Recently, I have been doing a particularly challenging task. It felt quite painful because I had to continuously fight the urge to stop doing whatever I was doing and watch some brainrot content. After finishing that task, I thought to myself: Why am I feeling lazy?
My best guess for that question right now is the idea that humans are adapted to conserve calories as much as possible. Humans are evolved to be savannah hunter-gatherers who had very limited amount of food, so laziness probably was a good adaptation to them. The particularly hard-working ancient humans probably were more likely to die from starvation. Therefore, it made sense for them to evolve mental circuits which are adapted to conserve energy and have a high discount value.
The thing is, I live in a postindustrial society with basically unbounded access to food. I do not need these energy saving, procrastination inducing mental circuits anymore. They are just making it harder to achieve goals that I want to achieve. So I just want to turn them off. I want to fix laziness. I want infinite willpower.
So far, I could not find any academic literature that focused on turning off the parts of the brain which are responsible for causing laziness. Any help with providing the academic literature that is relevant for my question is highly appreciated.
I think many people have found this frame ultimately sort of unhelpful at the stated goal.
My experience has been that generally, “laziness” is more of a symptom than a cause, or at least not very useful as a model.
Here are a few alternate frames:
do you actually believe in the thing you are procrastinating away from doing?
is the problem that your job just sucks and you should get a different one? Or a different work environment?
can you connect more strongly with whatever is good about the thing you are trying to do?
is there something particularly unpleasant about the thing you’re procrastinating? Can you somehow address that?
are you specifically addicted to particular flavors of brain-rot content?
do you need rest? (Often I need rest, but then slide into addictive youtube content or videogames instead of resting, so #3 is also relevant but incomplete)
It’s useful to be able to power-through with willpower, but if you’re finding yourself needing willpower IMO it usually means something else is wrong.
Words like “lazy” are fake explanations. They pretend to explain, but all they do is put a label on something. (Notice the urge to explain something without investigating it first.)
How specifically are you lazy? You mention an “urge to stop”. How much of that is “push” and how much is “pull”? Would you be willing to do some other kind of boring work instead, for example do the dishes instead of the thing you are supposed to do? If yes, I think it casts some doubt on the “saving energy” explanation.
I suspect it might be more useful to think about the emotions associated with the work you are avoiding, and to observe how those emotions appear. Maybe you could do something about it?
Another thing that is different in modern society compared to the jungle is that the rewards are no longer immediate. You find a berry, you can eat it. You kill a mammoth, you… can’t start eating it right now, you need to cook the meat first… but at least you see the meat right there in front of you. Modern work often lacks these rewards. (And various online activities provide them: you get the replies, karma points, etc.)
So maybe you could motivate yourself by contemplating the greater context of the work you are supposed to do. Or to find some detail that makes you happy, and focus on that. Or try to make your working environment more pleasant somehow.