logged
The neural circuit that makes starting hard (and how to beat it)
Sometimes I do this thing where I stare at my laptop like it owes me money.
Tabs open. Cursor blinking. To-do list getting longer.
And the task I’m supposed to start?
Still not started.
Which is funny… because I want to do the thing, but my brain is like:
Let’s just… not.
So anyway, I was reading Nature News the other day and found an article about this exact thing. In it, scientists trained monkeys to do a simple decision-making task.
Sometimes completing the task came with a reward (delicious water).
Sometimes that reward came with a little “bonus” puff of air to the face (mildly unpleasant).
Well as it turns out, anytime the monkeys anticipated that starting this trial could lead to discomfort, even though it would also lead to a delicious reward, they hesitated to start.
Not because they didn’t want the reward, but because something in the brains hit the brakes.
The researchers called it a kind of “motivation brake”.
A specific neural pathway that seems to dampen your drive to take the first step when starting means you might also have to feel something unpleasant.
And when they selectively suppressed that circuit?
Goal-directed behavior returned.
In other words… the monkeys got way more willing to start the hard thing.
Now obviously, I'm not emailing you to suggest we all go around “suppressing circuits” in our brains. Nor to suggest that we should really be doing this type of thing to monkeys either.
But nonetheless, it happened, and the results are interesting.
Because here's the deal…
This maps onto something I've seen over and over with writing, and content, and marketing.
People do not get stuck because they are lazy.
They get stuck because starting feels uncomfortable, especially while you’re in the early learning stages.
Starting is where you confront the blank page and the possibility of being misunderstood, it’s where you confront the potential of “wasted” time and the willingness to try something that might not work. All those things are like a mildly unpleasant puff of air to the face.
So your body hits the brakes.
Which is why relying on motivation alone is a terrible plan.
Motivation is what you do when you feel like it. But systems are how you get results even when you don’t. Systems reduce the discomfort of starting by removing a whole lot of unnecessary decision making.
You just follow the steps…
Step one, step two, step three, and the work is already in motion before your brain has time to argue.
And if you’re building your business with content, this matters.
Most people do not fail at content because they “need a better hook”. Most people fail at content because they do not reliably start. Most people never get enough reps. They never stay in the game long enough to earn momentum.
And this is true no matter which marketing method you choose.
Ads, content, knocking door-to-door, it’s all about doing it just a bit longer than everyone else who tries but inevitably gives up right before it starts working.
So if you’re reading this thinking:
“Yeah… I do kind freeze up at the start…”
I’d like to invite you to something.
Threads Organic Traffic is basically a system for bypassing the discomfort that comes with starting. It gives you a repeatable process for coming up with ideas, turning those ideas into posts, building an email list from your writing, and doing it all in a way that doesn’t require you to be “in the mood” every day.
If that sounds like something that might interest you, here’s the link to learn more:
Your pal,
Kevin Hood