How to Become Smarter and Happier, According to Psychology and Neuroscience
Science says you should embrace the brain strain.
We often call Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman geniuses, as if they won Nobel Prizes and scientific praise because they cruised through life with inexplicable intelligence. But what contributed more to their success was that they worked and thought very hard, routinely concentrating for hours on rigorous tasks.
To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time…it needs a lot of concentration…if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time.
- Richard Feynman
That is the way to learn the most; when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal.
- Albert Einstein
You don’t have to be a genius to work like Feynman and Einstein. All it takes is flow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the psychologist who introduced the concept of flow. Here’s how he describes it:
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.
Feynman and Einstein were smart because they sought opportunities to stretch their minds. We can do the same. We can pursue conditions that put us in flow by working on difficult things.
Yes, this sounds unpleasant. Sometimes we don’t feel like thinking hard. In fact, we would rather experience burning hot pain than perform a mentally challenging task.
But science shows that the unpleasantness of exerting cognitive effort makes us smarter and happier.
Why Your Brain Likes a Challenge
You achieve flow when the task difficulty matches or exceeds your skill level. The task shouldn’t feel too difficult. It should feel like a challenge you can only do if you exert your full attention and effort.
When you tackle a challenging task, your brain works hard so you can make progress, causing your brain to release dopamine. That motivates you to continue. The progress feels good because it signals you are getting closer to completion. You focus intensely on the task to continue that feeling of satisfaction.
This intense focus on a task during flow is associated with decreased activity in brain structures related to self-focus and fear, such as the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The deactivation of these structures helps you do the task without distractions, anxiety, or self-doubt.
The initial effort leads to a feeling of effortlessness, which occurs when you get into a rhythm with your task.
How can something that feels hard become easy and even enjoyable? A paper describing the effort paradox explains that effort is costly but has inherent value. Outcomes can become more rewarding if we put in the effort.
That can lead to a sense of accomplishment and life satisfaction. It relies on you exerting enough effort on a task that demands your total focus. That is crucial for the calm, pleasurable feeling that flow gives.
The Best Way to Exercise Your Brain
“If you want to learn and change your brain as an adult, there has to be a high level of focus and engagement. There’s no way around this…regardless of how agitated you feel, you have to lean in and focus extremely hard,” says Andrew Huberman, an associate professor of neurobiology at the Stanford School of Medicine.
You might experience a mental strain from this. But that is necessary to improve your cognitive abilities, according to Cal Newport, author of Deep Work.
The intense focus that happens during flow can induce neuroplasticity. Norepinephrine gets released from the locus coeruleus, located deep in the brainstem. The norepinephrine makes you alert. As you direct your alertness towards focusing on a task, acetylcholine releases in the part of your brain activated when learning a skill.
For instance, if you’re encoding a lot of information into memory, acetylcholine releases in the hippocampus. If you’re reading something dense, acetylcholine releases in Wernicke’s area, a region responsible for understanding the meaning of words and sentences. Working on a challenging math problem? Acetylcholine releases in the prefrontal cortex, an area involved in problem-solving.
When working on a challenging task, it’s likely that all those parts of the brain are activated. The focus from flow and the acetylcholine release causes neural circuits to strengthen, fire more efficiently, and trigger myelin production.
That means your neurons can communicate with each other more quickly, allowing you to learn and recall information faster.
How to Motivate Yourself to Do Challenging Tasks
Try rewarding yourself.
A study showed that frequently rewarding people for performing cognitively demanding tasks increased their intrinsic motivation for these tasks later on. Soon, participants preferred doing cognitively demanding tasks even when there was no reward.
Rewarding yourself at random intervals is even better. It increases dopamine levels, boosting your motivation to complete demanding tasks.
After you complete a challenging task, flip a coin, roll a die, or spin a wheel to determine if you get a reward. The reward uncertainty creates excitement and anticipation, which dopamine thrives on.
You won’t have to rely on external rewards forever. If you reward yourself enough times, you’ll treat the cognitive effort as the reward itself.
You’re One Step Closer to Becoming Einstein
You don’t have to resort to being burned. Your brain is testing you when you work on a task that feels so hard you want to pull back, and the only way to eliminate that feeling is to lean into the challenge. Science shows that your brain enjoys this.
Now you can tackle tasks that before seemed too difficult to handle. You’ll feel accomplished and experience lasting rewards (and a stronger brain!)
So don’t fret when a task feels hard. That means you’re on the right track.
Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.
-Gandhi
