How To Be More Productive When You're Feeling Exhausted

Life can be tiring. You've got work, you've got family, you've got chores, maybe you've got a social life and you're constantly sleep deprived. And one of the reasons that life is tiring is that there's constantly something you need to do. But it's not just that you have a lot of stuff to do, it's that each of these tasks has resistance. You don't want to do it, it's daunting, you'd rather rest. And so you have to use your willpower to overcome this resistance and get the task done. And it's the fact that you need to constantly motivate yourself to overcome this resistance that is draining. But it doesn't have to be that way. I've spent 14 years coaching thousands of people to take control of their learning, focus, energy and time. And over the years, I've discovered some really powerful strategies from cognitive and behavioral psychology that can help lower the resistance of these tasks, ultimately allowing you to get more stuff done without the exhaustion. So the way I'm going to structure this video is first I'm going to talk about this resistance itself. Where does it come from? How do we respond to it? And how is the way we're responding to the resistance actually creating more exhaustion for us? I'm then going to go through a four step behavioral framework that shows you where the resistance comes in and strategies that we can use to decrease or sometimes increase the resistance depending on the outcome that we want. And by using this framework, you can not only get more stuff done and feel less tired, but even maybe enjoy those tasks and feel energized from the things that used to tire you. Crazy to think about, I know, but we're going to cover that later in the video. But first, what is this resistance? So the conventional way that people tend to think about this is that you feel busy. You've got lots to do. And this is what makes you feel tired and exhausted. But as I mentioned, it isn't just the fact that you've got lots of activities to do. It's actually the resistance that is part of this. So the resistance that's attached to the activities and the fact that you're having to use your willpower and motivation to constantly overcome this resistance over and over and over again. This is the thing that leads to exhaustion. And this is eventually what's going to lead to burnout. So when you're trapped in this cycle of having a lot of stuff to do, that stuff having a lot of resistance and then constantly using that motivation and willpower to overcome this resistance, that's going to lead to burnout. It's much less likely that you're going to burn out, even if you have a lot of things to do, if those things that you have to do do not have much resistance. For example, you don't tend to get burnt out from every day being full of enjoyable, fun hobbies. You look forward to that. It's actually energizing. And so here's the issue is that when we don't understand this and we think that the problem is here, the stuff that we have to do, the sort of natural response, which is actually counterproductive, is to try to overcome this by just doing less. And this is actually a problem because this creates a spiral. The thing about doing stuff like activities in the day is that those things that you do can actually help you to feel good. This is actually a way that we internally measure our own productivity. When you get to the end of a day where you had a lot of stuff that you needed to do, you didn't do much of it, you start feeling bad about the day. You start feeling like the day has gone to waste. You'll be lying there in bed thinking about all the stuff that you were meant to do. You get insomnia because your brain is suddenly full of motivation and all the stuff that you were meant to do today, but you didn't get done. And then you're sleep deprived even more the next day. So this leads to this negative spiral where by doing less, yes, it's taking less things off of your plate, but it's also actually reducing your productivity. And this is actually stuff that you need to do to, for example, achieve your goals, achieve certain outcomes. It doesn't necessarily have to be productivity in terms of work. It could just be productivity in terms of staying healthy, cleaning the house, doing your exercise, doing your mindfulness, whatever the task is that you wanted to do. The productivity going down actually makes it feel worse, plus you have less progress to your goals, which over time makes you feel worse. And also by doing less, you are also doing less things that actually energize you, which means that you actually feel even more tired and exhausted. And this is this very common relatable situation that most people find themselves in, which feels counterintuitive, where you're starting off really busy and you're deliberately doing less to be less busy, but you still seem to be just as tired and exhausted as you were before. And by the way, if the idea of burnout and what creates burnout and how to prevent burnout is something that you're particularly interested in, I'm not going to go through it in a lot of depth in this video, but I do go through it a bit more in my newsletters. So if you haven't signed up yet, if you don't know about it yet, I've got free weekly newsletters that gets into your inbox. I write them up myself thinking about what are the things that I think are going to be the most helpful for you to take control of your learning and your life and your energy and your focus. And I distill them into these short emails that take a few minutes to read with some practical takeaways at the end. So one of those newsletters is about burnout and energy and this whole idea of willpower dependency. So if you're interested, it's totally free. I'll leave a link for you to sign up in the description below. And so doing less, although it's sometimes the right approach, especially if you're kind of reaching this burnout level, there's just too much on your plate, you know, it's affecting your mental health. There are certain situations where doing less is absolutely the right move, but on a day-to-day basis for most people, I think doing less can do more harm than good. And I think the more sustainable solution that allows you to maintain everything that you need to do without burning out or feeling exhausted is to address the fundamental issue, which is up here, the resistance in the first place. How do we create a system so that the tasks that we have to do do not feel so daunting in the first place? And that is where we draw on some principles from behavioral and cognitive psychology. And so let's break down the behavior, the thought process around doing these high resistance tasks into four stages. The first stage is decision. You're merely making the decision to do something. Once you've made the decision to do it, then we go into initiation. By the way, these are not necessarily the same terms that you're going to find in cognitive and behavioral research, but these are the terms I think are easy to understand, they're intuitive, and I think it's appropriate for just kind of explaining the concept to you guys. After initiation of the task, we go into reinforcement, and eventually what happens is that this behavior becomes a habit. And so this habit here, this is really the golden zone, this is the holy grail of where we want to get to in terms of behaviors, because when things become habit, normally it means that we have a high level of competence, and we're also running on autopilot, which means low energy. It's very sustainable, we can do this very easily, it doesn't take a lot of mental effort to do. Once things start becoming habit, you can get that done without it feeling like a big willpower drain. But to get to here is not easy. As we all know, building new habits is sometimes an arduous and unsuccessful journey. And so what we have to understand is that really a habit is actually a symptom that all of these processes beforehand have gone well. When all of these previous processes are done well, the habit forms whether you like it or not. And I truly mean that. You can't really avoid the habit being formed. This is the reason why it's so easy to be addicted to certain things, if they are bad habits. And in fact, when we dissect a bad habit, the power of doing these previous processes correctly becomes really clear. So with a bad habit, the decision can just be once or twice. So if we take some kind of very addictive drug, for example, you may decide to just try this drug a couple of times. And so the decision part is very easy. This is just saying we're going to do something. It's merely the injection of intention. This is easy. Everyone can do this. No one is going wrong at this part. But let's see what happens in the initiation phase. Initiation, this is the stuff that gets you to actually start doing this behavior the first few times. So first few times, this might involve a level of planning. You might be, you know, putting things into your schedule or seeing how you need to do it for the first few times. And we often do feel a small level of resistance here as well. A little bit of resistance here. And again, this is where we often have to inject a little bit of that willpower. So willpower comes in to overcome the resistance of doing the initiation, doing it the first few times. But again, it's fairly easy to overcome this resistance with a little bit of willpower. You've made a decision. You're feeling motivated. It's still fresh. You use a bit of willpower. You do it the first few times. Now, if it's a bad habit, something that's highly addictive, this part is often very easy. There's a low barrier. There's low levels of friction in engaging with this. So if you think about a lot of things that are addictive, we don't even have to go as extreme as something like a highly addictive drug. We can think about social media scrolling, doom scrolling. These are designed to be low barrier entry. You just open up your phone, you open up the app. Straight away, you're engaging in the behavior. It takes very little effort, very little thinking, very little planning. And what's happening is that because there's a low barrier and there's low friction, what that's doing is it is reducing this resistance. So there is less willpower necessary to engage and initiate in that behavior. Now, when it comes to trying to develop a good habit or trying to kick a bad habit, we can utilize some of the psychology and there are some strategies that I'll go through later in this video, talking about how we can change the initiation path to make it easier to build new habits or remove old habits. But for now, let's move on to the reinforcement part because this is the part that is the most challenging. This is the part that has the highest level of resistance. This is usually the part where that burnout cycle of willpower comes into play. This is after you've done it the first few times. Usually at this point, our motivation is starting to go down. The reinforcement phase is about doing that behavior repeatedly and you're doing it enough times until it eventually just becomes the habit. So the question is, what are the factors that influence whether we can do something repeatedly or not? And this is where I need to break down this word reinforcement a little bit more because actually there are multiple different types of reinforcers. So the way we're going to break this down is like this. There's positive and there's negative and then there's reinforcement and then there is punishment. It forms this quadrant. Positive means we add something. Negative means we take something away. Reinforcement means that we increase the behavior. Punishment means that we reduce a behavior. So positive reinforcement means we are adding something that we think will increase the behavior. So this is usually some kind of reward. And when we think about the word reinforcement, this is normally what most people think about. If we think about a highly addictive substance, we often think about the dopamine spike. When we scroll on our phones, that's an example of dopamine spike. We feel good about the behavior. And because we feel good, that is self-reinforcing because it encourages and incentivizes us to do that behavior again. When you shoot yourself up with some kind of highly addictive drug, that is creating a dopamine spike that is much larger than what you would normally encounter in natural life. And so that is highly addictive. Your brain wants to do that behavior again because it feels so good to do it. And so technically, positive reinforcement is actually the most powerful lever. When a behavior is positively reinforcing, even if there is high barriers and high friction and you don't even want to do it, it is so self-motivating that it is likely to develop into a habit. But the issue with relying on positive reinforcement is that it is often practically very difficult to implement. Most of the habits that you're trying to build probably are difficult to build because they don't come with it positive reinforcement. For example, if you're really unfit and the habit you're trying to create is exercising regularly, your first few runs are going to feel like crap and they're going to feel crappy for many runs. It doesn't start feeling good. You don't get the positive reinforcement until much later. And so a lot of these things that are really life-changing, transformative, really good for us long-term, they're hard to build as habits because they are not positively reinforcing short-term. And so a strategy that we can use is we can try to add a short-term positive reinforcement artificially. This is where habit trackers and little gamification things come in, where it artificially gives you a tiny little dopamine spike that makes you feel good about this activity that normally doesn't have a short-term dopamine spike. And so this can be useful for that initial momentum. However, this is usually also unsustainable. Part of that is because these little dopamine spikes, we're going to start getting used to them over time. Unless you, and you really shouldn't be, shooting yourself up with some highly addictive substance as your reward mechanism, unless you're doing that, the dopamine spike is still not going to be super massive. And so as a result, over time, we're going to get used to it. And the value and the novelty of that reward mechanism is going to fade over time. If by the time it fades, we don't have that behavior established as a habit, then we're going to start seeing some drop off. And this can happen around three to six weeks down the line. And the other thing is that sometimes it's just not pragmatic to create this reward system for the behavior, especially if the behavior is something that you're trying to engage in every single day, multiple times a day. If you're training a dog, a new trick, you can have a little bag of treats. And every time it does the trick, you reward it. Every single time you can reward it. And that's actually very easy to set up. As humans living our life in society, it's hard to have our bag of treats of meaningful rewards that we can use to reward ourselves every single time we're trying to do this behavior. It actually starts becoming more effortful to just set up your reward system. And then we get lazy about doing that. So that defeats the whole purpose. And so even though positive reinforcement is technically the most powerful lever, in practical reality, it's actually a very difficult one to be able to max out. And so while we should use little short term motivation techniques to try to kickstart these habits, we have to understand that it's not sustainable. It's probably not going to be the thing that drives us to eventually creating that long-term habit. And it can be unreliable if that's all we're relying on. So this is the reason why it's useful to know about positive reinforcement. But I think it's actually more useful to know about the other three quadrants because this is where you're going to get much more of that sustainable habit development. So let's move on to the next one, which is the negative reinforcement. So remember, positive means you're adding something. Negative means that you're taking it away. So with negative reinforcement, we're trying to take away something to encourage a certain behavior. That's the reinforcer. So this is usually removing something that's bad. So a great example of this is when you're getting in the car and you don't have your seatbelt buckled and you start moving, a lot of modern cars, they will just start beeping. The beeping, as you stay unbuckled, the beeping gets increasingly aggressive and irritating. And when you buckle your seatbelt, that annoying beeping sound stops. That's an example of negative reinforcement. In order to encourage the behavior of buckling up, we remove the annoying beeping sound. Now, another example of this, which is one that people often don't think about, is let's say that you're really stressed and there's a lot of pressure from work. Negative reinforcement could actually be something like planning out your day, prioritizing events, doing some mindfulness meditation, getting your work done instead of procrastinating. By doing that, you feel less stress and less pressure because you've actually removed the cause of the stress. By doing the work, you've reduced the pressure and stress. That is actually also an example of negative reinforcement. And negative reinforcement can also be very powerful. However, negative reinforcement tends to be more effective at immediate short-term behaviors. They don't tend to be a great way for building enduring, long-lasting habits. And that's because it relies on this pressure or this bad thing from being present. So if the only way you get work done is when you feel urgency and this sense of pressure and you leave it to the last minute, and then you do that, and now you feel good because the pressure is gone, well, it means that you're creating a system for yourself. And the habit that's being built is leave things until the last minute, until I feel this negative pressure. And then the thing to remove that. And oh, now I feel good. So in the future, I should do that again. And this is also the reason why some people develop maladaptive coping behaviors. So if you're feeling really stressed and tired from work, and then you get completely hammered by drinking a whole bottle of whiskey, if I don't do that, now you don't feel stressed. Actually, you don't feel you don't feel much at all. So you've removed the stress by doing something that's actually not good for you. And that can reinforce and become a habit. So the issue with building good behaviors using negative reinforcement is that even though you can build that behavior right now, when the issue is present, that behavior can go away when the bad part is not present. I think a really great example of this is people trying to do mindfulness meditation, where if you're feeling really stressed, and there's lots going on in your mind, you're feeling anxious, doing some mindfulness meditation can make you feel much better. And then once you start feeling better, and weeks go by, and you're feeling a little bit more stable. Now, there's no reason to do the meditation anymore, even though they're actually transferable long term benefits from doing that. But there is actually no reinforcer to do that anymore, because the only thing that made you do it was removing the bad part. So even though negative reinforcement can be powerful, it's best to use it together with things that lower the friction in initiation, I'll go through some strategies later, as well as a positive reinforcer, so that even when the bad part is removed, the positive part is still there, continuing to make it feel motivating and lowering the resistance of that reinforcement phase. And I'll go through an example of one specific strategy that you can use to overcome procrastination in a little bit after I talk about punishment, because let's talk about punishment, because that is another very common way that we try to create behavioral change. So remember, a punishment is you're trying to reduce a behavior, whereas a reinforcer is trying to promote and encourage a behavior. So a positive punishment means you're adding something to reduce a behavior. So this is actually adding something bad. It's the conventional way that we think about punishment. And so this is easy to understand. A positive punishment could be like, you touch a hot stove, you feel pain, you learn that you shouldn't touch a hot stove. This is one of the most intuitive ways to stop bad behavior. However, what a lot of modern research has identified is that positive punishment is actually the least effective and most unreliable way to change behavior. And the reason is that all it teaches you is what behavior to avoid, what behavior to suppress. But it doesn't teach you what you should do instead. And this is the reason, one of the major reasons, why positive punishment, punishing through pain or like hitting or beating your dog or your children, has gone out of fashion because beyond the sort of ethical implication of it, it's actually just not effective. And the major risk here is that it's a very good way of teaching people avoidance, fear, and resentment behaviors. And the interesting thing is that it can actually train an alternative behavior that is potentially even worse because you've created an environment for negative reinforcement training which is more powerful. So here's a great example. Let's say that your child is swearing and so you want to stop that behavior of swearing and so you yell at them and then you hit them. So you have applied a punishment to avoid that behavior of swearing. The child could learn to just swear when you're not around. And so the reason they're swearing in the first place is the cause, the emotions, whatever they're trying to regulate and do through swearing, that still exists. All they've learned is that when I swear in front of you, I will get punished. So if I don't swear in front of you but I swear elsewhere, at school, I act up when you're not around, that is actually negative reinforcement. Because now I have an outlet for that feeling and that emotion but I don't get this punishment. They've actually removed the bad for themselves and you are negatively reinforcing an alternative behavior that you never intended to reinforce. And this is not just for children. So let's say that you are a software developer and you are presenting your code to your manager and your manager does a code review and they say you suck, you're incompetent, you know this is terrible, it's full of errors and they yell at you and they just chew you out. So great, the reason that they're making the mistakes and the reason that there are errors is still there but now what they're learning is that I can't show this to the manager. So they're going to avoid the manager, they're going to avoid asking questions, they're going to avoid getting things reviewed. And again, these behaviors are being negatively reinforced because the punishment exists. And so the risk of these sort of spirals developing with positive punishment is very high. You create these behaviors that you never intended, that actually makes things worse, the performance or the results actually decreases, they get punished even more because of that, they recede even further, even more alternative behaviors develop. It creates an individual that is afraid to make mistakes, afraid to try, afraid to be criticized, afraid to take risks, doesn't have the skills and the processes necessary to get better at any of those things but just creates fear, avoidance, resentment. And this happens for you punishing yourself as well. If every time you try to start a new habit and every time you fall off, you have a bad day, if your self-talk which might be mirroring the type of talk that you receive when you're a child, if your self-talk is look at you, you're useless, you failed again. Here's another example of how you weren't able to stick with a habit, you are so inconsistent, you're useless. If that's your self-talk, that is you punishing yourself. It's not going to help you to engage in the behavior, it's not going to address the underlying issues, it's not going to reduce the barrier or the friction, it's not going to create a positive reinforcement cycle, it's not going to reduce the willpower dependency, it doesn't change any of the resistance profiles anywhere. All it does is it means that now you can avoid that punishment by not trying. If you don't try, you can't fail. And if you don't fail, you won't be punished by your own self-talk. And this is the reason why psychologically, behaviorally, it's so important to be kind to yourself when you fail and make mistakes. And this is something that personally, I've really struggled with over the years as well. I typically hold myself to a really high standard. I have journal entries where you can see that I'm just ripping into myself. I'm literally like swearing at myself, calling myself useless for failing on these certain things. It's such a negative mentality to have. Now, one of the things that I find is so important is that I still hold myself to a high standard, but I treat myself like a human. I understand that I can make mistakes. Things don't go to plan sometimes. I give myself the compassion while holding a certain standard for myself. So this is about positive punishment. And actually, the same phenomenon is for negative punishment as well. So negative punishment, remember negative is removing something. So you're removing something to decrease a behavior. So this usually means removing something that is good. So this would be like someone really enjoys playing games. So if you do a certain behavior, you don't do that behavior. Okay. Your punishment is that I'm taking away your game privileges, you're grounded. You can't leave your room. I'm taking away your social privileges. And so the same sort of thing happens here where basically everything that I said that is bad about a positive punishment is the same thing for a negative punishment as well. It's not really addressing the underlying issues or the processes. All it's showing is something to avoid. So all the issues and risks of a positive punishment also apply for a negative punishment. Generally speaking, all the punishment related ways of trying to change behavior are much less effective. And so you normally only use these for immediate safety related behaviors. The classic example of this is with children. If someone is doing something really dangerous, having like a really firm, like no, you know, this emotive kind of no stop kind of signaling, which makes them feel, oh, I shouldn't do this. So this is an example where because there is an immediate hazard, you need to create an immediate stop of that behavior. The objective is not to change some other behavior. You're not even thinking about what the alternative behavior is. It's not really like there's an underlying problem to address. There's literally something procedural that someone is about to do that is dangerous and you just need that to stop. That's an example of an appropriate use of a punishment strategy. This happens in the workplace as well. If someone is breaching a PPE protocol and they're about to go into something hazardous, the immediate action is that you remove them from the workplace. That's actually a punishment strategy. But even in that situation, if you want to retrain that worker to have the correct behavior, you would then use a retraining process that involves some reinforcement because that's the way that you create a desirable behavior. Punishment is used for immediate stopping of hazardous behavior used only short term and very sparingly. But if it's about actually creating any kind of long term behavioral change or teaching someone the way to behave, you have to use a reinforcement strategy. So if we were to rank these in terms of effectiveness at changing behaviors and building new habits, this is kind of like how you and most of your situations should be thinking about which strategy to use. It's going to be positive reinforcement is number one, then negative reinforcement, and then the punishment strategies. Now, there is actually a fifth strategy that doesn't fit within this quadrant. And this first strategy is actually at the number two spot. So this is third, this is fourth. And the second most effective thing, which is just below positive reinforcement, is actually something that's called extinction, which I feel sounds really dramatic. Extinction is about removing a reinforcer that maintains the behavior. So let's say that there's a behavior that you don't like and there's something reinforcing that behavior. Extinction means that you take that reinforcer away. Again, if we look at it like a parenting example, let's say that a child is throwing a tantrum and they're screaming and kicking all over the floor. Now, what they want is probably attention. They want attention from the parent. And so a reinforcer is actually giving the child attention. So by giving the child attention, you are reinforcing the behavior. I want something. I'm going to throw a tantrum. I get the attention. And so now they learn when in the future they want something, they can throw a tantrum. Sometimes these people just grow up and become adults that do the exact same thing. The alternative here is the punishment. Someone's throwing a tantrum and you punish them for it, right? So now you want attention. You can't do the tantrum. You don't know what else to do with the attention. You haven't learned an alternative pathway. You act out in all sorts of different ways. Neither of these things is desirable. This is where extinction comes in. Extinction would be they throw a tantrum. You just ignore it. You deprive them of the thing that motivates them to do that behavior. If you're social media scrolling, one thing that you can do if you want to take away the reinforcer and you want to pull that trigger is go and reset your algorithm. Now, when you go on, your feed is just full of things that you don't care about. A lot of the reinforcement has been removed. And this extinction strategy is actually almost as effective as positive reinforcement is. The only difference here is that positive reinforcement is for increasing new behaviors, whereas extinction is for removing a behavior. So this is basically how we used to think about things in the bad old days, is that if you want to remove a behavior, you use punishment. If you want to add a behavior, you use reinforcement. Actually, now we understand that if you want to add a behavior, you use reinforcement, either positive or negative reinforcements. This is going to create behaviors. If you want to remove a behavior, you use extinction. Remove. And then this is used for safety, hazardous situations only. And so here's a really great example using a common bad behavior, which is procrastination. So procrastination is this emotional coping mechanism. There's stuff that you need to do. It feels daunting. It feels overwhelming. And that's a negative emotion. So if you open up Instagram and start scrolling, now you feel relief. You don't have that negative emotion anymore. That relief has become a reinforcer. You have removed the bad feeling of feeling overwhelmed at the task. And it's also given you a little dopamine spike, a bit of a reward that's very strongly reinforcing. And this is the reason why procrastination is so easy. And so one of the strategies that you can use is that you just do a two to three minute block where you deliberately only start the activity with the goal to leave it incomplete. So if there's this big essay that you need to write, and it's going to take you 20 hours across the week, that's a lot of work. Anyone's going to feel daunted and overwhelmed by starting on that task. But if your only goal is to just start, see what you get to in two to three minutes, which could be virtually nothing, but that's all you need to do, that's very easy. You're not, there is no intention to finish this task. All you're trying to do is just do two or three minutes, see how far you get. And by setting yourself that goal, it reduces the overwhelm of that task. And by getting started, it means that you no longer feel that sense of dread. And so actually just by not procrastinating and setting yourself a two to three minute goal instead, where you can always just do two to three minutes. And afterwards, if you want to go and scroll on Instagram, by all means, you can do that. You can go ahead and you give yourself the permission to do that, but just start with a two to three minute block or a five minute block. And what that's going to do is it actually reduces that feeling of overwhelm because you've lowered the standard of the goal. So you've achieved the same thing. You've negatively reinforced, you've removed that bad feeling. And because you got some stuff done, you've positively reinforced yourself as well. And on top of this, we introduced the Zeigarnik effect, the fact that it's easier to continue something that's left incomplete. And so now we actually feel more motivated to continue just working through it after that two to three minutes is up. And again, you don't have to, but the option is there for you. And that option is much easier for you now because you already started. And that in itself allows you to be productive, get stuff done, and that is positively reinforcing. And so what you can see we're doing is that by utilizing these strategies more specifically in a targeted way, we are lowering the resistance and the amount of willpower we need. If we don't use this and we simply try to do that 20 hour essay or project, there's a high amount of resistance. You have to overcome all of that using your willpower. But by using these strategies, we're setting ourselves up to reduce that resistance, utilizing just a little bit of willpower just to do two to three minutes of work. And then that will reinforce itself. The willpower is an investment into a reinforcement cycle as opposed to your one and only way to break through this wall of resistance that you're going to feel every single day and make you feel exhausted and tired. And in doing so, we stave off burnout. It allows us to build these habits automatically over time because these behaviors are self-reinforcing. It starts feeling good to do these things. And then on top of building a reinforcement cycle that is self-reinforcing, we can then also work on certain things in the initiation phase. This is usually a little bit easier, a little bit more procedural, just things that lower the barrier or lower the friction. Or alternatively, if you're trying to remove a bad behavior, you can do things that increase the barrier and increase the friction. So for example, just that two to three minutes starting on something to prevent procrastination, that's something that not only creates reinforcement, but also lowers the barrier, lowers the mental friction. Another thing would be the night before that you need to work on some kind of big project or do some kind of intensive learning. The night before, you can set yourselves up by opening up all of your different tabs, having all the resources compiled, doing a little bit of the preparation work the day before so that when you come to sit down, you can just seamlessly jump back into it. If you're trying to do some exercise that day, pack your exercise clothes with you. If it's possible, wear your exercise clothes at the ready, sit down and think about what are all the things that need to happen to go from not doing the behavior to doing the behavior and be in a solution focused mindset where you're thinking, what can I do to do as many of those things in advance as possible so that when I'm busy and I'm tired and I can't be bothered doing it, the only step that I need to invest willpower into is just the final step of doing it. Sometimes this involves a reasonable amount of planning. For example, if the behavior you're trying to create is waking up early every morning, the reason that that might be difficult is because you're going to sleep too late and then you're tired and you're sleep deprived. But the reason you're going to sleep later is because you're working until late and then you've got to come home and take care of the kids and there's lots of stuff that you need to do and then you need to unwind. So actually, there are lots of things that need to happen as prerequisites for you to create this new behavior. So being in a solution focused mindset around this is about not saying, oh, it's really hard because of all of these reasons I can't do it. It's saying, if this is important enough of a behavior for you to invest in, think about all of those barriers, all of those things that stop you and ask yourself, well, what could I do to solve that? And it's incredible really when I'm in a consultation with someone and I'm coaching them and I'm talking to them face to face and I'm saying, well, what is the thing that's stopping you from being able to do this? And they list out all these different reasons. It's hard because of this and it's challenging because of this. And that's totally valid. Life is full of challenges. I get it. But then when I ask them, well, is there anything that you could do about that? Just imagine that you could. What do you have at your disposal? It's incredible how just asking that question and shifting that frame of mind towards looking for a solution instead of just looking for problems shifts that perspective and allows them to find new ways of overcoming these barriers. And again, I'm not saying that every single barrier can be overcome so simply like that, but I do think that it's worthwhile for everyone to entertain that idea and challenge it. Is this something that is actually impossible to fix and overcome? Or is it just difficult? And in that case, is that difficulty worth it? So that's about using a lower barrier and lower friction to initiate on tasks. And again, we can flip this around. So let's say that we're trying to avoid procrastinating on our phone. Well, the barrier to that's going to be really high if we deactivate the apps that we're using. We have app blockers installed. And again, being a solution focused mindset, you've installed an app blocker. Has it worked for you? What if you install two app blockers? What if you increase the settings of those app blockers? What if you add an accountability partner? What if you leave your phone at the door? What if you throw your phone underneath your bed? What if you throw your phone in the Atlantic Ocean? What are the things that you can do that increase the barrier to a point where it's now so inconvenient for you to access the bad behavior that you just can't be bothered doing it? So that's how we adjust the resistance profile strategically, either lowering it or increasing it to control the behaviors that we have. Now, just remember, you have to still have this level of reinforcement in place. If you don't have a reinforcing cycle here that's utilizing reinforcers properly, you can lower the initiation phase resistance as much as you like. It can be very, very, very difficult. You've literally yeeted your phone across the ocean. There's nothing for you to distract yourself. You're living in a cave, but you still don't want to do your work. So you just find other things to procrastinate with. You start counting blades of grass on the ground. You will find that this second resistance barrier is very, very high, even if this resistance barrier is low. So you need to have this, and you need to have this. And if you can only have one, focus on this. Because like I said, if the reinforcement cycle is high enough, you will overcome whatever barriers are in the way to be able to do this. But ideally, you want to have both, especially a high barrier and a high level of friction for undesirable behaviors, because you're not going to be able to create a reinforcement cycle for a lot of these long-term behaviors that are good for you that matches the level of reinforcement for a lot of these things that we typically find addicting. Those are engineered to create a level of reinforcement that is way beyond what we can naturally create for ourselves. And so if you're purely looking at what is more reinforcing, this positive behavior that is good for you versus this negative behavior that's going to destroy your life and keep you distracted forever, the distraction is actually going to win. So we need to combat that by ramping up the resistance up here for that behavior, making it really inconvenient, and then lowering the resistance for the good behavior, setting up a reinforcement cycle. And by doing that, we strategically play with our resistance, reduce our dependence on willpower, set up long-term habits, and finally, we're able to just get things done during the day without every single task feeling like an exhausting mountain to climb. That never ends. An endless stairmaster of mountain climbing, of tasks. Now, if one of the times that you want to feel more energized during the day is in the evenings, when you come home from work, then you might want to check out this video right here, where I go through and talk about different strategies to increase your energy and feel less tired after work. But otherwise, thank you so much for watching. I hope this video was helpful, and I'll see you in the next one.