When the novelty is gone - Why doing things the second time is harder.
As I write this, I’m on day 10 of the Embrace The Suck challenge.
If you’ve been following along with this newsletter, you know Embrace the Suck is a pretty brutal daily workout. It’s designed to be hard, not to achieve some physical result, but because doing hard things makes us — and our brains — better.
The “physical suck” is the same. But the “psychological suck” is much worse.
Why? Because the novelty is gone.
The first time around, the challenge had an element of novelty. It was new, intriguing, uncertain.
In fact, I didn’t even expect to complete the challenge, I just wanted to push myself to do as much as I could. I figured that level of volume of running and lifting would crush my 42 year-old body. That was motivating.
Novelty propels me in a lot of ways, which is common. There’s a dopamine hit that comes with doing something new and challenging or unpredictable. Dopamine is a known quantity and considered to be incredibly important to motivation, as highlighted in this Brain World article.
Novelty is why I love fly fishing in creeks where I can’t see what’s around the corner, why I love skiing in the mountains, why I love sport in general. It’s also why I made it to the apex of sport and then retired. I admire Olympians who got that gold medal and came back for more, because there’s a monotony to that — to repeat the process of four years of training to attain something you already achieved.
(Want to go even deeper on the connection between novelty and motivation? This LifeHacker piece gives you some solid takeaways about adding novelty.)
Novelty is incredible motivation. There’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s also a bit of a psychological trick that only gets us so far. Because here’s the reality:
Sometimes the novelty just isn’t there. And we have to keep going anyway.
Take pandemic life. You might have thought that by now we’d have all adapted, and the worst part of living in the pandemic would have been 2020 when things were at their most volatile and terrifying.
But for many of us, 2020 at least had some element of novelty. If nothing else, it was new. And we were thrown into a situation where we had to try new things: come up with creative ways to stay connected, deal with the new (hopefully temporary) constraints of life, and reconsider parts of our life and work.
And then we got tired of it. That, partially, would be where the unending blasts of dopamine become bad for us. (This Be Brain Fit piece explains how we feel when we’ve had too much dopamine hitting us. TLDR; it can lead to more risk taking, addictive behaviors, and mental disorders. Doesn’t sound like society today at all, does it?)
Two years in, that COVID novelty is likely dead and gone in most of us — sans the occasional variant that gets us to notice again.
Maybe this is an opportunity to grow by learning to motivate ourselves WITHOUT novelty.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my motivation to depend on novelty. I think there’s something deeper and more interesting to explore here.
So here’s what I’m thinking about:
When the dopamine is gone, the sense of adventure is over, and all that’s left is the grind—what motivates us to continue doing hard things?
I honestly don’t have the answer, but I’m interested in exploring the idea. I’m learning more about myself right now through Embrace the Suck with the removal of novelty… so perhaps I’ll have more thoughts to share in two weeks.
But until then - What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.
– Steve
