Understand why it is possible to fail when trying too hard – 12/03/2023 – Balance

“When imagination and willpower are in conflict, they are antagonistic, it is always the imagination that wins, without exception.”

This is how the French psychologist Émile Coué explained what the intellectual and writer Aldous Huxley called the Law of Reverse Effort.

If Coué’s beautiful phrase confused you, think about quicksand. It’s a surface that appears solid, but if you step on it, it separates into water and sand and makes your body sink — getting out requires enormous strength.

Many of us have only seen this in movies or comics, when characters are swallowed while desperately trying to avoid their fate.

Therein lies the error — and why shifting sands are a good analogy.

The way to avoid being swallowed by quicksand is not to try so hard: stop struggling and lie down calmly so that the weight is distributed and the pressure decreases. This will allow you to crawl to safety.

Something similar should be done when you can’t fall asleep, or have a fit of laughter at an inconvenient time, or can’t remember something: instead of forcing yourself to try to do what you can’t do, relax and do it (or think ) into something else.

This is because, although it may seem contradictory, sometimes we fail because we try too hard.

This doesn’t mean that you never have to do anything, or that you always have to have a passive attitude towards life — but sometimes, the more you try to improve something through willpower, the worse the situation becomes.

Writer Leo Tolstoy illustrated the concept in his book Anna Karenina, describing what happened to landowner Konstantin Levin when he found harmony in cultivating the land with the peasants:

“A change began to occur in the work that filled him with pleasure. In the midst of his work there were moments when he would forget what he was doing and work without effort, and at those same moments his row would be as neatly cut as Tit’s.”

“But as soon as he remembered what he was doing and tried to do better, he felt the weight of the effort and everything turned out worse.”

Taoists call something similar “wu wei”, which can be translated as “effortless action”.

In general terms, the idea is that when we stop fighting and learn to wait and observe, we see more clearly that there are external forces that overcome us and sometimes we have to go with the flow and only act at the right time and with the correct measures to reach the desired destination.

When acting hastily, every step is a potential mistake, and emotion and ego can guide decisions more than reason.

To do or not to do

According to Huxley, after whom the law was named, “expertise and its results are only achieved by those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing”.

In a talk he gave in California, USA, in 1955, entitled “Who We Are”, he observed that “we have to combine relaxation with activity”.

Huxley clarified that what needs to relax is “the conscious personal self”, which he described as “a kind of small island in the middle of a huge area of ​​consciousness”.

“This is the self that tries too hard, the one that thinks it knows everything.”

However, there is a deeper self, with knowledge and skills that enable us to be.

Huxley referred, for example, to “what used to be called the vegetative soul.”

“It’s something we inherit,” something that does things like digestion and automatically regulate our heartbeat.

He also referred to another type of internal self “which functions in a completely different way than instinctively.”

It is responsible for what Huxley called “acts of intelligence ad hoc: acts never performed before in its biological history and which, nevertheless, are done with extraordinary efficiency without the conscious self having the slightest idea of ​​how it is done.”

As an example, he evoked a baby imitating an adult’s gesture that he had never tried to do.

For the first time in that baby’s history, there is something that organizes “a whole mass of muscles connected to an elaborate nervous system to pull that muscle up, down, one loose, the other tense, to reproduce the grimace that the child saw on the face of an adult.”

‘It’s a very mysterious thing’

Thus, there are other selves that are part of who we are, besides the self that “we call ourselves, that responds to our names, that minds its own business and has the terrible habit of imagining itself absolute in some sense.”

Therefore, when we insist on striving to do something we are not achieving, what happens is that the superficial self eclipses all the other powers of our deeper, broader self.

If we relax, we let them shine.

“We always have to learn this paradoxical art of combining the maximum relaxation of the superficial self, with the maximum activity of the non-selves, which we carry with us and which, in reality, give us our being.”

This is because “in all psychophysical capacities we have this curious fact of the law of invested effort: the more we try, the worse we do.”

For Huxley, the goal of all activities in life, from the simplest physical to the highest intellectual and spiritual, “is not to hinder our own light from arising, but without giving up our personal conscious self.”

“We cannot just sleep and wait for everything to happen,” but rather allow the wisdom of the deep self to emerge and at the same time let the conscious self “organize it in a way that is helpful to ourselves and others.” others”.

Is it of any use to you?

The law of reverse effort is invaluable in those moments when you don’t stop moving, but you don’t move forward — at least not in the desired direction.

This can lead to a vicious cycle where you feel bad about not doing enough, try even harder, and force yourself to keep going.

But, psychologists warn, this pressure only serves to increase stress and block the path.

Research on productivity at work, for example, shows that we are only truly productive during the first four or five hours of each workday.

Then, there is a considerable drop in performance, to the point where the difference between working 12 and 16 hours is practically non-existent. What is produced is nothing more than mental and physical fatigue.

But don’t be confused: the law of reverse effort is not synonymous with resignation, nor does it invite passivity, apathy or mediocrity.

On the contrary, it encourages reflection and motivates us to stop, evaluate the circumstances and take the best possible attitude.

It helps reduce stress on any of the days or periods in your personal or professional life when there seems to be nothing but pressure.

Obsessing about everything that needs to be done or the bad things that could happen doesn’t help, but taking psychological distance and giving yourself time to breathe is a form of help.

This informal law is a useful tool when you are faced with a blank page that you need to fill with thoughts and you don’t know how to express yourself, whether you are a professional writer or not.

And even in interpersonal relationships it has its place: sometimes, the more you try to get closer to someone, the more they move away.

But perhaps you will get more results by following that saying that if you love a person, you should let them go; if she comes back, she was always yours; If not, it never was.

This text was originally published here.