STRUGGLE WITH EFFORT?

 When it comes to being physically active, the requirement to endure the sensations and experience around physical effort can be a significant barrier. This post is going to break down why more intense effort is naturally uncomfortable, but why it only becomes all-out aversive when we react to it in unhelpful ways.

First let's look at why effort is inherently uncomfortable.

Throughout our body we have sensory receptors that detect physiological and physical changes that are happening in our tissues. As the amount of work we are doing (and therefore effort) increases, specific types of receptors will start to send increasingly frequent signals to our brains about the nature of these changes. We have mechanoreceptors which detect changes to pressure and force in our muscles and tissues, chemoreceptors which detect chemical changes such as reduced oxygen supply or increased lactate, and nociceptors which trigger pain signals, communicating a potential disturbance or damage to our tissues.

All of these signals contribute to the experience of fatigue, discomfort and potentially pain, depending on the intensity of effort. These are all vital for letting us know of the status of our body.

However, that's not all there is to it. Once those signals are received, areas of the brain that deal with emotion are also activated, which contribute to the effort being experienced as unpleasant. If pain exceeds a certain threshold, brain structures dealing with threat detection and hence emotions like fear and anxiety will also activate. Emotions have evolved to drive action in response to the situations that activate them, and as pain and exertion are considered potential threats we are likely to experience some level of negative feeling in response, which theoretically supports heightened vigilance and potential withdrawal from the activity in question. And whilst the brain also partially suppresses pain signals via endorphin release, this is insufficient to significantly reduce the discomfort, aside from in unusual circumstances.

So you may see already how the experience of significant amounts of effort in the physical activity space are inherently uncomfortable - your brain is reacting as it should.

But that's only the beginning. We are also constantly assessing the anticipated costs versus benefits of every movement we do at an automatic, unconscious level. The more the costs are deemed to exceed the benefits, the greater the perceived effort will be (see our previous post for a full explanation of this). Thus we have automatic anticipatory processes also potentially working to make what we are doing feel even more arduous.

Furthermore, prolonged effort can also make us feel weak in some instances. If you are doing high-intensity cardio to the point of exhaustion or surpassing your anaerobic threshold, you will inevitably experience a reduced ability to control your movements to the same extent, reduced power output and possibly some disturbance to your proprioception (sense of balance and awareness of where your limbs are in space). This requires you to put more effort in to continue which then increases the weakness further, so there is a double-layered experience of feelings of powerlessness or weakness that comes with this. The same can happen when strength training if you are trying to max out or alternatively working at extreme ranges of motion whereby you are far weaker in the stretch position of a muscle than the normal range. Unless this situation is associated with positive or meaningful experiences for you, it serves as another form of implicit threat because it signals a decreasing ability to have your intended effect on the world.

Finally, to add to all that, we might have negative associations with certain levels of effort that have emerged from our experience with it. Perhaps intense effort evokes feelings of being weak more generally, being vulnerable or inadequate, or memories of shame-provoking experiences in PE class. Where we have repeated negative experiences that go beyond the fundamental discomfort of effort, we will learn to experience effort as more aversive.

All of these things happen automatically, making effort not only uncomfortable but also potentially emotionally negative. But for a lot of people effort is not just uncomfortable or unpleasant but explicitly aversive. For some people the word "aversive" is synonymous with "uncomfortable", but I am using "aversive" in the psychological context whereby it typically means that the activity is experienced as explicitly negative, is accompanied by a strong accompanying avoidance tendencies (i.e. to hold back, stop or avoid the activity altogether) and elicits anticipatory dread. With physical activity this is also usually accompanied by the sense that the effort and its sensations are unmanageable.

The good news is this is in your control, particularly in the long-term. And that is because effort only becomes truly aversive because of how you react to the experience of effort and its accompanying thoughts and feelings. Some common examples of the ways in which we turn this discomfort into aversion are: catastrophising about the sensations and what they might mean for the rest of the activity, being fundamentally unwilling to have them, relentless self-criticism, buying into negative thoughts and talking ourselves into a more negative state, and allowing all of the above to totally dominate our focus.

This means there is work to do on looking at how you may be magnifying negative experiences via unhelpful reactions and then creating more positive associations with it. That way you can work towards an experience of effort that is more mixed, as it naturally should be - not something you'd wish to engage in constantly and perhaps accompanied by some negative thoughts and feelings, but nonetheless feels worthwhile, manageable and contained.

Below are some questions to help you start exploring.

How am I transforming discomfort into aversion?

When you start to "hurt" in a workout and the sense of exertion really builds up...

• What is it about the effort that you find most difficult to deal with?

• What are you thinking about?

• What are you saying to yourself, internally or otherwise?

• How do you interpret the sensations of effort?

• What emotions come up and what's your response to them?

• How is your behaviour affected?

• What are the consequences of all of the above?

• How do you think all of that contributes to the experience of effort in the future?

Transforming the psychological functions of effort

Here are some questions/prompts to help you reflect on how you might build positive associations with effort:

• Why do you want to be able to deal with effort better?

• What is important to you about the activities that involve effort?

• If you have identified any patterns in the questions above that you feel are making the experience of effort worse, what could you do instead?

• What is the best way to encourage yourself in these situations?

• What do you want your focus to be when it really starts to hurt?

• The uncomfortable or aversive nature of effort is an excellent opportunity to practise dealing with adversity. Some people find it helpful to brainstorm some values that they might like to guide their behaviour in the face of such discomfort, giving it a new meaning and providing them a new focus. My favourites in these scenarios are humour, courage, humility, being patient with myself, dignity, doing hard things and being in my own corner, but there are no right answers so think about the qualities you would like to embrace when faced with this challenge.

If you need some more practical examples of what it means to "respond differently" to effort, feel free to check out my earlier blog on how I learned to manage discomfort in running.

Chloe

Psychology of Movement