Laboriousness learned: How do problems nourish your inner strength?

"Beware of easy things," said Italo Calvino, a tip that we should keep in mind in our daily lives, especially at a time when the main objective seems to be to make everything easier: get everything in the smallest space of time and with the least possible effort. The problem is that reducing effort to its minimum expression is not always good. Save us fatigue and psychological struggle today, tomorrow can pass us a bill that we may not be willing to pay.

Neither the easy is better, nor the difficult is worse

The desire to make everything easier and to work as little as possible is not new or exclusive to our time. Already in ancient Greece people longed to have in their homes a kind of "robot" as an assistant. When the philosopher Aristotle spoke of deus ex machina he did not say it at all figuratively.

The mechanical engineer Konstantinos Kotsanas recreated the first operational robot of humanity, the automatic servant of Philon, who had a human form. In his right hand he held a jug of wine and, when they put a cup in his left hand, it automatically came first and then water.



This means that, as humanity, we have always longed for that moment when we will not need to work or make any effort. Where does that desire come from?

It is likely that our tendency to "save energy" will help us to survive thousands of years ago, when consuming all our strength was a certain death because we would not be able to provide the food we needed. To ensure our survival, our brain developed in a way that always seeks the easiest way, requiring less effort.

As a result, our brain tends to trap us into believing that the easier things are more pleasant, positive and desirable while the difficult things are the opposite. The problem arises when we apply this reasoning to our psychological life.

Sooner or later we will have difficulties if we close ourselves to all those thoughts, ideas, opinions or beliefs that generate "resistance" or "friction", in other words: we ignore everything that does not fit with our way of seeing the world because it generates too much cognitive dissonance. On the contrary, we feed ourselves with everything that is in line with what we already know and believe, something much simpler because it is easy to fit these ideas into the frameworks we have built.

That commitment to the easy tends a double trap. On the one hand, it prevents us from growing because it keeps us within the limits of what we know, creates a comfort zone around us in which we anchilosamos. And on the other hand, it prevents us from testing our capabilities, so that when problems knock on our door, we will not have the necessary confidence in ourselves or have the psychological tools to face them, so that we are more likely to end up in the grip of frustration and learned helplessness.

Learned hard work: The way to strengthen ourselves psychologically

The brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan is an example of talent or industriousness, depending on how you look at it. He learned mathematics alone and in a few years achieved remarkable theoretical advances where great mathematicians remained stuck. There is no better example of innate talent, but both Robert Kanigel, his biographer, and the psychologist Robert Eisenberger are convinced that the learned industriousness was also found at its base.

The concept of learned helplessness of Martin Seligman refers to the loss of hope and confidence in our abilities to solve problems as a result of living repeated failures. The concept of learned industriousness proposed by Robert Eisenberger is the exact opposite.

The industriousness learned is a hope that feeds itself based on the problems we have been able to solve or the adverse situations we have overcome. According to his theory, people who have a history of effort, will be more likely to apply all that they have learned to new situations.

Of course, it is not about traumatizing ourselves voluntarily to become stronger people, but about not fleeing from problems and accepting them as an opportunity to reinforce that learned industriousness. If we deny the problems or let someone solve them in our place, we can not grow.

We need to be aware of our current limits and pose new challenges that allow us to leave our comfort zone without experiencing too much vertigo. It is about everyone finding their own difficulties and cultivating skills such as perseverance and determination, the two pillars on which learned industriousness is built.

Posted using Partiko Android