How to achieve higher performance in your everyday life

When you think of high performance, you might think of a test or a race. However, we can also strive to perform at a higher level in anything we do in our everyday lives.

The focus of this post is on one particular mechanism to achieve this: When we reduce how effortful our tasks feel, we enable ourselves to sustain greater objective effort (and can achieve greater mental and physical endurance).

Perceived Effort (or Perceived Exertion) and Task Performance

Imagine you’re running on a treadmill, and someone is gradually notching up the speed. You’ll reach a point where the effort feels too much, and you’ll decide to step off.

It’s clear that our perception of effort will go up when what we’re attempting is objectively more strenuous. But, in fact, identical actions can feel more or less effortful depending on the circumstances. We’ve probably all felt this. Some days our daily routine feels harder than other days.

The topic of perceived exertion has been extensively studied in endurance sports (like long-distance running and cycling), but many of the same principles (and some of the same techniques) carry over to activities that only require mental endurance.

For example, we know that factors like caffeine and music can decrease perceived effort. Sports science tells us that cycling often feels less effortful when the rider is listening to music. Extrapolating from this, we can easily test for ourselves whether everyday activities like tidying up or washing a sink full of dishes feel less effortful with music.

In the sphere of mental effort, there’s an incredible range of what influences our perceptions of effort.

Expectation effects can reduce perceived effort. For example, when I learned that reading to children reduces feelings of stress in parents, I started to notice this. Reading to my toddler started to feel pleasant rather than like a slog. Knowing that research says this should reduce stress made this more true for me.

A core benefit of habits is that they reduce perceived effort. A behaviour that’s a habit feels easier than when the same behaviour is new to us. Habits and routines are such a powerful tool for higher performance, exactly because they reduce our need for self-control.

Other options that can influence how effortful a particular action feels:

• Whether you’re tired, hungry, or hot.
• The presence of other people.
• Being in nature or beautiful surroundings.
• How long you expect to have to keep going at the same effort (an activity often feels easier when we know we’re almost at the finish).
• Whether there’s a known endpoint (waiting feels more effortful when we don’t know how long we’ll need to wait).
• The relative effort of a task compared to your other tasks (tidying up feels easier if the alternative is studying for exams than if the alternative is watching YouTube).
• Fitness, or being accustomed to a certain level of effort. When we’re fitter, we perceive operating at near our max as easier. It’s less scary. Athletes and fitness enthusiasts who are accustomed to the physical discomfort of exertion tolerate it better. It’s conceivable that this principle also applies to people who are accustomed to high levels of mental focus and endurance.

Negative Self-Talk Adds to Perceived Effort

You can approach the problem of perceived effort by introducing factors that reduce it, or by eliminating factors that increase it.

Overly dramatic self-talk that amps up negative emotions (e.g., “This is so hard and miserable, I hate it”) can increase perceived effort, as can various types of overthinking, like second-guessing your plans instead of just executing them.

Approach Your Perceived Effort With an Experimenter’s Mindset

The ideas presented in this post represent only a small selection for you to explore. Once you recognize that you can influence your perceived effort, and get yourself to do more effortful behaviours if you can lower your perceived effort, you can easily experiment to see what works for you.

This is an ideal self-improvement topic to approach through personal experimentation. It’s especially relevant if you’re seeking to be more focused and self-disciplined. Knowing how to reduce your perceived effort can increase your persistence when you’re expecting a lot of yourself. (To learn how to be a better self-experimenter, see this post.)