Have you ever tried petting a cat, but every time you come closer, the cat runs away and keeps watching you from a distance? Then, you walk towards the cat in a second attempt, but it runs away again. When you approach the cat a third time, it flees and disappears. However, a few hours later, when you’ve focused your attention on something else, the cat appears, walks toward you, and jumps onto your lap. A phenomenon we often experience is that when we chase something or someone, it moves away from us.
But when we leave it alone, it comes to us. This mechanism can be hard to reconcile with the idea that ‘effort’ is the key to success. Even though it’s true that achieving goals often requires work, there’s also another side to the story. The law of reversed effort shows us that, in many situations, putting in work only removes us further from the desired outcome. And that the more we try, the worse it gets.
But the less we try, the better it gets. Hence, achieving goals doesn’t just require work; we also must abstain from action.
And to know when to act and when not to, we need intelligence and skill. In a previous video, we explored a dimension of the law of reversed effort (also called ‘the backwards law’). But this exploration was from the viewpoint of pursuing happiness, as stated by bestselling author Mark Manson: “wanting a positive experience is a negative experience; accepting a negative experience is a positive experience.” End quote. So, the more we want happiness, the less happy we’ll be, as we’re reinforcing a sense of lack. And that if we’re content with how things are (and not in a state of lack), we suddenly have what we’re looking for. But in this video, we’ll explore the law of reversed effort from the viewpoint of performance, achieving goals, and overcoming fears. The law of reversed effort was once coined by English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley, who stated that we only achieve proficiency by combining relaxation with activity.
I quote: The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold.
We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind, in which understanding may come to us. Imagine an insomniac trying to sleep. The more he tries, the longer he seems to stay awake.
And the longer he stays awake, the more frustrated he becomes and the harder he tries. But after a while, the insomniac stops trying, accepting that he can’t sleep. And suddenly, without any effort, he dozes off. Sleep is one of those many things we cannot force. Yet, we often try hard to fall asleep, with horrible results.
When we look at the nature of sleep, this isn’t much of a surprise.
We can see sleep as the ultimate form of relaxation. Thus, trying to sleep is pretty contradicting, as we make an effort (or even force ourselves) to relax, which is the opposite of relaxation. Another thing we cannot force is attraction. No one chooses to be attracted to someone or something; it just happens.
Even though this is a generalization, by and large, we see that clinginess repels, and elusiveness attracts. The more we chase someone, the less attractive we become. But if we stop chasing, we become more elusive, and the attraction may return. As the proverb goes: “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Trying too hard often backfires.
Philosopher and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed that when we focus too much on achieving specific outcomes (and preventing others), we generate “anticipatory anxiety.” In many cases, this hyper-intention leads to the situation we try to avoid. An example from his book Man’s Search for Meaning is a stutterer who desperately tries not to stutter. But because he tries too hard, his speech falters even more as he’s anxious not to speak without stammering. And so, it’s with many things.
If we try too hard to enjoy ourselves, we’re probably not enjoying ourselves because we’re so fixated on results that the fixation itself is unpleasant. Another example is people who experience difficulties climaxing in the bedroom. The more they fixate on trying to climax, the less successful they’ll be, and the more dreadful the whole bedroom experience becomes (including the anticipation beforehand).
Again, hyper-fixation on specific outcomes hijacks one’s ability to perform. Viktor Frankl provides us with a practical method called ‘paradoxical intention.’ This method can help us relieve ourselves of hyper-intention or, in other words: not try so hard. By applying paradoxical intention, we shift the paradigm from avoiding specific outcomes (like stuttering or not being able to sleep) to wanting these outcomes.
By wishing for things, we previously tried to prevent from happening, we’re less likely to become petrified by anxiety, as we remove the pressure of wanting results. So, we’re more likely to fall asleep by wishing to stay awake than by trying hard.
You’ll find a more detailed exploration of paradoxical intention in a previous video named Viktor Frankl’s Method to Overcome Fear.
Learning to drive a car can be an immensely frustrating experience. It takes many lessons and many hours to master for most people. For an inexperienced person, controlling a vehicle (while watching traffic) is a very unnatural and complicated task. Unless you drive an automatic, you have to step on three different pedals to accelerate, slow down, and switch gears, and you must learn to use mirrors to observe what’s happening around the car. It seems almost impossible to master.
However, after lots of practice, you suddenly catch yourself automatically doing these things. Our conscious mind is a gift and a curse. It allows us to reason, analyze, and use language. However, the conscious mind often sits in the way of what the Taoists call ‘Su-Wei,’ also referred to as the flow state. In the flow state, our actions are fluent and effortless, as if they happen by themselves: as if the dancer becomes the dance or the painter becomes the painting.
The video ‘Taoism | The Philosophy of Flow’ quotes retired basketball player Bill Russell, describing the flow state as “playing in slow motion” and that he “could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken.” Any conscious effort in addition to the flow state causes us to hesitate. That’s why the moment we become consciously aware that we’re in such a state, and we begin intellectualizing and trying to control it; we lose it. And so, many of our actions seem to emerge from beyond our conscious minds. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung realized that our conscious mind is just a tiny part of the psyche.
We could compare the conscious mind to the tip of an iceberg, while the unconscious is a major part of the iceberg that lies underwater, invisible to those above the surface.
Hence, according to Jung, the psyche generates many unconscious processes that the conscious mind isn’t aware of. Similarly, Aldous Huxley distinguished between consciousness and the personal conscious, saying that a relaxed personal conscious is required to let the “wider self” come through. I quote: The personal conscious self being a kind of small island in the midst of an enormous area of consciousness — what has to be relaxed is the personal self, the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows what what is, that uses language. This has to be relaxed in order that the multiple powers at work within the deeper and wider self may come through and function as they should.
In all psychophysical skills we have this curious fact of the law of reversed effort: the harder we try, the worse we do the thing.
End quote. When someone asked author Charles Bukowski how he writes and creates, he answered: You don’t (…) You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more.
It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you.
When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it. End quote. The more we try, the worse it gets. The more we chase the people we desire, the more they run from us.
The harder we try to sell something, the fewer sales we tend to make. But if we don’t act at all, we won’t see any results either. So, we’re looking for a middle path between action and non-action, between conscious effort and letting action occur. On the one hand, conscious effort seems necessary to develop our skills: we need to practice, learn, think, understand and analyze.
On the other hand, the absence of conscious effort and intellectual activity seems necessary for letting the developed skills emerge naturally.
We have to calm the mind and “get out of our own way,” so to speak, to perform optimally. As Aldous Huxley wrote: Take the piano teacher, for example. He always says, relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax.
The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises, we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity. End quote. The flow state appears to accompany mental clarity and equanimity, according to the accounts of people who experienced it.
When athletes, musicians, singers, Formula 1 drivers, and martial artists experience “being in the zone,” they don’t ruminate, worry, analyze, intellectualize, or think about their next step: they just flow along with the natural course, as if they’re the course itself.
So, paradoxically, optimal performance requires us to relax, stop trying, and let our activities emerge and happen automatically. Or, as Lao Tzu stated: “Can you remain tranquil until right action occurs by itself?” Thank you for watching.
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