Recently in one of the coaching sessions a client (who gave permission to publish her case here) uncovered a personal dilemma: she was incredibly good at achieving results whether at work or through additional practical courses, yet “unpractical” hobbies or activities- those purely for enjoyment- were consistently pushed to the side.
During the session we also uncovered her learning approach- something she learnt very skilfully at school back in the Soviet Union where she grew up. Every child was being taught the same way, regardless of personal characteristics and individual ways of learning. So, to adapt, she learnt to learn by force, exerting a significant amount of effort to produce results that were demanded of her. And she became really good at it!
Her to-go-to coping tactic was further reinforced as she continued getting good results through pushing, which brought a sense of achievement and feeling good, whether by getting ahead at work or learning a language.
As we saw, however, now a few decades later, there was a sense of being somewhat trapped by her own success, needing to develop a new approach for situations where pleasure, fulfilment and curiosity were the goal- not a specific accolade or external achievement. Like learning a photography course- but just for the sake of it. Or dedicating more time to cooking delicious meals at home, or anything else that doesn’t bring external rewards.
As the brain has learnt to prioritise “productive”, externally rewarded activities that are seen to bring specific value to the society, it begins to de-prioritise more internally-oriented activities- after all they still take up time and effort, yet, we are not equally rewarded for both.
And so we might begin to lose a sense of joy in smaller things, often also unable to properly relax and give ourselves space to “just be”, as there is always the next productive thing to be ticked off the list.
Our brain loves what it already knows best and how external rewards win over internal
There is another layer, however.
Neuroscience tells us that from the Autonomic Nervous System perspective we favour that which is familiar, regardless of whether it is serving us well or not. Our brain loves predictability beyond anything else- it perceives it as safety.
What does this mean?
If we have learnt to push through, and feel good from achieving this way, doing things differently will feel alien, weird and unlike us.
And, if you are a bit of a science nerd like me, you might find it interesting to know that neuroscientists have known for a while that there is a specific part of the brain- called nucleus accumbens - that is responsible for motivating us towards the goals which we already know we can succeed at (Moscarello et al., 2010), thereby reinforcing our learning ways that we know lead to positive outcomes for us.
It works in tandem with our medium Prefrontal Cortex that does the budgeting and forecasting of the time and effort required to achieve these reinforced types of goals.
To add to this, if there is no external reward for us, our internal reward mechanism will simply not be activated enough to move in this new direction. We end up losing motivation and as a result abandon the new interesting yet “unproductive” activity.
"So what?" you might ask
In some cases, this habit of pushing through comes with certain risks, such as a risk of burnout, impact on our relations or potentially undermining our future, authentic success we deeply desire for ourselves.
These will be explored in the next post- stay tuned!
References:
Moscarello, J. M., Ben-Shahar, O., & Ettenberg, A. (2010). External incentives and internal states guide goal-directed behavior via the differential recruitment of the nucleus accumbens and the medial prefrontal cortex. Neuroscience, 170(2), 468-477.
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