The Appropriate Amount of Effort Is Zero

This definition of effort is novel but interesting:

Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone.

With that framing, it's interesting to consider why and under what circumstances we apply more than the necessary effort to a given task.

An example that makes me chuckle is when my daughter gears up to start running, she starts by breathing really heavy, even if she doesn't run far or fast. She has absorbed the experience that running is hard and that people breath hard when they run, so that's how she starts.

And how much of this do we do with our day to day work?

A friend asked me the other day--it doesn't seem like you work very hard. Shouldn't it [work] be harder?

And I think that I have in the past pulled so much of my self-worth and identity from the quality of the work that I do or how hard I tried. Even if the end product wasn't good, at least I tried my best.

But what I have slowly been experiencing over the past several years is that there isn't an inherent connection between how hard you work and the size of your income. And trying less hard can be quite a challenge.

The appropriate amount of effort is zero

Most people put too much effort into everything they do. Here’s a good example from Kristijan around tension in his hands when touching and holding things: Something clicked about inhibition and non-doing (in Alexander Technique), and the strongest effect has been a relaxation of my hands. Like I was

https://expandingawareness.org/blog/the-appropriate-amount-of-effort-is-zero/

Related: Awakening to — And Escaping From — Total Work Through Non-Doing

Highlights

• Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone (View Highlight)
• Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero. (View Highlight)
• When you try so hard all the time, that level of effort feels familiar and you stop noticing it. Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so effort feels right and ease feels wrong. (View Highlight)
• What all this means is that when you pull back the effort below your familiar baseline, it can feel unfamiliar, like you’re not trying hard enough, and those societal scripts I mentioned before can make this experience hard to stay in, even if you’re now closer to the appropriate amount of energy needed. (View Highlight)