Understanding the effort paradox can help you reshape your relationship to exertion so that you commit to those hard but truly meaningful activities

“On the one hand, effort is costly,” says Michael Inzlicht, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada. “On the other hand, it looks like we tend to value those things that we exerted effort for.” In a seminal 2018 paper, he and his colleagues dubbed this apparent conflict the “effort paradox”. Since then, psychologists have been figuring out the origins of the effort paradox and why some of us struggle with tasks that others might find easy. What they are finding is offering fresh insights not only into how you can get off the couch and into your running shoes, but also how you can learn more effectively, better empathise with others and even cultivate a more meaningful life. “[It seems] that if we can become…

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The struggle for self-control is real, and one many of us are familiar with - but is 'willpower' actually a myth?  Psychology professor Michael Inzlicht has long been intrigued by how we curb our less desirable behaviours, and what it is that unites people with 'high self-control'. His research at the University of Toronto's Work and Play Lab also seeks to understand our complicated relationship with effort and empathy - and whether so-called 'empathetic AI' has a place in our future. 

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Famous rapper Snoop Dogg is well known for his love of the herb: He once indicated that he inhales around five to 10 blunts per day—extreme even among chronic cannabis users. But the habit doesn’t seem to interfere with his business acumen: Snoop has sold 35 million albums across the globe and has collaborated extensively with numerous other successful celebrities, including domestic doyenne Martha Stewart. He’s hardly alone in his cannabis hobby. In Canada, where I live and work, about 9 percent of residents use cannabis three or more times per week.

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‘People would rather shock themselves than spend 15 minutes alone with their thoughts’ — could you handle the ‘bed rotting’ trend?

Over the past few years, wellness advocates have championed “niksen” (the Dutch art of doing nothing) as an antidote to burnout. Before that, we had il dolce far niente, a 200-plus-year-old Italian phrase that refers to the pleasures of doing nothing: a romantic concept that enjoyed a little comeback when it was name-checked in the 2010 movie “Eat, Pray, Love.” “Actually doing nothing is something a lot of people find aversive,” explained Michael Inzlicht, a professor in the University of Toronto’s department of psychology. “People associate doing nothing with boredom, which is an emotion most people try to avoid.”

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This is the greatest mystery of my adult life: How can I spend all day typing at a computer and go home feeling exhausted? How could merely activating the small muscles of my fingers leave me craving the couch at the end of the day? This question actually lies very close to one of the more hotly contested issues in psychology: What causes mental fatigue? Why is desk work so depleting? “It is kind of a mystery, to be honest,” says Michael Inzlicht, a University of Toronto psychologist who studies self-control, motivation, and fatigue.

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In Outside Magazine, an article describes a new paper by Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav, and Christopher Olivola on what they call the effort paradox. The effort paradox might help us understand why people do things like climb mountains, solve crossword puzzles, or shop at IKEA.

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Commenting in the News and Views section of Nature Human Behaviour, Michael Inzlicht and Cendri A. Hutcherson comment on a brilliant new paper on prosocial apathy, noting its many strengths, but also areas for future inquiry.

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In an essay published in the Conversation, Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William Cunningham discuss the nature of empathy, specifically asking if empathy has limits. In the essay, which is part book review of Paul Bloom's Against Empathy, Michael and his co-authors suggest that limits to empathy are more apparent than real; these apparent limits are not built into empathy itself, but reflect the choices we make. These so-called limits, in other words, result from general trade-offs that people make as they balance some goals against others.

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Harvard Business Review discusses the changing landscape of research on self-control, including covering work by Michael Inzlicht, who suggests that self-control is not similar to a fuel tank that becomes emptied with use. Instead, Michael suggests that self-control is better understood as a motivational construct, with features that make it resemble an emotion. 

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Business Insider covers a new lab study suggesting that effortful self-control might be relatively unimportant in reaching one's goals.  Achieving your goals, in other words, is less about exercising self-control; instead it's about avoiding temptation in the first place. Thus, against popular and scientific wisdom, effortful self-control does not appear to play a role in goal-pursuit, suggesting that the immediate positive consequences of exerting willpower do not translate into long-term goal success.

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Forbes covers a new lab study showing that acetaminophen, a common painkiller found in brands like Tylenol and Paracetamol, impacts the brain's error-detection system. One implication of such a finding is that drugs like Tylenol might have unintended side effects, including hurting the ability to respond to cognitive errors, which is essential for control.

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