Download The Psychology Of Laziness Pdf
Yuk Walke
I think laziness really is this canary in a coal mine kind of emotion that tells us when our values are out of step with our actual lives. A lot of times we pour so much energy into being impressive at work, satisfying all the demands of our friends and family and just trying to overachieve in every possible way that we don't really listen to that inner voice that tells us, "Here's what matters most to me in my life. Here's what I really believe in and value. And here's how I really would live if I wasn't just setting out to satisfy other people."
I think when we start listening to laziness, we can really question a lot of unfair social standards like fat phobia. This social standard says that our bodies need to look a certain way and that we need to exercise and cook meals that look a particular way. And it's just all of this drive towards meeting a really arbitrary standard of perfection. When we stop pushing ourselves to kind of overachieve by this completely arbitrary metric, we can say, "OK, what actually feels good for my body? How do I actually want to spend my time?"
Most of us don't have that ultimate freedom to walk away from things that are exhausting to us and just work at a much slower pace. Unlearning the hatred of laziness isn't another thing to beat yourself up for not doing correctly, because most of us are in a situation where our freedom and our choice is pretty restricted. If you're in a workplace where you aren't kind of trusted to self-motivate and you aren't given the room to set limits, you are really in a coercive environment that's going to keep running you down. A lot of times it comes down to looking into things like unionizing, documenting problems as they occur, demonstrating how when one person leaves the company, all of their work is just dumped onto someone else instead of replacing them.
Sitzfleisch is a German word that means "sitting meat" and refers to sitting on your behind and not getting your work done on time. The situation sounds familiar, right?. Let me tell you why it means and sounds the same as what our mothers call us when we are being lazy. Happens to many of us. Similarly, there are many other words that we use for laziness. Whether we call it lethargy, sloth, or idleness. In the end, all these terms simply indicate an unwillingness to work or use energy, despite having the ability to do so. Often, this is not what we think it is.
People who do not have enough emotional support around and have no one to talk to, the constant struggle with their own emotions can lead up to exhaustion and laziness. It is very important to have someone around to keep you on track, listen to you and push you to manage your responsibilities. Having no one to discuss your emotional state can lead to laziness, constant sadness and in a longer run, depression.
Being rejected on something, humiliated on how you did it and not getting proper acknowledgement is a major cause of our 'apparent' laziness. These behaviours gradually develop from our childhood and form into permanent personality traits when we grow up.
The difference is, an athlete has methods to help themselves through it. They have ways to distract themselves from their day to day pleasures like playing partypoker and staring into space, that are effective enough to keep them on target. So if you are having issues fighting your own laziness, here are a few ways you can conquer it.
If you're like most people, you use your phone for everything from talking to friends to managing your money to even doing your job. Unfortunately, some experts think this reliance might actually be taking a toll on our brains. Some negative effects that might happen include changes in cognitive ability, problems with social or emotional skills, problems sleeping, and mental laziness. While it's not likely (or realistic) for people to forgo their phones, their are some things we can do to protect our brains from these damaging effects.
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I originally wanted to ask a question "Is there a drug for motivation or laziness", but google search revealed that people have been asking this question for years and there's no drug that is currently prescribed to fix those issues.
This makes me interested in the the following question: Did "motivation issues" or laziness always exist for humans, or is it something that became a much bigger problem because of the modern lifestyle or cuture?
UPDATE: it would be very interesting to examine if a correlation exists between laziness and workforce moving from working physically/outdoors(ex: farmers) towards working mentally indoors(office workers) over the years.
I would define laziness or motivational issues as "I will do this tomorrow" attitude (procrastination) or promising to do something, but delivering excuses as to why the task wasn't done. The task never gets started.
Motivation for paleolithic hunter-gatherers was simply the need to not go hungry. It was not something that you did not have. You either hunted or died. The very concept of motivation does not fit such a life, because action sprang directly from your basic needs. While those needs were satisfied, there was no need for action: "laziness, nomadism and sharing were all integral parts of the Aboriginal life-style" (Ward, 1988).
Hunter-gatherer life is the garden Eden that Adam was sent forth from: "thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread". Rowley-Conwy, in his aptly titled article "The laziness of the short-distance hunter" (1984), argues that for one Mesolithic community in western Denmark at least, "farming was not adopted until problems arose with the hunter-gatherer economy".
Evolutionary psychology assumes "that our minds and bodies are adapted for an ancestral environment", and "that we suffer the consequences of poor fit between our inherited natures and many of the constructed environments in organizational society" (Nicholson, 1997).
Although it would be hard to experiment on dead peasants, I believe that the Status Quo Bias promotes the idea that laziness is a human trait. You can see the orignal research here, or just google the term.
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When someone struggles with anxiety, they typically want to do well. For those of you who know someone who has difficulty with anxiety, you also know they often avoid what makes them anxious. The feelings of anxiety are so overwhelming, it shuts them down. It is too much. For example, someone with social anxiety may retreat from social situations. They may spend more time at home because being around others causes them so much stress. A person with social anxiety is often so focused on the judgement of others social interactions are almost painful. When someone with anxiety retreats from the cause of their anxiety, they feel a sense of relief. To the outside observer, and often to the anxious person this is confusing. It can appear as though they are lazy; however, in the case of the anxious person, the treatment for laziness is to treat their anxiety.
When those who appear lazy get treatment and support for the root cause of their difficulty, they often can shed some of the apparent laziness. It is often a great relief for them to feel understood an perform in greater alignment with their goals!
In most cases, it is deemed painful to expend effort on long-term goals that do not provide immediate gratification. For a person to embark on a project, he has to value the return on his labour more than his loss of comfort. The problem is that he is disinclined to trust in a return that is both distant and uncertain. Because self-confident people are more apt to trust in the success and pay-off of their undertakings (and may even overestimate their likely returns), they are much more likely to overcome their natural laziness.
Other people are lazy because they see their situation as being so hopeless that they cannot even begin to think through it, let alone address it. Because these people do not have the ability to think through and address their situation, it could be argued that they are not truly lazy, and, to some extent, the same could be said of all lazy people. In other words, the very concept of laziness presupposes the ability to choose not to be lazy, that is, presupposes the existence of free will.
I could have ended this article with a self-help pep talk or the top-10 tips to overcome laziness, but, in the longer term, the only way to overcome laziness is to profoundly understand its nature and particular causes: to think, think, and think, and, over the years, slowly find a better way of living.
Let's look at laziness as an example. Laziness is not a personality disorder. It's just a habit. Lazy thinking and lazy behavior, like any other habits, can be broken. Laziness isn't something we're born with. It's a behavior we learned along the way.
One of the principal issues, which are often confused with laziness, is procrastination, but it has nothing to do with being lazy. The researchers claim that it is a functioning problem related to numerous reasons other than laziness (Price). In fact, procrastination results from a lack of self-confidence and poor planning skills (Prices). From my personal experience, I would say that my friends who tend to procrastinate when studying are struggling with their perceptions but not laziness. Most tasks seem to be too complicated for them as they require following specific steps for fulfillment. Therefore, these people seem to be lazy as they postpone assignments due to their complexity and as a result of the inability to divide them into parts, which proves the idea of poor planning skills mentioned above.
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