How to NOT be LAZY anymore - The LAZINESS CURE

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Let me ask you something. Do you come home from work just to sit on the couch and watch TV, or browse dank memes on your iPad? Maybe a friend will text you wanting to go out later, and you respond pretty exhausted, “Just gonna take it easy tonight,” as if you have anything better to do. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of people, no matter how successful they are, have a lazy day sometimes. It's just a part of life, so I wouldn't beat yourself up too much for having a sweatpants day every once in a while. We all have them.

Being a lazy person in general, though, like being lazy as just a way of life, is a whole nother issue and one that seems especially prevalent in young people these days. An interesting U.S. survey back in 2013 involving 13,000 participants found that young people aged 15 to 24 were one full point more tired on a scale of one to ten than seniors aged 65 and up, which is crazy. It implies that old people—like actual old people, seniors—have more energy throughout the day and are less tired than today's youth. What's going on here? Are young people more tired because that's just how humanity evolved, or are we doing this to ourselves?

I'd argue that they're not actually tired; they're just lazy. Now, there's not a ton of scientific evidence to back this claim up, but it makes sense once you define what laziness really is. Psychology Today says that a person is being lazy if he is able to carry out some activity that he ought to carry out, but is disinclined to do so because of the effort involved. Instead, he carries out the activity perfunctorily or engages in some other, less strenuous or less boring activity, or remains idle. In short, he is being lazy if his motivation to spare himself effort trumps his motivation to do the right or expected thing.

Let me repeat that: a person is being lazy if his motivation to spare himself effort trumps his motivation to do the right or expected thing. So, in essence, laziness can be chalked up to good old-fashioned discomfort avoidance. If you're lazy, it's because you're too comfortable. That doesn't necessarily mean that you live a lavish, cozy, and problem-free lifestyle; it just means you generally fill your day with too many cheap pleasures.

You've conditioned your brain to gravitate towards dopamine dispensers, like Netflix and Facebook, instead of hard, fulfilling activities that improve your quality of life. The consequence of that is that these good, healthy activities that will actually improve you as a person seem repulsive to your brain because it won't give it that cheap and temporary high it's been conditioned to expect.

To fix it, you need to gradually replace these dopamine-dispensing habits that you've established with good, healthy activities. It doesn't have to be all at once, but that's the only way to do it. Start getting used to doing hard-ish things, like making yourself a good breakfast in the morning, making your bed, or reading five pages of a book before you're allowed to check your email. Implementing these kinds of activities into your day is kind of uncomfortable, but that's exactly how you stop being lazy—by embracing discomfort.

And the nice thing about habits is they're easier to do than not to do. Once being productive and healthy is actually ingrained into your lifestyle, voila! You're not a lazy person anymore. So, no matter how you spin it, laziness isn't something that's ingrained into your genetics; it's something that's easily correctable. You just have to put in the effort.

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