'm in sort of, it's up adjacent to a neighborhood, actually, but I have a coworker who lives in that neighborhood.

• 39:46Speaker 07

  And he had said, hey, if you get stuck or anything, you know, feel free to just text me and I'll come and pick you up. But I didn't stop. I grabbed my water and I thought, okay, I'll just keep going and see where this goes. And I kept going, just past that 5K mark.

• 40:09Shankar Vedantam?

  What was it like to run where you couldn't feel your toes? And was it just your toes or was it your feet that became numb after some time?

• 40:17Speaker 07

  It was my toes and most of my feet and also my fingers. I'm used to running with, you know, some cold or numb toes, but it was much more pronounced. It was both my feet and my, my hands were completely felt really numb. And I didn't, again, I didn't feel as, as stable or steady on my feet.

• 40:38Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, if you can't feel your toes, you can't feel your feet, that's actually quite unsafe because how do you plant your feet?

• 40:44Speaker 07

  It probably is. I, I'm not, I don't recall how I, I mean, I guess there was maybe some sensation, if maybe just pain, that I was able to do that. And there were several times where I'd slip and I'd sort of, you know, gain my balance again. And I would slow down for a little bit and then I would speed up again when I think I gained a little more confidence. But right after every time I lost my balance and slipped, I was much more hesitant and cautious, I think, right after that.

• 41:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering what thoughts went through your mind as you were doing this, Mary? What was your internal voice saying to you as you're going through this essentially half marathon from hell?

• 41:34Speaker 07

  I kept thinking, should I just stop? I think there were these moments of should I stop? But for the most part, I, and I realize this is just a pattern in my life. Whenever I meet a challenge or I commit to something, I tend to want to finish it, to complete it, even if it's very challenging and painful. I had started it, I had committed to it,

• 42:03Speaker 07

  and I wanted to finish it. And it was so beautiful visually, you know? It was really a gorgeous morning on that trail in many ways. But I couldn't really enjoy it fully because my body was really in a lot of pain.

• 42:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Mary kept going. No matter how much pain she was in, no matter how many times she slipped, she kept hearing that voice inside her. You must finish.

• 42:36Shankar Vedantam?

  As she reached the back half of the race, something happened that certainly made it seem like the running gods were conspiring against her.

• 42:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I'm running up the hill. I have about two miles left in the race. And I'm noticing it's warming up and the evergreen tree branches are heavy with snow. And I'm starting to see some of the snow drop around me.

• 43:00Speaker 07

  And as I'm running up this hill, one of the branches, full of snow, just dumps snow right over my head and all over me.

• 43:13Speaker 07

  And no one else is around at this point. And I exclaim and sort of let out a bit of a laugh, too. I'm nearing the end. And it was just so ridiculous that I got soaked by this, by this snow on the branch at the, near the very end of the race. And at that point, I could sort of look at it and laugh at myself a little bit for, for even making the decision to continue on with this and the timing that I would just got dumped on by this, this snow at the very end.

• 43:47Shankar Vedantam?

  It's almost as if the gods were trying to tell you something, Mary.

• 43:51Speaker 07

  Maybe, yes, that's true.

• 43:55Speaker 07

  So the rest of the race, I was able to finish the race. It was warming up, so it was very slushy snow for the most part at that point, which can also be very slick to run on. And I made it to the end and felt a lot of relief and a lot of soreness. And I grabbed my hot chocolate and got on the shuttle bus and headed back to my car.

• 44:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, looking back on it, how your accomplishment of having finished this race under these very difficult circumstances in a lot of pain, what did that tell you about yourself? What was the message you heard from yourself?

• 44:43Speaker 07

  I think that I can do difficult things. That's a core value of mine is to completing and making it through challenges and difficult experiences. This is just a core of who I am, this taking on challenges. And I was thinking of, you know, I ran hurdles when I was in middle school. And my first track meet, I remember I started the race, ran over the first hurdle, second hurdle, hit it with my foot, fell down, was bloody and saw all the other runners in front of me, got up and kept going.

• 45:26Speaker 07

  Hit the next hurdle, fell down, got up and kept going. Hit the next hurdle, kept going, finished the race. And I remember the coach came up to me after, and I was only 12, 11, 12 years old, and said, wow, Mary, I've never seen anyone, you know, finish something, you know, when they're bleeding like that.

• 45:53Shankar Vedantam?

  I shared Mary's story with Michael Inzlicht at the University of Toronto. I asked him what he made of it.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  I mean, I hear the effort paradox written all over that story. So first, she wanted to run a half marathon, which the act of running a marathon is a really, really puzzling thing, if we come to think about it. Running in a circle, more or less, and, you know, it's painful, it's not necessarily good for you, bad on your feet, bad on your knees, yet people do this regularly. And Mary, she experienced the true hardship of running. It's, forget about it being painful, normally she also had snow, you know, branch with

• 46:42Speaker 03

  snow falling on top of her, didn't sound like she was having a good time at all, sounded very unpleasant. But yet afterwards, she appraised it as this important experience, this meaningful experience. And she even connected then to a story of herself running hurdles when she was younger. And she kind of built this story of herself as being a persistent person, a person who, you know, overcomes things. So I think, you know, these effortful situations in our life give us these like testing grounds, these testing grounds to show what we're made of. And they allow us kind of to be a hero in our own life story.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  And you don't get that by not running the marathon. You only get that by putting yourself in hard places, in challenging places. And that's why, you know, the economists or the psychologists who talk about, you know, the silliness of effort and how we're all lazy, is not paying full attention to, you know, the rest of us and how we tell stories about ourselves and we want those stories to be, to some extent, a hero's story. And effort allows for that, allows us to be a hero in our lives.

• 48:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Effort is unpleasant and painful, but effort can also be rewarding. Michael and other psychologists suggest that we can help other people in our lives cultivate industriousness by offering praise when the people around us display effort, regardless of whether it achieves a goal.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  That's something we can do as parents, is to teach our children that trying is the key. We want people to be rewarded for trying. So you've got someone who just kind of participated, but didn't do much. I'm not sure how much reward they need. But if they participated and they've tried and gave it their all, then who cares what the outcome is at that point? Now you're like, you tried hard and I'm going to reward you for that. So we're learning that to be industrious is rewarding, to push yourself, to try, to give it your all, to like, to tolerate that feeling because it is not necessarily a pleasant feeling. And that's something that we can learn. And in fact, many cultures teach this. We receive all kinds of lessons about the value of trying. And we can scaffold that

• 49:07Speaker 03

  in our children or our students when they're trying for things.

• 49:15Shankar Vedantam?

  Is there any evidence that learning to be industrious in one domain transfers over to other domains?

• 49:21Speaker 03

  Yes, there is. In fact, there's some research that I've just done in my lab that people, in fact, exerted more effort on a brand-new task that they had not experienced if previously they had learnt that effort is rewarding. So what I love about this idea is it suggests that, you know, we can learn to tolerate effort as a general thing. And the reason for that is because, you know, the feeling of effort is a generalised feeling. Yes, when I try hard on my piano, of course, there's something strictly attached to the piano and the finger movements and what have you. But the experience of effort is common. These feelings transfer. And then if we can learn that these feelings signal reward is coming,

• 50:06Speaker 03

  you then become industrious.

• 50:09Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you yourself have absorbed the lesson of your research, and you did so many years ago, even before you had conducted the research, during a trip to Indonesia with your then-girlfriend, who again was the woman who became your wife. Tell me the story of what happened on that trip, Michael.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Yes, so I am also cognizant of, I've met lots of stories around trips. Clearly, you can see that my wife and I like to travel. And Indonesia is truly one of our favorite places. And we had, this is, you know, after graduate school, and we'd spent, this is, I think, probably about two and a half months now in Southeast Asia. And at the end of our trip, we were kind of on what I call the paradise island of Bali. Bali is one of my favorite places, beautiful people, beautiful culture, beautiful nature. And my wife wanted to go to Java, which is the neighboring island just to the west of Bali.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  But it involved a long series of trips, on boat, on various buses. You know, I think it involved like over 24 hours of travel. And I just was tired. I just, you know, the idea of sitting on a bus, being bored, this is well before smartphones and entertainment on a bus. And also, you know, the heat, and it's not pleasant to be on a bus for so long. I just didn't want to do it. But I decided, okay, let's just go ahead. And we then continued on to Java. We then experienced Jogjakarta, which I witnessed, you know, incredible sights there.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  But truly, the thing that I will never forget, as long as I live, is the moment I saw Mount Bromo. Mount Bromo is an active volcano on Java. And I'd never seen something like this in my life. I'd never been to the moon, as most people have and not been to, but the landscape was... Seemed like it would be, you know, what you'd be like on the moon. And I was surrounded by volcanoes all around me, fires kind of just coming from the ground. And it was an otherworldly experience. It was tremendous. And we spent a good 36 hours there. And I now see that the effort was so worth it to see this sight. And if I had not had that pain, I wouldn't have seen it.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Now, of course, maybe I'm exaggerating how beautiful it was, because, again, cognitive distance can play these tricks on you. But I do think that if anyone ever gets a chance to see this, this kind of otherworldly place, go. The effort was truly, truly worth it. And I do not regret that whatsoever. It was one of the highlights of my life to see that.

• 53:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Michael Linseligt is a psychologist at the University of Toronto. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

• 53:35Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 53:57Shankar Vedantam?

  If you love Hidden Brain, please join our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. You'll be helping to support the research, reporting, and interviewing that go into every episode of the show. Plus, you'll have access to episodes you won't hear anywhere else. To sign up, go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you listen to the show via Apple Podcasts, you can sign up at apple.co/hiddenbrain.

• 54:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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