Want to Make Life Easier? Break the Habits that Make It More Difficult Than It Needs to Be

I’m very suspicious of life hacks. And I think short cuts usually turn out to be long cuts. But I do believe that we can make life easier–and more fulfilling–by letting go of habits that make it more difficult than it needs to be.

I distinctly remember an early client of mine who was a remarkably good writer. He would post a relatively simple comment online and get marriage proposals in return. And he loved to write, too.

But while fiction was his favorite form of writing, when it came time to write the novel he clearly had in him, he backed away. “That would just be too difficult.” Novels are difficult to write. But not impossible. Just ask any literary agent how many queries they get from lonely novels seeking a good home.

Now this man was not lazy. But tasks had a way of surging to gargantuan proportions in his mind. As a consequence, we–especially him–have all missed having the satisfaction of his novel-that-was-not-to-be.

What else are we missing because it seemed too difficult to do?

No, life is not easy, and we actually make it harder if we imagine we can sashay through it effortlessly. A certain amount of struggle is what makes the juice worth the squeeze. As  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in his book Flow, being challenged at an optimal level is what’s most satisfying. “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

But we can also make life more difficult than it needs to be by imagining that the path forward is steeper than it really is.

The Mountain Mirage

I call this perspective the Mountain Mirage. Rather than make life easier, we magnify how difficult tasks are going to be. We can project the Mountain Mirage onto fixing a healthy smoothie or how we approach the entire trajectory of life. It drives the Sunday Scaries, that feeling of dread about going back to work on Monday.

The mountain looks more insurmountable than it really is. Take it step by step and it’s not as bad as you imagine it will be. Especially if you savor the views.

Many of my compulsive patients are either paralyzed or driven by this mirage. It can lead them to either give up and not pursue projects that would otherwise be fulfilling, or to pursue them with such desperation, urgency and stress that those projects become less effective and less satisfying.

The irony is that rather than make life easier, we actually make life more difficult this way. Delays from procrastinating can do that. Physical tension can do that. Gearing up for an imagined fight with a malicious mountain can do that.

In order to make life easier, let’s get to know this tendency so that we can recognize it when we’re under its influence, respect it when it’s accurate, and reject it by showing it the door when it’s not.

A Caveat for the Manic and the Chill

Here’s a danger some of you may need to watch out for: if you’re subject to manic episodes this post could push you over the edge. Manic episodes make people vulnerable to unrealistic assessments of their capacities, and it isn’t funny. Should you have a history of manic episodes, I’d suggest that you consider coming to terms with limitations as your true challenge. That’s what’s  really difficult.

Also, I do know some people who seem to be immune to the Mountain Mirage. If that’s you, this is not your post. If you naturally float through life with the assumption that everything will be hunky-dory, good for you. You can move onto another post now.

5 Signs You’re Making Life Too Difficult

Since life is difficult, how do we know if we’re experiencing Mountain Mirage rather than Credible Concern? Here are some indications:

• Because you avoid and procrastinate, you make things even more difficult than they would have been otherwise.

• Persistent muscle tension and seriousness make it hard to relax and easy to get tired.

• You find yourself saying, “Oh no!” whenever a new task comes up.

• You set rigid parameters for work to make sure it’s successful, e.g. I can’t write unless I have a 3-hour stretch, the perfect computer, and absolute quiet.

• After projects are over you often realize they were easier than you expected.

But wait, Gary. Everybody experiences this stuff. True, but maybe not as much as you imagine. What might seem typical to you may not actually be so typical. But even so, even if others do experience these challenges, that’s no reason for you to continue to be as stressed or avoidant as you are.

You could challenge me by raising issues that are quite difficult, like being audited, buying a used car, or not eating sugar. True, these are hard. But hear me out. Even with the truly difficult, why would you want to focus on, or magnify, their difficulty?

Your assessments may not be as rational as you imagine. And other more emotional motivations may shape how you see that mountain.

Causes of Mountain Mirage: Perfectionism, Demand Sensitivity, and More

Two of the main causes of Mountain Mirage are perfectionism (what we expect of ourselves) and demand sensitivity (what we imagine others expect of us). But there are more. Let’s look at some of them.

In each of these cases, we tell ourselves a story about life being difficult, because, without realizing it, we imagine there is some advantage to approaching life as difficult. If there were no payoff, we would not do it.

Perfectionism

Maladaptive perfectionism makes things harder than they need to be. If I thought that this blog and podcast needed to be perfect, I would either give up and quit (because I know that I’m incapable of perfection), or I’d tense up and stress about every word I type. I’d also drop other pursuits in my life, get totally out of balance, and lose my standing as a card-carrying Healthy Compulsive.

Demand Sensitivity

Demand sensitivity is the tendency to imagine that people demand or expect more from you than they actually do. I’ve described it as a lens. If I believed that you guys expected this blog and podcast to be perfect, I’d either be too tense to write, or too cowed to try.

Rigid Perceptions of Ourselves and the World

Questioning Mountain Mirages wouldn’t be so powerful if we were more flexible in how we see the world. But we cling tightly to our views out of insecurity and a need for control. “I insist that there is a huge mountain there!” serves as an excuse not to change.

Creating a Pass

Magnifying the difficulty in our mind may also be an attempt to garner empathy or a pass from ourselves or others: “This is going to be a really hard day. I only got four hours of sleep last night. Don’t expect too much from me.”

Anticipatory Self-Protection

We take the phrase “forewarned is forearmed” as gospel and gear up for a battle with suffering. Some suffering is inevitable, but if we have a secondary reaction to that suffering, we make it worse. If I have surgery on my foot, I can focus on how bad it’s going to feel, or I can focus on knowing that it’s not permanent. The same applies to studying for a real estate license or going to Aunt Mildred’s for Thanksgiving. Knowing there will be some suffering is helpful. Burrowing into that suffering like a pig in mud is not.

For instance, fear of failing and fear of falling. “What if I do try to do what you’re suggesting and it turns out I really can’t get up that mountain? Then I’m going to feel horrible and I’ll never try anything again. I’ll know that I can never trust myself to gauge this stuff.”

But notice what you just did. You assumed that there was a second, insurmountable, mountain after the first one—your emotional reaction to a human limitation. That mountain—which exists mostly in your imagination—is the one that keeps you from trying.

The old adage applies here: Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s  research on affective forecasting shows, we are quite bad at knowing how we will feel and what we will want in the future. So these efforts at being forewarned and forearmed do not make life easier and are not very effective.

Suffering from Difficulty as a Sign of Virtue

But we may also anticipate suffering and magnify it as if it were a good thing. In order to assure ourselves that we’re doing the right thing or the heroic thing, we may seek higher degrees of difficulty and suffering. That might lead you to take the more difficult path up the mountain to make sure you’ve actually climbed it, and then you really feel virtuous. As if, the harder they come, the bigger they fall. But you’ve really just made it more difficult.

Masochism: The Test of Suffering

Let me tell you a little story about how this need for suffering and its relationship to perceived difficulty can show up.

Once when I was starting to play trumpet again after having taken some time off, I consulted a trumpet teacher about getting a couple of lessons to get me back to playing well enough to get through my humble club gigs with my rock and soul band. I had found him online, and he seemed to specialize in people like me who were returning to the horn after a break, so it seemed like a good fit.

I was a little suspicious about his remarkable claims of being able to help, but his ideas about how to improve one’s mechanics on the instrument were basically sound. So, I signed up for the free 45-minute consultation.

He came across as unhappy and astonishingly stern. He kept pushing me to say that I had complete faith that he could make me a better trumpet player. I was baffled by his harsh approach. Surely, I was misreading him, I thought, because that would not be a good way to get students.

I was wrong.

Getting me to believe that I was in terrible shape and needed his help to get out of my huge difficulty was exactly his strategy. Create a Mirage Mountain and tell the climber only he can lift him up.

While I went into the consultation knowing he might give me the hard sell, I was unprepared for how hard the sell was. He graciously lowered his price from $10,000 for a year to $6800. I said that was still a lot of money, that I didn’t think I needed an entire year of lessons, and that I would want to think about it before signing up. He told me that that was not a lot of money, especially for a therapist, and that if I wasn’t willing to sign on the dotted line right now, it meant I wasn’t committed to my art. I must not be serious and therefore he wouldn’t work with me if I didn’t fork over the money now.

You can’t be serious, I thought to myself about him.

I extricated myself from the call and monitored the stress it had produced in my body and psyche. He was trying to play on my vulnerability to creating a Mountain Mirage. Fortunately, I didn’t fall for it.

He wanted me to buy into the idea that this process would be difficult, and that it would require suffering, financial at least, if I wanted to succeed.

It turned out many people had complained about this guy’s tactics online, calling him a scammer. One person wrote,

“When I declined to pay his exorbitant price because I am supporting our son who has fallen on hard times, he told me we should make our son survive on his own. His last words to me were ‘I’m not going to help you anymore because you are being ridiculous.’”

More to the point of our subject here, one person commented that some musicians seek out tyrannical teachers such as this guy, assuming that playing their instrument was so hard that they wouldn’t make progress if they weren’t suffering.

This reminds me of one of my favorite films, Whiplash. It portrays how the Mountain Mirage can manifest in people who are driven to succeed. In the film, Andrew, a young jazz drummer, pursues his art with the assumption that success is brutally difficult, and that it requires suffering. He practices so much and so hard that his hands often bleed. (Yes, modern day stigmata.) He falls under the spell of a teacher who pushes him relentlessly and even violently. Sadly, this reassured Andrew he was on the right path.

The trumpet teacher I consulted was literally banking on me seeing the same thing, a mirage of difficulty that would lead me to buy into his despotism.

No thanks.

Psychological Change

Mountain Mirage applies to psychological projects as well. Changing how we think or behave, in order to make life easier, may also seem impossible when it really isn’t. It might seem impossible to pivot away from negative thoughts to positive ones, let go of that tendency to correct or nudge other people when they don’t need correcting nudging, or accept anything less than perfect.

If science has learned anything about the brain in recent decades, it’s that the brain is malleable. To some degree we can shape it. But we may think of it as solid rock rather than clay.

There are some limits to what we can change, including the foundation of our personality that came with genes, and to some degree with our environment. But on top of that foundation is a layer of strategies, both adaptive and maladaptive, that we came up with to deal with our environment. That layer can change.

You will always be compulsive. But how you are compulsive is up to you. And that can make life easier or more difficult.

Through the process known as epigenesis, even genes can be activated or deactivated. Psychological development is not entirely predetermined. So, we can cultivate a perspective in which our world and our psyche is more malleable than we had thought before.

Remember the 4-minute mile? Nobody thought it was possible to run a mile in less than four minutes until, in 1954, Roger Bannister, a medical student at Oxford, ran it in 3:59.4. Then lots of people started doing it. Well, maybe not lots of people, but once Bannister proved that it was possible, many others changed their perspective and were able to do it.  This had not been a physical limitation, but a psychological one.

Four Different Compulsive Approaches to Make Life Easier or More Difficult

Not everyone creates their Mountain Mirage the same way. Let’s look at how this assumption of difficulty would affect each of the four types of obsessive-compulsive personality. Note that I describe each of these types first in terms of their positive potential, then in terms of their negative potential:

Teacher/Leader—Boss/Bully: Imagining that a particular project is nearly impossible, you may push the people around you even harder, sensing danger that if you don’t, the project will fail. That could lead to rushing people to get to the movie theater on time, or becoming very severe with your employees when your company faces a challenge.

Doer/Worker—Workaholic: You may push yourself out of fear that a particular project is too hard. Whether you are a ballet dancer, sousaphone player, or third baseman, you probably know that tension is your enemy, and ease is your friend. Yet, you may strain anyway. Thinking things are impossibly difficult will make you tense up to the degree that you overshoot. And you’ll get tired—or injured–sooner.

Server/Friend—People-Pleaser: People-pleasers desperately fear disappointing others. You may imagine that to stay in the good graces of others that you have to work extremely hard. Which isn’t always a good thing. Sex, for instance, is a joyful union between two people, not an athletic performance in which you work hard to prove your love. The Server/Friend type needs to be particularly wary of demand sensitivity, of thinking that others expect more of them than they really do.

Thinker/Planner—Procrastinator: If you see life or particular projects as very difficult, you may feel you need to plan so much to get it perfect that you never actually get started. “I’ll do it when I’m really ready. It would be bad to try now because it’s just too hard and I’m not up for it.” It also may lead you to race in circles in your mind trying to figure out a problem that’s not as hard as you’ve made it.

A common denominator in each of these cases is that whether or not we can handle the difficulty becomes a measure of our worth, rather than an opportunity to explore a challenge.

How to Make Life Easier by Deconstructing the Mountain Mirage

Here are seven steps to help you break out of the assumption that things are overly difficult, and to begin to make your life easier:

Assess your pattern. Ask yourself, do you usually imagine things will be harder than they are, or easier? Do you do this just with specific tasks, or is it your way of approaching life?

Listen to your body. Notice when you start to gear up physically to climb the mountain. Shoulders up? Head down? Tension in hands? Fatigue in the body?

Practice Living with Ease. Try using as little effort as possible when walking, holding a pen or stirring soup.

Identify its function. What secondary gain might you get from imagining a project will be more difficult than it really is? Avoidance? Trying to please others? A sense of virtue? Protection against failure? Justification for maintaining the status quo?

Accept the feeling. Strategies such as the Mirage Mountain are usually adopted in order to help us avoid a particular feeling. Identify it, let it be, and step aside. Without letting it run your life.

Accept “good enough.” Acceptance actually leads to more success.

Take the Risk. Experiment with letting go of your protective Mountain Mirage. It may feel dangerous, but accepting that danger may be less difficult than you imagine.

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For a radical alternative to living in a Mountain Mirage, read my blog post about what we can learn from the Archetype of the Fool, or listen to Episode 48 of the podcast.