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Sometimes “the harder we try, the worse it gets,” Huxley said
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- Author, Dalia Ventura
- Scroll, BBC News World
2 hours ago
“When imagination and willpower conflict, they are antagonistic, it is always imagination that invariably wins.”
This is how the French psychologist Émile Coué explained what the intellectual and writer Aldous Huxley called the law of reverse effort.
If Coué’s beautiful sentence confuses you, think of quicksand. It’s a surface that appears solid, but when you step on it, it collapses into water and sand, causing your body to sink requiring enormous force to get out.
Many of us have only seen this in movies or comics, where characters are swallowed while desperately trying to escape their fate.
Therein lies the mistake and why shifting sand is a good analogy.
The way to avoid being swallowed by quicksand is to not strain so much: stop struggling and lie still so that the weight is distributed and the pressure is relieved. This will allow you to get to safety.
Something similar is what you should do if you can’t fall asleep, have a fit of laughter at an inopportune time, or can’t remember something: Instead of forcing yourself to do something you can’t, relax and do it (or think) into something else.
This is because, even though it may seem contradictory, sometimes we fail because we try too hard.
This doesn’t mean that you never have to do anything or that you always have to have a passive attitude to life but sometimes the more you try to improve something through willpower, the worse the situation becomes.
The writer Leo Tolstoy illustrated the concept in his book Anna Karenina, describing what happened to the landowner Konstantin Levin when he found harmony in cultivating the land with the peasants:
“A change began to take place in the work that filled him with joy. There were moments in the middle of his work when he forgot what he was doing and worked without effort, and in those moments his row was as clean cut as… “Tits.”
“But as soon as he remembered what he was doing and tried to do it better, he felt the weight of the effort and everything got worse.”
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Song Dynasty statue of Lao Tzu, master Chinese philosopher and father of Taoism
Taoists call something similar “Wu Wei,” which can be translated as “effortless action.”
In general, the idea is that when we stop fighting and learn to wait and observe, we see more clearly that there are external forces that overwhelm us and that sometimes we have to go with the flow and only at the right time and act at the right time with the right actions to achieve the desired goal.
When you act hastily, every step is a potential mistake, and emotions and ego can guide decisions more than reason.
To do or not to do
According to Huxley, after whom the law was named, “expertise and its results are achieved only by those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing.”
In a lecture he gave in California, USA, in 1955, entitled “Who We Are,” he stated that “we must combine relaxation with activity.”
Huxley clarified that “the conscious personal self” needs to relax, which he described as “a kind of small island in the middle of a vast field of consciousness.”
“This is the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows everything.”
However, there is a deeper self with knowledge and skills that enable us to do this.
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Regarding the superficial self, Huxley said that we must get out of the way and free ourselves so that the light can penetrate
Huxley, for example, referred to “what was formerly called the vegetative soul.”
“It’s something we inherit,” something that does things like digestion and automatically regulates our heartbeat.
He also referred to a different kind of inner self “that functions in a completely different way than instinctive.”
It is responsible for what Huxley called “acts of ad hoc intelligence”: actions that have never been performed before in its biological history and yet are performed with extraordinary efficiency without the conscious self having the slightest inkling of them has, as it carries out.
As an example, he described a baby imitating an adult’s gesture, something he had never attempted.
For the first time in this baby’s history, there is something that “organizes a whole mass of muscles connected to a sophisticated nervous system to pull that muscle up and down, one loose, the other tense, to make the grimace.” reproduce what the child saw.” the face of an adult.
“It’s a very mysterious thing”
Therefore, there are other selves that are part of us, besides the self “that we call ourselves, that responds to our names, that minds its own business, and has the terrible habit of imagining itself to be in some sense absolute .”
So when we insist on striving for something that we cannot achieve, the superficial self eclipses all other powers of our deeper, more comprehensive self.
When we relax, we let them shine.
“We must always learn this paradoxical art of combining the maximum relaxation of the superficial self with the maximum activity of the notself that we carry around with us and that in reality gives us our being.”
This is because “for all psychophysical abilities, we have the curious fact of the law of invested effort: the harder we try, the worse it gets.”
For Huxley, the aim of all activities in life, from the simplest physical to the highest intellectual and spiritual, “is not to prevent our own light from arising, but without giving up our personal conscious self.”
“We cannot simply sleep and wait for everything to happen,” but rather allow the wisdom of the deep self to emerge while the conscious self “organizes it in a way that is helpful to ourselves and others.” “.
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The fact that a baby imitates gestures is something very mysterious, Huxley understands.
Is it useful for you?
The Law of Reverse Effort is invaluable in those moments when you won’t stop moving but won’t move forward at least not in the direction you want.
This can lead to a vicious cycle where you feel bad about not doing enough, try harder, and force yourself to keep going.
But, psychologists warn, this pressure only increases stress and blocks the path.
For example, research on workplace productivity shows that we are only truly productive in the first four or five hours of each workday.
Then there is a significant drop in performance until the difference between 12 and 16 hours of working time practically no longer exists. Nothing arises other than mental and physical fatigue.
But don’t be confused: the law of reverse effort is not synonymous with resignation, nor does it invite passivity, apathy, or mediocrity.
On the contrary, it makes us think and motivates us to pause, evaluate the circumstances and adopt the best possible attitude.
It helps reduce stress on those days or periods of your personal or professional life when there seems to be nothing but pressure.
Constantly worrying about everything that needs to be done or the bad things that could happen doesn’t help, but maintaining psychological distance and giving yourself time to breathe is a form of help.
This informal law is a useful tool when you are faced with a blank page that you need to fill with thoughts and don’t know how to express yourself, whether you are a professional writer or not.
And it is also justified in interpersonal relationships: the more you try to get closer to someone, the more distant they become.
But perhaps you will get more results if you follow the saying: If you love a person, you should let him go; when she comes back, she was always yours; if not, then it never was.