Why Your Brain Makes Productivity Hard

Productivity is hard, even though it is good for us. Why is this? Shouldn’t productivity be easy?

The reason why productivity is hard is because your brain wants to keep you safe.

The difficulty of productivity is decided by how you view yourself in relation to your work. For example, if you view yourself as very productive, then productivity will be significantly easier for you than if you didn’t.

This happens because your brain does not like change. This is also why our personalities and values remain relatively the same throughout our lives. When we do something atypical of ourselves, our brain dislikes this and you feel negative emotions. Our brains want us to remain as we are, and this is because we have proven to be able to survive in our current state.

And this happens because your brain is only concerned about your survival, and your “current self” is surviving just fine, you are surviving well in your current state right now.

So your brain doesn’t see the need to change, it wants you to remain as the person that you are right now, because you’ve established that you can survive in your current state.

So how does this make working and being productive difficult?

This is because, when you do things like work, and other tasks where more is expected of you than what you currently are, these situations cause you to improve, and therefore change.

Your brain doesn’t like change, even when you’re improving, because your brain is solely focused on your survival, and it doesn’t want the risk of you changing.

Situations like working cause you to become a better version of yourself, and to become a better version of yourself, your current self has to die, for the new and improved you, to take its place.

And your brain doesn’t want that, your brain sees changing, even improving, as risky, because you are surviving just fine in your current state, your brain doesn’t want you to change, your brain wants you to stay who you are.

So how can you make productivity easier? You can make productivity significantly easier by viewing yourself as a hard worker, because then hard work becomes typical of you, so you are no longer changing as much, so your brain produces less negative emotion when you are being productive.

But this is much harder than it sounds, because the only way to view yourself as a hard worker, is by working hard, and you know deep down if you are trying as hard as you can.

But if you are working very hard, very diligently, and you are genuinely trying your best, then productivity will become easy for you.

Hope this helps! cheers 🙂