How to make the hard things easier
One of the inescapable facts of life is that voluntarily doing hard things leads to highly valuable outcomes.
In a prior newsletter about how to make habits for happiness, I wrote:
“All the things that are good in life - great relationships, thriving health, exceptional performance, happiness - are founded on what my professor Angela Duckworth called “the accretion of mundane acts.”
Eating your vegetables. Practicing kindness. Building the tiny components of a skill. Cultivating your mind to be resilient and optimistic.
Day in, day out. The accretion of mundane acts.”
These mundane acts are also the hard acts.
It’s harder to eat your vegetables than to eat sweets, to practice kindness than to snap at people, to build a skill than to lay around, and to cultivate your mind than to consume mindless entertainment.
A second inescapable fact of life is that there are many hard things that happen to us that we have no control over; it’s usually the fact that we don’thave control over them that make them exceptionally tough.
Hard things are inevitable in life, both if you’re a regular human and if you’re pursuing a meaningful, generative, impactful life.
Given this inevitability, I want to make it easier for you to go through the small hard things and the big hard things. Today I’ll share some of my top strategies, culled from the latest scientific research, on just how you can do that.
There are three main strategies that I recommend that you try to transform a hard thing into something a bit easier: the first uses your brain, the second uses your heart, and the third uses the world around you.
Use Your Brain: Make It A Game
When you’re struggling through a hard thing, the last thing that you would describe it as is ‘fun’.
More likely: hellish, draining, soul-sucking, unpleasant, painful, and so on.
And yet, for some reason, when we’re struggling through a hard scenario in a game, we are often having the time of our lives, or at least completely in the moment, immersed in the state of flow. Why are hard things so hard when they share so many of the same characteristics of games, like repetitive challenging activities?
The reason is that games have an overlaid structure on top of a series of activities, including rules, players, and most importantly, a way to win.
Many of the struggles that we face in our lives are hard because first, we lack control over the situation (“I didn’t want this to happen") and second, because we don’t know the rules and how to win (“I don’t know how to move out of this situation”). In these moments, we’re often facing a challenge that we’ve never tackled before: be it an illness, a loss, a new phase of life like parenthood, a financial challenge, or a toxic relationship, the shape and waves of that situation are new to us and thus, something we don’t know how to succeed at. We haven’t built self-efficacy for that situation, which is the term psychologists use for ‘believing you can do what you are trying to do’. To master a hard situation, you have to have confidence in your ability to solve your problems and achieve your goals. That’s where turning your hard thing into a game can really help.
Adopt a gameful mindset
There is a psychological concept called cognitive appraisal, which is a fancy word for ‘changing the way you look at something’. Think of this as your super power in your game: it gives you the ability to take your situation and completely change it so it’s easier to handle.
Psychologists have studied people who play games and discovered that they almost never feel hopeless when they’re playing. Instead, we feel determined and focused, because we are focused on achieving our goals and on growing, we believe we can push ourselves to do more than ever before, and we believe that it is always possible to win.
What if you could adopt that mindset with the hard thing you’re tackling? Studies have found that this strategy works exceptionally well for the challenges that we didn’t choose, where things feel the most hopeless.
To adopt it, remind yourself that what you’re facing is a challenge, not a threat. When we are threatened, our brain’s executive function goes ‘offline’ and makes it impossible for us to figure out the wisest path forward; instead, we get emotional, overwhelmed, stressed, and often end up making unproductive choices. When we are facing a challenge, however, our attention kicks in to high gear, helping us to stay laser focused on what we want to achieve and keeping us aimed at our goals. A challenge keeps us more positive, more resourceful, and more adaptable.
Your mantra: “This is a challenge that I can master!”
Figure out how to make it winnable
From there, it’s time to figure out how to follow through and master the situation, thus building your self-efficacy.
In a game, you know that you can win, if you can just figure out how. That’s what helps you to keep adopting your gameful mindset: you know, that if you’re resourceful enough, that you can find the way. In the hard moments of life, whether you’re trying to quit smoking or lose weight or claw out of depression or recover from an illness, it often feels like there is no path towards winning. Your quest here is to figure out any possible way to make the situation winnable.
One way to do that is to figure out the rules of the hard thing as quickly as you can. Every situation has rules. If you’re trying to lose weight, a rule is that fruits and vegetables are both more filling and less fatty than other snacks. If you’re trying to quit smoking, a rule might be that you crave a cigarette after eating. If you’re trying to recover from depression, a rule might be that being alone is not helpful for you.
Start an ongoing list of all of the rules of your hard thing. Once you know the rules, figure out how to use them! This is where it gets fun, where you can get creative. Replace your after-meal cigarette with a lollipop. Set up dinner dates every night so you’re not alone.
The second way to make the hard thing winnable is to accumulate as many small wins as you possible can. You have to start tracking the tiniest of wins and celebrating them. Every time you eat a piece of fruit instead of chocolate, put on a celebratory song. Every time you have a lollipop instead of a cigarette, add a big star on a piece of paper on the wall. Nothing is too small to celebrate - and the more small wins you can accumulate, the more you will build your self-efficacy.
By figuring out a way to make a hard thing winnable, you’ve done the impossible: wrestled control over a situation, something that you might have previously thought impossible. When you can see that you can win, you are immediately filled with the energy to try to master the situation.
Use Your Heart: Connect To A Value
There’s no such thing as a person who is more motivated than another person.
There are, on the other hand, people who are in contexts that motivate them, that hit their buttons in the right way.
For you to become your most motivated self, the self who is able to tackle the hard things, you have to learn what your buttons are, and how to hit them.
Your buttons are your values: the things that you believe are the most important things to honor and to live by.
It sounds incredibly obvious, but if something is important to you, it’s way easier to stick with it through the hard times. Here’s a powerful example, from the ultramarathoner Rich Roll, who wrote about having a stark awakening on the evening of his fortieth birthday, after binging on food and television until 2:00am:
“I began hauling my 208-pound frame upstairs when midway I had to pause - my legs were heavy, my breathing labored. My face felt hot and I had to bend over just to catch my breath, my belly folding over jeans that no longer fit. Nauseous, I looked down at the steps I’d climbed. There were eight. Eight steps. I was 39 years old and I was winded by eight steps.
I entered our bedroom, careful not to wake Julie or our two-year-old daughter, Mathis…. Tears began to trickle down my face as I was overcome by a confusing mix of emotions - love, certainly, but also guilt, shame, and a sudden and acute fear. In my mind, a crystal-clear image flashed of Mathis on her wedding day, smiling, flanked by her proud groomsmen brothers and beaming mother. But in this waking dream, I knew something was profoundly amiss. I wasn’t there. I was dead… the tiny crystal ball foretold my grim future - that I wouldn’t live to see my daughter’s wedding day.”
He goes on to write about how this moment connected so deeply with his core value of family that it changed his behavior completely: 24 hours prior, he had relentlessly teased his wife regularly for being vegan, saying he could never possibly eat ‘her food’ - but then, suddenly, the next day, he told her he wanted to explore it. Over the coming months, that moment compelled him to completely change his entire life: becoming a vegan, shedding fifty pounds, and becoming an ultramarathoner and elite athlete competing in some of the world’s toughest races.
You will change your behavior if something matters enough to you. Rich changed his behavior because his daughter mattered more to him than eating donuts. You will also be able to get through hard things if you can connect it to something that matters to you. It’s easy to turn down a donut in favor of your daughter, if you’ve made that connection.
So now we have to make that connection, and make it strong.
If you’re self-selecting a hard thing, like ‘becoming a better person’, you can use this strategy to keep you motivated by figuring out how your hard thing connects to your deepest values. If you’re facing a hard thing you didn’t choose, like an illness, you can use this strategy to help you keep putting one foot in front of the other, by figuring out how the situation might help you fully embody or tap in to one of your core values.
Research has found that across cultures and countries, there are about ten common values:
Power: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources
Achievement: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards
Hedonism: Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself
Stimulation: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life
Self-Direction: Independent thought and action - choosing, creating, exploring
Universalism: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature
Benevolence: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact
Tradition: Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide
Conformity: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms
Security: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self
Go through this list and choose the 2-3 top values that are most important to you.
Next, you would ask yourself how your goal of ‘becoming a better person’ helps you to connect with that value. If it isn’t connected tightly, it will be far more challenging for you to do it, because it’s not wedded to the deepest values of your heart; it could even be conflicting with it, which might be what is pulling you away from really mastering it.
For example, perhaps your core value is achievement. How could becoming a better person tie to achievement? You could tell yourself that the ultimate achievement in life is mastering yourself.
If you’re facing an illness, as in our other example, you would want to figure out how this situation is allowing you to enhance or more deeply live your core values. Perhaps your core value is power, and you’ve been suffering because you have lost your power in ‘the real world’. Perhaps you could instead look at how this situation has allowed you to see what true power is, the power of letting go.
Spend some time really thinking and feeling through these connections. Tell some people you love about the connection to really solidify it. The stronger they are, the easier it will be to keep mastering your hard thing.
Use Your World: Change Your Environment
Most of us think we are in charge of ourselves. We are wrong. Our environment impacts us so much more than we could ever imagine. Here are two of my favorite examples:
Google ran a study on their employees where they moved their candy from open bowls to containers with lids. Instead of just swinging by and grabbing candy, they had to stop and open the jar. During a period of seven weeks, the New York team consumed 3.1 million fewer calories from M&Ms.
In countries where organ donation is opt-out, there is about a 90% organ donation rate. In countries where it is opt-in, the maximum percentage of people registered to donate is just 30%.
You can’t fight the power of the environment upon you. You have to find a way to make that power work for you by having it support your decisions rather than making them harder.
For example, if your hard thing is going to the gym more frequently, the absolute worst thing you can do is sign up for a gym that is out of the way of your normal haunts. That gym might be sparkling new, might have the best equipment and the most motivating trainers, but I can guarantee that you’re not going to be there enough to take advantage of it.
Ask yourself: how can you make it the default to make good decisions, and how can you make it hard to make bad decisions?
If you’re trying to look at your phone less often, an easy way to default to good decisions is to delete the apps on your phone that are taking up your time. Simple. They’re gone, so you can’t go to them. Don’t force yourself to use willpower!
What if you’re going through a hard thing that you didn’t choose? Think about how you could design an environment that would bring the things that make you happiest - or at least, less sad - to the forefront. For example, if you’re feeling loneliness due to a divorce, you would want to create an environment that forces you to get in touch with people: perhaps you could put a recurring walk on the calendar with a friend, and ask her to never cancel on you unless it’s an emergency. That way, come that day every week, you’ll have a default social option, which sometimes is exactly what you need when you’re lonely and not feeling up to reaching out.
Hard Things Can Be Mastered
The good news is that even when we don’t choose them, it’s possible to use our superpower of cognitive appraisal, the strength of the values in our hearts, and the secret impact of our environment upon us to help us make hard things easier.
I’ve used these strategies in every hard thing I’ve ever tackled, both the ones I chose and the ones I didn’t. I can really attest to the power they have to make the situation more navigable.
Of course, some hard things are never going to become easy. But my hope is that with these strategies, you are able to make the hard things a little bit lighter to carry, which in turn, makes it possible to keep walking and moving forward.
“Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness. But it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.”
The New Happy Links Of The Week
Five scientifically proven ways to fall asleep faster
Two thirds of adults in developed nations don’t get enough sleep. And that has a huge impact on their well-being: lack of sleep has been shown to increase risk of infertility, cancer, depression, obesity, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
“After being awake for 19 hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk… After 16 hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for 24 hours.”
How to live it: The article offers five tips that you can try if you struggle to fall asleep.
Maintain a consistent sleep schedule
Create a dark sleep environment.
Keep your body cool.
Avoid caffeine and alcohol after 2pm.
Don’t stay in bed after you wake up.
Your professional decline Is coming (much) sooner than you think
What drives our fear of professional decline? How does achievement connect to happiness? How do you move from a life focused on the self to a life focused on others? These are the questions - foundational to our community - explored in this fantastic piece.
“I told him my conundrum: Many people of achievement suffer as they age, because they lose their abilities, gained over many years of hard work. Is this suffering inescapable, like a cosmic joke on the proud? Or is there a loophole somewhere—a way around the suffering?”
How to live it: Decide what deeper values you want to live in your life now. Don’t wait for a midlife crisis or a professional decline to pursue it. The sooner you devote yourself towards others, the better you will be for it.
New study: people are really quite honest, all around the world
This is your good news item to give you faith in humanity today.
A great study, across 355 cities spanning 40 countries, dropped 17,000 wallets containing money and other items in various locations. While there was big variation across cities, almost everywhere people were MORE likely to return the wallet when it had MORE money in it!
Trust and honesty are the backbone of society. Interestingly, levels of social trust, averaged across a country, predict national economic growth as powerfully as financial and physical capital, and more powerfully than skill levels.
How to live it: Use this data point to remind you to trust in people’s goodness! Trust often begins with one person being slightly more vulnerable, which is then reciprocated by the other person. Be the vulnerable one first - and see what happens.