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How to Train Your Brain to Crave Doing Hard Things — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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How to Train Your Brain to Crave Doing Hard Things

Dr. Izzy Sealey · 5,057 words · 25 min read · EN-ORIG

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of How to Train Your Brain to Crave Doing Hard Things by Dr. Izzy Sealey on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked around 16,000 steps a day, hunted their own food, and built things with their bare hands. Then, you have the average modern adult who walks four times less, sits for nearly 10 hours a day, and increasingly outsource our thinking to AI. So, I have a slightly embarrassing confession to make. My life has gotten

too comfortable, and I'm not enjoying it. A lot of us are feeling anxious or restless, dissatisfied, feeling purposeless, or burned out, or even just feeling kind of flat. And it seems like the more comfort that we add in, the worse it gets, because we were actually never built for frictionless lives like this. And so, it's no wonder that we're

finding it hard to do hard things, because we're just not used to it anymore. And my hot take on this is that our entire generation is basically friction starved. If you're new here, I'm Izzy. I'm a mom, tech co-founder, and Cambridge-trained doctor. And on this channel, we explore the [music] strategies and mindsets to help you

create a life that you love. And so, in this video, we'll walk through understanding the science behind why our bodies and brains need challenge to grow, the identity shift that gets your brain to actually crave hard work, and four specific kinds of friction that actually worth engineering back into your life so you can do the very things

that you were built for. Also, quick thing, as a companion to this video, I've made a completely free friction audit guide, and you can find that down below in the description. So, without further ado, let's dive in. So, firstly, the science. You might think you're lazy, but according to evolutionary biology, that's pretty much

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the furthest thing from the truth. We were literally built to do hard things, and here's the science behind it. During my time at Cambridge, I spent 1 year studying biological anthropology, essentially studying human biology and evolution over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. And for almost all of human history, our ancestors lived in

environments where being physically and cognitively challenged was the only way to stay alive. Movement, effort, problem-solving, navigation, memory, building relationships, skills, these were all structural features of being alive and surviving. They weren't optional add-ons. And so, for the last 200,000 years of human existence, no one ever intentionally exercised, because they didn't need to. Life naturally

supplied the friction and the exercise that they needed. And genuinely, both you and my ancestors would probably scoff at high rocks even just a few generations ago. So, for example, my grandma's generation in China, they find it confusing as to why people actively pay money to a personal trainer to be made to exercise. Because for many of

them, movement and farming and lifting things and carrying things was just a natural part of daily life. Obviously, now in younger generations, exercise and working out is emerging as more of a status symbol and a health forward symbol in modern China and younger people in China. And so, this is a timeline just from 200,000 years ago,

which is when anatomically modern humans were thought to be around. Essentially, when humans pretty much like you and I today evolved and were roaming around and living their lives. For the vast majority of the time, they lived as hunter-gatherers, living in small tribes and villages, hunting and gathering, sometimes doing a little bit of

gardening, that kind of thing. Only about 10,000 years ago did organized agriculture become a thing, allowing bigger cities of people to coalesce and start building stuff together. Then just 150 years ago, we had the Industrial Revolution. 30 years ago, we invented the internet. And then just in the last couple of years, AI has really been

taking off. And so, you can see how for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, we didn't have things like the internet, technology, industry, AI, all of these kinds of things were not available to us. And so, our bodies and brains didn't evolve to be optimal under these conditions. All of the engineering

away of the environment and the frictions that we were used to happened in a very, very tiny sliver of time in the last 100 years or so. Anthropologists studying modern hunter-gatherer communities like the Hadza in Tanzania, whose lifestyle broadly resembles how we think our ancestors probably lived, did studies measuring their daily activity. On

average, the Hadza take about 16,000 steps a day, versus the modern adult takes around 4,000 steps a day. And there's a name for this. It's called evolutionary mismatch, where the environment and lifestyle that we evolved for no longer matches the reality that we're actually in. In biology and medical science, hormesis is a word that describes how small repeated

doses of stress can actually make a biological system stronger over time. And this is exactly the principle that underlies exactly why this loss of friction is causing us to feel more unbalanced than ever. An example of hormesis is when you lift heavy weights, you actually cause micro tears and micro damage to your muscles, which in the

short term technically makes them weaker. Because over the course of a weightlifting session, you can actually lift less and less weight because your muscles start to accrue a little bit of damage. But then ultimately, this stimulus of some stress and damage and weakening actually triggers your muscles to rebuild even stronger. Dr. Mark

Mattson, who used to be the chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, has spent decades researching exactly this, showing how hormetic stresses trigger those adaptive responses that keep your cells healthy and can even prevent or slow down things like memory loss, neurodegeneration, and metabolic diseases. Ultimately, our bodies don't

just tolerate effort, they actually need it to function the way that they were designed to. And the same principle applies to our brains. And the core principle that brains grow under challenge is actually one of the most established findings in modern neuroscience. It's something called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity can be defined as the brain's ability to

physically reorganize itself in response to use, forming new connections, strengthening existing ones, and even growing new tissue in regions that are being challenged. And critically for neuroplasticity, meaningful change requires meaningful challenge. Because the brain only puts in the effort to rewire itself in a significant way when the work is actually hard enough that

the existing pathways can't quite handle it. And here's one of my favorite examples of neuroplasticity in real life. In 2000, a neuroscientist at UCL called Eleanor Maguire and her team published a really cool study. They recruited a cohort of London taxi drivers. And a bit of fun context, if you don't know, to get a license to

drive a black cab in London, you have to pass this mega test called The Knowledge. To pass The Knowledge, you need to memorize about 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks across the entire city. And it actually takes most drivers three or four years of studying and taking the test to actually pass it. And what they found in

this study was the part of the taxi driver's brains that handles spatial memory, called the posterior hippocampus, was actually measurably bigger in volume compared to non-cabbies. And the longer that they had been driving, the bigger this region of their brain actually was. And essentially what they found was that the cognitive work of constantly memorizing,

recalling, and using this knowledge of all the streets was literally physically growing this part of their brains. And as well as growing the volume, this active recall strengthens connections between neurons, which links to the principle of Hebbian plasticity, which we used to study back in medical school. Back in 1949, a psychologist called

Donald Hebb came up with what's known as Hebb's law, which is that neurons that fire together wire together. So, our brains are actually not fixed even as an adult. They constantly change, reform, reshape, create new connections, prune old ones in response to the cognitive stimuli that we get in our day-to-day lives. And so, it's kind of a bit like

training a muscle, where the more reps of cognitive work that you give your brain, the stronger, more efficient, higher performance you actually get from it. But then coming back to this comfort crisis, modern life has actually engineered most of that cognitive tension out. Maps navigate for us, search engines remember things for us,

AI now even just thinks for us and tells us what we should do and think. And so, our brains can actually be very, very chill and do very little to survive. The ultimate result of this is that if we go with the flow and lean into what's comfortable, both our physical and mental faculties are downgrading at the

same time. Not because we're broken, but because we're adaptable and we're learning to adapt to a world that we actually were never designed for. And so, this is the concept I think we need to talk about more, which is friction starvation. I think that the phenomenon of actually actively removing friction from our modern life deserves actually a

name, because nothing in mainstream culture has actually given it one yet. So, this is just a name that I've come up with. And this is how I'd explain it. Because our brains and bodies no longer receive the effort signals that we evolved to expect, we paradoxically feel worse as we layer on more and more

comforts. In his book, The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter describes something quite similar. And here's something I've noticed over the last couple years on social media, and especially if you're in your late 20s or early 30s like I am, you might notice that when you open Instagram or social media, you notice loads of people doing

Hyroxes, people doing London Marathons, people talking about their cold plungers, Dry January, 75 Hard, Ultra Weekends in the Lake District. And interestingly, several years ago, nobody really talked about any of this outside of specific niches. But now people really enjoy sharing about the versions of hard that they have voluntarily signed up for. And I think some of this

isn't just to do with fitness, it's also to do with us wanting to find something to really challenge ourselves again. It's this yearning that people are feeling to almost counteract this comfort crisis that we find ourselves in. By pushing ourselves to do something hard, we actually feel great. Our body releases endorphins and feel-good

neurochemicals in response to a hard stressor that we expose ourselves to. And so once we understand friction's salvation and the science behind it, we can start to address it and fix it. But this only works if we're trying to fix it at the level that the problem is actually operating at. And this is

something I actually learned the hard way this year, and it's that just changing behavior doesn't really reach the root. The level we need to work on is actually identity. Because when we don't choose to do hard things and we choose to take the easy way, it isn't because we're lazy or lack willpower and

should judge ourselves negatively for this. Because the honest truth is that your body is just doing exactly what evolution designed it to do, which is to be energy efficient. For nearly all of human history, food was scarce and effort was costly. So, the brains and bodies that survived were those that took the easiest path, which was most

efficient. And so what we sometimes call laziness and view in a negative light is actually one of the most ancient and well-developed survival instincts that we actually have. The problem is we've now engineered the world to be so frictionless and so easy that the same energy-saving instinct is starting to work against us. And we often try to

push through this energy efficiency with sheer willpower. But honestly, this usually breaks down quite easily and is the reason why 80% of New Year's resolutions actually die off by February. And the gym is kind of half empty by March. So, this isn't a personal feeling, it's actually a strategy problem. Here's an example. We

can try to change our lives on, let's say, three different levels. We can try to change the outcomes. So, we tell ourselves, "I want to lose 10 lb." We can try to change our processes. For example, "I'm going to run four times a week." Or, we can change our identity, which would go something like, "I am

someone who runs regularly." It's so easy, and I used to do this as well, to start at either outcome or process-based change. But, that's why it doesn't really last, because the identity underneath it all never shifted. And what I found worked was to stop asking, "What should I do?" and instead ask, "Who am I becoming?" From this place,

all of the other outcomes and behaviors flow naturally. And so, here's an identity shift to counteract friction starvation, which I really like. "I am someone built for friction and doing hard things." And here's one potential action point. Look at the next 12 hours of your day, and pick one moment where you can actually choose between things

being easier or harder. For example, for me, every single day I'm faced with the choice between taking the stairs or taking the escalator. And in Michael Easter's book, The Comfort Crisis, he talks about only 2% of people would actually take the stairs rather than taking the easier option of the escalator. And once we have the identity

of being someone who chooses and embraces challenge, the actual behaviors and practices stop feeling like things we need to discipline ourselves into. They start to feel like just natural expressions of who you actually are. And so, let's get into the four types of friction that are actually really worthwhile to add back into your life.

Now, this is the part of the video where the theory stops and the exciting action points begin. Before we dive in, I want to reiterate that not all friction in life is equal. Some friction is worth keeping, like the kind that makes you sharper, more resilient, healthier. But, the other type it's just tax, honestly,

like with email admin. Now, not many people know this, but when I'm not creating content, I'm in CEO mode running the company that my husband and I started called Sparkle Studios, which is the umbrella for our courses, like the Lifestyle Business Academy, our personal brands, and also our software ventures. All of that funnels through

one inbox for me, which has turned into a daily mountain of mostly menial admin. And climbing this mountain every morning really isn't where my time should be going, which is why I want to tell you about Superhuman, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Their email tool, Superhuman Mail, is part of the

Superhuman productivity suite, and the whole system's been built with long-term productivity in mind. Superhuman Mail's AI handles the mundane admin, so that I can stay focused on actual needle-moving work that needs my human judgment. There are two especially high- leverage features. The first is Ask AI. Half of the time that I open a thread, I'm not

actually replying. Instead, I'm actually just hunting for the tiniest details that someone's already sent me before. With Ask AI, I just type a question, and the answer comes back in seconds. So, now I don't have to troll through super long email threads anymore. The second feature is Auto Drafts. Auto Drafts essentially helps me get unstuck on

emails, which gives my brain the breathing room it needs to work through the hard stuff for my content and the business. So, this might be a sign to stop chasing the next quick AI hack for emails and start actually using a system that makes email feel less overwhelming. You can [clears throat] sign up and get

1 month free of Superhuman Mail with my link in the description down below. Now, let's get back into the video. We'll be strategically engineering positive friction into our lives in four key areas: physical, sensory, cognitive, and social. And the point isn't to do all of these at once and have it have to

completely revamp everything you're doing. It's actually just to simply find one or two ideas from each of these categories that you can maybe experiment with over the next few weeks. The first category is physical friction. This means things like movement, exercise, effort, temperature, hunger, manual work. All of the demands that our bodies

evolved to actually expect. And as we learned about in the theory section, the body gets stronger by being asked to handle small repeated doses of discomfort, aka hormesis. Here are some specific practices that you could experiment with. The first one is something that I've been doing myself, which is taking the stairs instead of

taking the lift or the escalator. This is a simple choice that might be presented to you maybe on your commute or whenever you're going out somewhere, but every single time that you make this choice, it actually does compound. Another similar switch is to walk instead of taking a car or taxi for anything that's under a kilometer. Then

in terms of temperature, we have one of my absolute favorites, which is sauna. I go almost every day. And actually regular sauna use has been shown in studies to actually boost your cardiovascular health and trigger the release of something called heat shock proteins in your body, which are actually really protective and have a

lot of health benefits. On the other end of the spectrum is cold exposure. So maybe end your shower with 30 seconds of cold. This also includes ice baths or stepping outside in winter without a coat for a few minutes. Another option is fasting, also sometimes called time restricted feeding. During COVID lockdowns I actually got very much into

intermittent fasting and I found it actually really boosted my energy and my mental clarity. And the next thing is to lift something heavy a few times a week. It doesn't actually have to be in a gym. I mean, you could do that if you want. It could also be body weight, kettlebells, household objects, even

just carrying your groceries up the stairs rather than chucking them in the lift. The second category is about adding sensory friction. So this is all about adding in boredom, silence, slowness, spaciousness, which are these spacious sensory experiences that often modern life can root around with constant stimulation. This matters because our brain needs this

unstimulated time to consolidate, integrate, and settle. And there's actually science behind this. The default mode network is a specific brain network that only switches on when you're not focused on a task. So it activates during things like daydreaming, mind wandering, walking without listening to a podcast or music, or just staring out of the window. And

you might notice that during these activities you find your mind just naturally wandering. This is exactly what the default mode network does. And the benefit of allowing it to run is it actually consolidates memories, processes emotions, and generates creative insight by connecting different parts of your life and thoughts that are going on. And so when you're doing

nothing, your brain isn't actually doing nothing. It's doing some of its most important work. And the problem that the modern world presents is that there is constant input. There is scrolling, social media, podcasts, music, notifications, back-to-back content. This means that our default mode network barely gets the chance to switch on and run because we're stuck in passive

consumption mode all day. So, here are some specific practices to give your default mode network the space it needs to really breathe. The first one is to simply sit still for 5 minutes without your phone. You could call this a meditation. It's deliberately under-stimulating. And just notice the urge to reach for your phone, but then

just come back to the present moment and let your mind do what it needs to do. Another idea is to eat at least one of your meals per day without a screen. So, just the food, the chewing, the mindfulness of the conversation if you're with somebody. Another practice is to drive or walk without any podcasts

or audiobooks or music or anything going on. Just let your mind wander in silence because this is where original thinking actually happens. Another practice is if you have a little bit of dead time in your day such as maybe going up in a lift or waiting in a queue or even going to the toilet, try to not take your

phone or not pull out your phone. Just stay present with whatever experience you're having. Here's another one that's made a big difference to me, which is not reaching for your phone for at least the first 20 to 30 minutes of the day. After you've just woken up, your brain is in what's called theta state and your

nervous system is slowly coming online. And so, if you immediately flood your brain with all of this hyper-stimulating content on your phone, that's like a very abrupt start to your day. And actually, when you're in between sleep and wake, your brain is very open to suggestion and taking on new ideas and inspiration. As you want to protect that

time for actually you starting up your day in an intentional and balanced way. And finally, maybe try one screen-free evening a week. So, no TV, no phone, no second screen. Instead, try activities like reading, talking, cooking, going to bed early, giving yourself that spacious mindful time. The third category is cognitive friction. And this is about

deliberately challenging your brain. And this matters because neuroplasticity works in both directions. You either use your brain or you kind of lose it. And especially with AI coming onto the scene, it's getting easier and easier to remove cognitive friction from our lives. And so, here are some specific practices with AI-related ones first

because this is the current new battle. The first practice is to write and do your own thinking first and only then refine with AI. One way that I like to do this is with an app that actually we built out called Voice Pal, which you install on your phone in the App Store

and you hit record and just start speaking out any thoughts you're having to get to a first draft. And only then can you bring an AI to either ask follow-up questions or sharpen and edit what you've written. The next practice is to actually read the source, not just the AI summary. Because I found that

summaries are okay for orientation, but for decisions and creation, the raw original material is actually so much more powerful. You can even try this out for yourself. If you ask AI to summarize a book that you recently read, you'll just notice that the AI summary, yes, it hits all the main points, but the way

that the author wrote it in the original context actually hits different. The next practice is before you ask AI a question, maybe have a think or write down what you think the answer is or what you think the AI would say. And only then actually compare the two. This simple act of actively trying engages

your brain and works those synapses. The next one is something that I've personally been battling with, which is doing mental math in my own head instead of immediately using a phone calculator. I've realized that at school I was amazing at mental math. I was so quick. I was just like that that that. But now,

simple addition, multiplication is starting to slow down and I actually notice it. And so then just doing the maths in your head first before double-checking it with the calculator if you're really not sure about your own abilities. Another practice is to plan a route in your head before you actually open Google Maps to map it out. This is

particularly relevant if you're actually already familiar with the place. So visualize the route that you're taking and then check on maps if you want. Another one for things that you actually want to really retain or engage with emotionally is to actually handwrite things. Studies have found that by handwriting notes, you actually engage

with them much more deeply and it activates a lot more of the brain. And the final thing is something that's becoming rarer and rarer, which is training the muscle of sustained attention by staying with one cognitive task for at least 30 minutes. No task switching, no multitasking, one single tab, one single track of focus. And as a

more general principle, here are some questions I like to ask to see if I'm really critically engaging with AI. The first one is, what's the actual question? The second one is, what is the goal of the output? And thirdly is, what would I say if I had to do this from scratch without AI helping? And the

fourth category is social friction. And this means choosing the harder, more intense version of any human interaction. There's a phrase that I heard online somewhere that I keep coming back to, which is that everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager. And when I heard this, I felt maybe a little bit called out. But

the reality is, you don't passively inherit community as an adult. You have to actively build it. Instead of just going to school or uni and showing up to your community and passively inheriting that community, you have to choose to host people, make plans, sustain the group chat, be the chief of your own

village. And this is something I realized recently that it's way harder to make friends as an adult than at school or uni because you don't have a default group of people that you're always hanging out with. And so then that means it just takes real effort and investment of energy. And the problem

with always just defaulting to the comfortable option without putting in that much effort or energy is that then you end up kind of lonely and isolated. And so here are some things I've been trying to do instead. Firstly, it's to call instead of text. This is especially for anything that truly matters. Another

thing is to just show up and say yes. And yes, this takes effort and yes, it sometimes doesn't always feel like it's something we can do. But as much as possible, encouraging ourselves to be that kind of person who shows up. The next one is to say the hard thing, the scary thing, the thing that makes you

think, "Oh gosh, like this feels important and I want to say it, but I'm a little bit scared." Because I've noticed these days as connection becomes more and more online, I wonder if we've forgotten how to be bold and just say the thing that is kind of on our mind that and and that needs to be said. The

next one is to initiate, become the chief of the village. And don't just say, "We should hang out." Actually send the invite, actually pick a date, actually execute on it and make it happen. And the final one is to choose to make at least one new real friend this year, like a deep real friendship.

Because it's easier than ever to have multiple relatively lightweight friendships, but actually going deep with one person and really connecting with them is what we often lose in adulthood as we leave those areas of our life where we automatically hang out with people all the time. And at the end of the day, the framework in this video

gives you the map, but the map isn't actually the journey or the work itself. The journey itself lies in the identity that you decide to take on, and all the small votes that you cast every single day for who you're becoming. So, just like at the end of every video, I'd like to invite you to choose two action

points that you're taking away from this video, and that you're going to implement starting today. So, pick two and write them down somewhere in your journal, your notes app, the comments below, an email to a friend. And I've had some requests in the comments to suggest two great action points. And obviously, pick any that you want, but

here are two. The first one is to cast one identity vote. Find one moment in the next 12 hours where you have to choose between easier and harder, and pre-commit to the harder one. And the second one is to run one micro experiment. Pick one of the four categories we walked through and try a

single practice from it for the next 7 days. The friction audit in the description will help if you're not sure where to start. If you like this video, I think you'll like this video over here, which is my video on digital anhedonia, which is the sister concept to friction salvation. And the two of

them together give you a fuller picture of what modern life is doing to us and our brains, and what to do about it to live well in the modern era. As always, thank you so much for watching. Take care of yourself, and remember that the journey is the destination. Feel free to hit subscribe so you don't miss my

future videos, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.