On trying to do something by frowning really hard

There is a very common pattern that people can engage in when they fail to perform an action that they want to perform. This pattern is especially pervasive when the action is perceived to be one that they should be able to just do, something under their immediate control.

Take these situations:

• When you have trouble concentrating on a task.

• When you have trouble persevering on a task for a long time, or drop it when it starts being difficult or boring.

• When you have trouble falling asleep or relaxing when you are stressed or anxious.

• When you have trouble with laziness.

• When you have trouble taking up a new habit or breaking an old one.

Many people who find themselves in this kind of situation will try to solve their problem by summoning some kind of willpower or motivation, as much as they can summon. It’s rare for people to have a backup plan for when willpower doesn’t work; it’s even more rare for the backup plan to be effective.

Frowning stories

Here are some anonymised examples of some forms that this pattern can take.

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Alice’s numerical methods exam is in a couple of days. She finds the subject extremely boring, and she has been slacking. She’s not going to pass it unless she puts in some serious studying this afternoon.

Alice puts down her phone and wills herself to concentrate on the book in front of her.

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It’s a Saturday afternoon. Tommy is playing a fighting video game at his friend’s house. So far, he’s losing 2-5.

Tommy is very competitive. He finds losing quite irksome. It doesn’t help that his friend is taunting him, not only by making jokes and remarking on how bad he is, but also in the game, by repeatedly using an overly elaborate move with an annoying sound effect and somehow making it work.

At this point, Tommy clenches his fists, riles up all his determination, and exclaims: "Now I'm going to play seriously! Watch this comeback!".

Tommy loses all of the following 6 matches.

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Bob is trying to fill out a mandatory tax form due tomorrow. He has been sitting in front of his computer screen for about 15 minutes, periodically checking his phone, scrolling through some youtube shorts, or changing the music that is playing. Then, he goes back to the tax form, does 1 minute of semi-focused work on it, and gets distracted again.

Bob proceeds, after noticing that he’s not making much progress, to emotionally blackmail himself into doing his task. He thinks to himself, “What is wrong with you? Are you a child? If you can’t complete this form by tomorrow, you should be ashamed of yourself!”

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Edouard wants to lose some weight, but he has had trouble sticking to exercising during his past attempts.

He usually starts by mustering up as much motivation as possible. Edouard tries to make himself feel, as intensely as he can, that he must keep exercising, so much so that he surely will not forget.

He keeps it up for a couple of weeks, and then he starts following the routine less and less rigorously until it gets dropped entirely.

It usually starts with some unavoidable hiccup. For example, he gets sick and needs to skip a few days, or he goes on holiday for a week and is too busy travelling, or he gets a couple of consecutive late shifts at work.

It doesn’t feel like his failure is a matter of motivation. There was no point at which he knew he was supposed to go to the gym but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Regardless of the reason, at some point he happens to skip a few sessions in a row, and he loses the habit. That is, he just kind of forgets to exercise - or to be more precise, he doesn’t spontaneously remember.

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Jane likes taking up skilful hobbies. For example, when she was a teenager, she got into painting, and she is now pretty good at it.

However, the initial friction when she just started learning a skill and is still failing at basic things can be hard to overcome. Now that she has a job and other responsibilities, these interests tend to fizzle out before she gets over that stage and the hobby gets pretty much forgotten about.

This time, Jane became interested in learning to play the piano. She came up with a trick to make sure that she doesn’t drop this hobby.

She tells all her friends how much she likes this hobby; she keeps bringing up piano-related things in conversations and goes on piano-related rants; she posts pictures of herself playing the piano on social media; she makes out-there claims about how in a year she will be able to play such and such music.

In other words, she makes sure that playing the piano becomes part of her identity, both private and public. On top of that, now she has to get good at it, or she will look like someone who talks big and doesn’t deliver!

Frowning

As far as I know there isn’t a commonly used word for this pattern. “Straining” comes close, but you might think I’m talking about physical straining, or about doing something one finds difficult. I call it “frowning”, because when people are trying to concentrate or be more motivated using this technique you can often see them physically frowning.

Other physical correlates of “frowning” are taking forceful breaths, or when people are particularly frustrated, clenching their teeth or tensing their shoulders.

The common thread between the stories from the previous chapter is that their protagonists start out being unable to do something:

• Alice fails to concentrate on studying

• Tommy fails to win at a competitive game

• Bob fails at filling out a boring tax form

Next, they attribute this inability to not being in the right mental and emotional state or not performing the right mental movement:

• Alice thinks she is not trying to concentrate hard enough

• Tommy thinks he hasn’t been hungry for the win enough

• Bob thinks he is not feeling the urgency of filling out the tax form enough

They try to solve this issue by saturating themselves with some mental state or emotion that they think is going to get them to succeed:

• Alice tries even harder to perform the mental movement of concentrating on studying

• Tommy tries to use his anger about losing and feel more determined to win

• Bob threatens himself emotionally with shame if he doesn’t do the boring task

How far can frowning take you?

Clearly, frowning is not completely ineffective. For example, most people in Alice’s position do manage to get some studying done, and depending on traits like mathematical talent, interest in the subject, industriousness or laziness, achieve some small degree of success.

So when does it begin to fail?

Frowning fails as soon as you have a non-trivial number of responsibilities in your life. There are a few reasons for this:

It’s not possible for people to maintain many strong feelings about many different things at the same time. That’s just not how humans work. If you are relying on feeling that something is important in order to keep it in mind or act on it, you will only be able to juggle a small handful of responsibilities at any given time.

If you try to push yourself too hard by frowning, it stops working. Eventually, you will become tolerant to whatever feeling you are relying on. If you shame yourself in order to be more productive, shaming yourself will become the norm. Not only this sucks and negatively affects your mental health, but it also means that it will become ineffective blackmail over time. People can burn out this way, as they need to resort to more and more violent self-shaming in order to keep functioning.

You will often drop responsibilities that don’t naturally capture your attention. Depending on your personality, this can mean different things. For example,

• If you are attracted to novelty, you will tend to drop repetitive tasks.

• If you are a perfectionist, you will spend too long on tasks instead of moving on to the next thing that needs to be done.

• If you prefer working alone, you will neglect communicating with your colleagues.

• If you tend to be motivated by urgency, you will neglect to do things that are useful in the long term.

Stupidly applied willpower doesn’t necessarily help. Players of competitive games tend to lose more when they get angry, not less. There is a mistake which I often used to make when I was younger, when I failed at something like understanding a mathematical principle or performing a complicated move in a video-game. As I got frustrated, I would just keep trying again and again while frowning, cementing bad habits, instead of going back to the basics.

Frowning is too fragile with respect to energy or motivation. To some degree, this is true for any process that relies on one person. However, frowning has a tendency to fail steeply as energy and motivation decline rather than gradually. Alice might frown and just fail to focus. Edouard either maintains his habit, or he doesn’t.

Frowning does not leave behind any examinable records or insights on what to change. Once you try to achieve something by frowning as hard as you can and fail, there are no buttons left to push, no knobs left to tweak

What to do instead

There are at two complementary ways to start replacing frowning that I want to write about:

• Manipulating your environment to make it easier to do things.

• Directly reduce the amount for motivation, willpower and energy you need to do things.

In this post, I will not talk about the latter. I had to pick one because of time constraints, and I expect for most frowners, improvements from the former are much more tangible and take less time to show up.

Either way, I suggest that you get good at the the former before you explore the latter, for reasons I dare not articulate.

Manipulating your environment

At a high level, this is about studying yourself and your environment and then looking for ways to manipulate these so that you achieve the effect you want.

This can sound fancy, but many such manipulations are simple, and people come up with basic ones all the time. Examples below.

• People notice that they have an easier or harder time focusing on studying or working, depending on which environment they are in. It usually goes in the following order, from least focus to most focus:

  1. Bedroom / living room / any room that is also used for leisure

  2. A room in their house that is dedicated only to studying or working

  3. A library, cafe or other public space

  4. A coworking space

  5. Their company’s office

• Various types of apps are optimised to capture their attention (usually social media and content platforms, but really all apps with infinite scroll and some without). Part of that is making it extremely easy and smooth for someone holding their phone to open the app. Many people notice, and wish it was less convenient.

• People who are feeling moody or even suffering from a mild depressive episode notice (or are told) that they will feel at least somewhat better if they take a walk outside regularly. Similarly, people with undiagnosed seasonal affective disorder usually have noticed a stark difference in their mood during the summer or when they travel to a more sunny country.

• People who struggle to exercise regularly may notice that when it comes to going for a run, the hardest step is putting your running shoes on. They may notice that the second hardest step is leaving out their front door.

These are basic examples that people notice spontaneously, without even knowing to look for this pattern. Once you look for it, you can see it in more subtle places. Unfortunately, these more advanced instances are harder to anonymise, and I don’t have any ready for this post.

Refining the technique

If you are a novice, your first manipulations will usually not work.

People’s first attempts are usually quite clumsy. Take Jane’s trick, or committing to giving a sum of money to charity every time you fail to do something. These attempts scratch the surface between frowning and proper techniques, because they are at least “real”, they’re not fleeting mental phenomena. They don’t disappear when you stop paying attention. However, they still rely mostly on self-blackmailing.

Another example is people who have a serious problem with scrolling on social media and try to solve it by setting screen time limits on their phone, which can be removed in less than 10 seconds. I just timed it.

When these attempts fails, which is often, people can get discouraged and stop practicing.

If you are at this point, you should start cataloguing what works and what doesn’t, troubleshooting when your attempts don’t work and refining them.

There are some tips in this post, such as not relying on saturating yourself emotionally or making things more convenient / inconvenient.

However, there is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to:

• Get a good intuition for how to apply these patterns to the problems in your life, and noticing when they’re relevant as often as possible; having this become second nature to you.

• Adapting the basic, generic rules to your own personality and dispositions, and finding new ones.

Don’t take these for granted just because you have a notion of what frowning is and why it’s ineffective. Knowledge integration does not happen automatically: you need to spend a long time deliberately applying this knowledge in the field before it becomes automatic.

You are the only one who can perform this work.

Frowning is pervasive

Despite it being quite common for people to notice basic instances of this pattern, it’s not necessarily common for people to act on them. For example, out of the people who notice that they feel down more often when it’s cloudy, you don’t see many moving to a more sunny country, or experimenting with placing bright white or cool light lamps in their homes. Some people who struggle to exercise could afford to have some gym equipment at home, yet don’t.

In my experience, it’s more common for people to perform extreme forms of frowning rather than extreme forms of these more principled interventions. For example, it’s easier to meet people who blackmail themselves with donating increasing amounts of money to charity if they spend too much time scrolling on social media (and fail to stop scrolling) than to meet people who took the hit and sold their smartphone and switched to a cheap dumb phone.

In some circles, you will meet people who got themselves addicted to nicotine on purpose. Then, they only allow themselves to consume nicotine after they complete a task or achieve a goal. Basically, they got themselves addicted in order to gain the ability to blackmail themselves.

Why is frowning pervasive?

To be honest, I’m not sure why frowning is so common. I have some guesses, but I don’t find them satisfying:

• It may be that many people were taught to frown at problems during their formative years, by way of their parents or teachers scolding them and imparting guilt when they failed to concentrate or to perform their duties.

• It may be that people see these interventions as admissions of defeat. “Surely I’m strong enough to just do the thing without these crutches”.

• It may be that people are correlated with themselves. If your personality makes it hard for you to consistently do X by frowning, that’s correlated with you not thinking about X often. That means you will have fewer ideas about how to intervene on yourself and your environment to become able to do X consistently.

I’m not a fan of these explanations because I don’t think they help much with explaining a puzzling phenomenon related to frowning: how hard it is to drill this concept into people’s heads.

It seems like such a core part of most people’s understanding of their own minds that there is an entity, whether they call it “soul” or dress it up in more scientific terms, which is independent from its environment and from the laws of nature. Also, that this entity can make anything happen if only it produces a strong enough “impetus”.

Discrepancies between what people think and do and what they would like to think and do are easily attributed to a failure, often considered a moral failure, to produce a strong enough impetus. In more concrete terms, the most natural continuation to the thought “I forgot to exercise for an entire week” takes the shape of “I will remember next week!”.

This might be a part more general pattern in which people don’t like to see themselves as causal entities. For that matter, people don’t like systematically looking at their own thoughts and behaviours. There are books about it. People don’t often think this way, and when they do, it’s usually quickly forgotten.

Frowning is a low bar for saying that you tried

Effort commitments

There are situations in which someone makes a commitment to put some effort into doing something. This can be a commitment that you make to your boss, or a commitment that you make to a friend, or a commitment that you make to yourself.

Usually, effort commitments are made when it’s impossible to commit to succeeding, or even to commit to making externally legible progress.

Think of someone committing to work 1 week on a novel approach to some research, which might just not yield anything.

Alice’s commitment to herself that she will study for her exam is also a good example. Since she doesn’t know of any way to guarantee results with high confidence, she resorts to swearing that she will at least make an effort.

The frowning norm

One worrying aspect of frowning is that in many of the situations which involve an effort commitment, there is an implicit norm which says the following.

Having frowned at X is considered a sufficient condition for declaring that one tried to do X, or even that one tried their best.

It’s easy to see how fewer of our goals are achieved when this norm is in place than in contexts where we have a higher standard for saying that we tried, but there are even deeper ramifications.

This norm is easily used as a shield:

• Even if Alice fails at studying, she can at least say to herself that she tried, and she feels less bad about herself than if she hadn’t even frowned.

• If you forget that it’s the anniversary of your wedding, you might try to get your wife’s forgiveness by telling her that you tried to remember (by frowning).

• If your boss asked you to brainstorm about X, you can say that you just didn’t come up with any good ideas.

As a consequence of the existence of this shield, there is lack of trust. For example, an employer can rarely ask an employee to put open-ended effort into X and be sure that it will be done properly; they have less recourse when the employee fucks around behind this shield. As a result, fewer projects can be pursued.

A better norm

Here’s a better norm. It’s not necessarily the best, but I’m sure it’s better than the norm above as long as you actually want to win.

In order to say that you tried to do X, you need to either plainly succeed, or produce a written log and / or description of your attempt.

In descending order of desirability:

• Ideally, the description should come with a few ideas for what you should do differently next time.

• If you don’t have any ideas, the log should be detailed enough that someone who is better than you at X can give you tips just from reading it.

• At the very least, it should be detailed enough that you will come up with ideas if you read the log later with fresher eyes.

Let’s see how this norm can help Edouard. One week, he skips most of his gym days. While writing his “failure log”, he described the sequence of events that leads to him failing:

• “I usually prepare the gym bag in the morning to make sure that it’s convenient to pick it up and go to the gym after I come back from work.”

• “This week, I was tired when I came back from work and gave up going to the gym, even though I didn’t get late shifts and usually came back around 6 PM.”

• “If I’m too tired at 6 PM, I could try going to the gym in the morning, though that would be difficult with my sleeping schedule.”

• “I also notice that I tend to feel the laziness all at once when I get home. I could try to circumvent this by going to the gym directly from work, without going through my house.”

Now, instead of feeling frustrated, he has two adjustments to try.