Why we avoid effort even though it can improve our well-being

As someone whose running shoes rarely leave the closet, I am both in awe of, and perplexed by, my endurance athlete friends. Particularly hard to grasp is that their love of running marathons or cycling up mountains isn’t in spite of those efforts being so gruelling. They enjoy them precisely for that reason.

Humans, as a species, often think of ourselves as intrinsically lazy, even if scientists prefer terms like “effort averse”. But we know that putting effort in can be deeply rewarding, to the extent that we may choose a more difficult process even if the outcome remains identical. We also seem to value effort after the fact, taking unreasonable pride in a poorly constructed piece of flat-pack furniture, say, because it was a struggle to assemble.

“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…