The Surprising Psychology of Why Work Feels Harder Than It Should

A few weeks ago, when I chatted with Chris Duffy for our Commons book club, I asked him if he had fun writing his book Humor Me. I thought it was a gimme — it’s a book about finding the funny side of life, after all. And Chris says he had a ball with the research for the book. But the writing was another story. To get through it, he resorted to setting forty-five minute timers and forcing himself to sit and write for set blocks of time.

It’s an open secret that many writers hate writing. The intimidation of the blank page. The long hours of staring at a screen trying to wrangle amorphous thoughts into clear prose. Writers bring more than a touch of melodrama to their feelings on the subject. In his essay Why I Write, George Orwell put it this way: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” Or more succinctly, in the words of journalist Gene Fowler, “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

I can relate to this sense of struggle around writing. I commiserated with Chris about the irony of writing a lighthearted book and having the process feel like torture. When I wrote Joyful, I already considered myself a decent writer at the outset. I couldn’t understand why the days of writing, which I’d so longed for, felt so slow and agonizing.

The Vicious Cycle That Makes Creative Work Feel So Difficult

But a few years ago, I started to wonder if part of the problem was that I’d bought into the idea that writing was difficult and had never really questioned if that had to be true. I realized that so much of my displeasure stemmed from my inner dialogue about hating it and it being hard. I was expecting my work to be miserable, and no surprise that it was.

I thought about all the ways I could be spending my time that I don’t like — writing PowerPoint presentations, being a short order cook, “creating value” — and it occurred to me that I’m insanely lucky to do something I actually want to do for a living. Why, then, am I constantly talking about writing like it’s this difficult, miserable thing?

Words have so much power. The way we describe our work (or our partner or body or anything else in our lives) tells our brain that that’s what we believe. So, I tried an experiment: What if instead of expecting my work to be hard, I expected it to be easy? I started catching myself anytime I’d say things like “this is torture” or “this is so hard” or “I’m so stuck” and I’d just say like a kind of deranged affirmation, “I expect this to be easy.” And it is almost that simple. It started to get easier.

The Science of Why Expectations Shape Experience

Ellen Langer has research on why this works in her book The Mindful Body. Expectations are like a prediction about our experience, and once our brains have made a prediction, they look for evidence to confirm that the prediction is right. In one study, students were told to “try” and solve a series of problems, while another group was told to just do the problems. It turns out that students told to try struggled more with the task, possibly because they word “try” led them to expect that the problems would be difficult and that they might fail. Langer’s current research explores the possibility that expectations may even influence healing times. So she is testing what happens when doctors tell patients not the average healing time for an injury, but the quickest known healing time. She suspects that we’ll see faster healing times when our expectations allow it.

So if you are telling yourself a story that you hate your work or that it’s going to be difficult, guess what? You’re going to drag yourself to your desk dreading what awaits you, and as you’re sitting there, you’re going to be looking for all the evidence that confirms that this is a terrible, unpleasant way to spend your time.

But if you tell yourself that your work will flow smoothly, that you’ll be easily able to meet any challenges that arise, that the process might even be fun — then this is what your brain is primed to notice. And this starts to become a feedback loop. (Learn more about how expectations influence joy here.)

How to Break the Difficulty Loop

As you do this, it’s important to break habits that reinforce the difficulty of the process. So for example, when it comes to writing, I had to learn to stop forcing myself to sit through it when it was especially difficult. Because the intense frustration I felt in those moments of trying to push through tended to confirm my worst fears about the process: that it really was difficult, that I was a hack, that I would never succeed. So instead, I learned to change gears when I hit one of those moments.

I do this in a few different ways. First, when I feel the pressure building up like I’m starting to spin and overthink, I get up and go for a walk. I find that usually by fifteen minutes in, I’m starting to have ideas and I’m back in flow. Even if I don’t, the movement and change of scenery help me reset.

Second, I keep multiple workstreams going so that if I get stuck on one, I can easily shift to another. For example, rather than working through writing a manuscript from beginning to end, I might research one section while I’m drafting another. If I’m feeling tapped out on drafting, I can switch to mindmapping the next section, or revising the previous one so I’m using a different part of my brain.

The dread of those excruciating moments of feeling stuck and trying to push through is most of what feels “hard” about writing, so if you pattern interrupt you retrain yourself that it’s just not a part of your experience and it really does feel easier. Not that I never feel lost or stuck, but I think you can disentangle that from suffering, so that it’s like a puzzle or a challenge, not misery.

If your pain is also driven by self-doubt or negative self-talk, that’s another area to look at. The part of our brain that focuses on being perfect is outcome-driven, and doesn’t care at all about how you experience the process. So learning to refocus from the impossible “perfect” result to enjoying the process of creating can be another helpful reframe. (More on how to shift this inner dialogue this here.)

Changing the emphasis in how you think about work — from outcome to process — is the most important shift you can make in increasing the joy you find in your work. When you view work as an unpleasant but necessary process to get to a desirable outcome, your mindset is about getting through it as quickly as possible. But when you view the work itself as having potential for pleasure, your whole orientation changes. Maybe you change your workspace to make it more joyful, or maybe you notice those moments of flow where you feel so aware of your competency, or you lean into your burning curiosity and get immersed in learning or experimenting. All of it can be so delightful — as long as you stop telling yourself it can’t be.

Image: Nina Luong via unsplash