Pain is not the unit of Effort

1. If it hurts, you're probably doing it wrong.
2. You're not trying your best if you're not happy.

I believed this firmly for most of my life, and still think there's some value in it, but I've learnt that this is a pretty privileged take on things. Targeted at a LW audience, it's probably true and useful to a majority, but that's because most of us (I believe) are living better lives than at least 80% of humanity, and thus fall into the truthish region of these ideas.

Most of humanity lives in uncertainty, instability, and the myriad day-to-day pains that are ultimately rooted in those. Most people don't have the privilege of sorting through multiple sources or spending time gaining enough background knowledge, such that learning something becomes the joy it should be.

When your very survival, barely holding together a family and a home, takes up 15 hours of your day, it's going to hurt if you're trying to advance yourself with education or other self-improvement, it's going to take a necessary toll on your physical and mental health. The reason "pain is the unit of effort" is such a common idea is that it was true for the majority and still is (if to a slightly lesser extent than back then, because of slowly declining poverty rates). For people in bad life situations, almost any extra effort is pain, so if you're supposed to be working and are not experiencing pain, it's a good heuristic that you're most likely avoiding actual work by some means, because that's such a tempting prospect, rather than that you've somehow cleverly worked around the pain.

The post is (likely) a good lens to evaluate your own life, and especially to leave behind baggage from previous less-privileged generations that might not apply any more, but make sure not to misapply it as a lens to view the rest of the world, to whom it likely doesn't apply and may even be counterproductive.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.

―How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham

I've been sitting with this post for a couple days and I'm starting to feel like it is only the tip of the iceberg. Here are three more pieces of the phenomenon to add some color:

1. My brain may be artificially injecting unpleasantness into effort. When engaged in activities that fall into the category of "work" I think my brain adds additional, unnecessary doses of drowsiness, anxiety, and feelings of low status and low agency. While doing the same activity, I can make these feelings disappear by remapping the activity in my head as "play." I hypothesize that this is an attempt to prove to myself that I am the kind of person who tries hard.

2. In attempts to reintegrate old memories of working hard in school, I feel a mental flinch every time I suggest the hypothesis that "In this instance, I put myself through a ton of pain for no reason." I predict that the primary immune reaction people will have to reading this post is the feeling of "This can't be true, or else all my suffering would have been pointless!" People like very much to ascribe meaning to suffering. This also maps onto behaviors like "Back in my day..." complaining and slapping people down for looking for easy weight loss solutions "because losing weight is supposed to be hard."

3. Part of the "pain is the unit of effort" heuristic is that pain is supposed to be the signal that you've exhausted your mana bar. Part of why it's so attractive is the idea that if you don't spend your mana, you're wasting it. So you work up to your pain tolerance to spend it all. My rebuttal to this model is that human energy is really frigging weird and a fixed mana bar is not a good model for it. I can have an entire afternoon of small group meetings and come out of them feeling more energized than I went in. Others have claimed that human energy is even weirder; for example in the discussions around Kensho [LW · GW] I recall Valentine making a claim (can't find the exact place) indistinguishable from "There is a way to input ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA into the brain through meditation practices that unlocks infinite energy mode."

Not a direct response to the post, but on the same broad topic:

It seems to me that many people (e.g., me and several people I've discussed this with) have not so much an intrinsic aversion to pain as a fear of how we'll act if in pain. (As the main effect. I do also simply like not being in pain, but the fear of how the pain will impact my actions is/was often the larger of these two.) So, for example, a person will avoid seeking out bad news about their project not so much because they mind the pain as such, but because they aren't sure whether they'll act funny or have trouble working or similar if they're suddenly sad. Or a person will try to manage their moods not so much to avoid the mood as such, as to avoid being grouchy toward those near them, or to avoid being a downer at the party.

In my experience, increases in my ability to try in deep/effective ways have several times come via decreases in how afraid I was of being sad/upset (and/or increases in my ability to act well despite being sad/upset). Acquiring less of a need to manage my own mood was important and useful for me. When trying to put up a pretense of "everything is okay and I'm fine," I couldn't think properly. (I still have some of that, and it is still a barrier to thinking, but less.)

This has seemed true for me despite it also seeming true that when I am trying my best, I am often/usually free and happy. (And that if I look for where I have a "posture of pain", I can often thereby locate a place where my form is poor and is wasting my energy.) Trying well for me has often involved a sort of happiness.... but first it has often involved pain/fear/similar as I integrate what I do not know how to integrate.

(None of this is intended as advice. I don't know you, whoever you are who is reading this, and I don't have a good grasp of how you're currently put-together and kind-of-stable.)

My problem is less internal confusion about pain equaling effort and more of a need to credibly perform painful effort to others. I fear that if I’m happy and relaxed and don’t perform well, it will seem as though I didn’t care about my collaborators or that I cavalierly stole my employer’s money. On the flip side, I seem to think that I can purchase the right to be lazy/not expose myself to criticism by making myself suffer— conspicuously, so those to whom I am responsible see it.

I don’t think my fears of not suffering when I’m “supposed to” are entirely baseless. When your boss thinks pain is the unit of effort, it’s at the very least your unit of evaluation. But I think most of that is in my head, and that I superstitiously believe the pain of effort and self-flagellation can protect me from the pain of judgment.

I very recently realized something was wrong with my mental stance when I realized I was responding to work agenda items with some variation of the phrase, "Sure, that shouldn't be too painful." Clearly the first thing that came to mind when contemplating a task wasn't how long it would take, what resources would be needed, or how to do it, but rather how much suffering I would have to go through to accomplish it. This actually motivated some deeper changes in my lifestyle. Seeing this post here was extremely useful and timely for me.

"If it hurts, you're probably doing it wrong." This is just an assertion from an analogy with sports, where even the analogy is false - elite athletes put themselves through a ridiculous amount of pain.

In fact, I'd argue the exact opposite: the fact that intellectual work is currently much less painful than athletics suggests that there are still big gains to be made via painful interventions. Perhaps that pain comes from not seeing your friends as often, and spending weekends in the lab; or from alienating people by demanding higher standards from them. (Sure, not all pain is useful - but I'm arguing on the basis of a few examples that there are some good painful interventions, whereas you seem to be arguing from a couple of examples that there are almost none). People don't currently make those interventions because the rewards aren't high enough, but they would if the rewards of academic work were more heavy-tailed, like they are in sports. As evidence for this, note that the domain where rewards are most heavy-tailed (entrepreneurship) is notorious for being painful: "It’s like chewing glass and staring into the abyss."

Normatively, also, people in intellectual domains probably should make more of those painful interventions because the rewards to society of them becoming better are very heavy-tailed even though their own personal rewards are not (being the best academic in a field is not that different from being any other tenured academic).

I originally made this argument here: https://twitter.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1327611320431239168?s=19

Note: in its original form, this comment also attempted to predict how this post would fare next year in the 2020 LW review. After receiving feedback from alkjash, I excised this. I still want to find a way to achieve my intentions with such predictions. But it is far more important to maintain a sense of warmth and camaraderie, and my original post failed to do that. For that, I apologize to alkjash.

In my experience, the idea that "no pain, no gain" is false is extraordinarily prominent. To the extent that we have to ask why highly educated Westerners are continuing to make themselves miserable despite almost all life advice givers consistently saying that they should focus on being happy and healthy first?

I have never been seriously told "no pain, no gain," or encouraged to view pain tolerance as a virtue. Showing pain was an occasion to question whether I was making fundamentally wrong life choices, to the extent that I would hide pain that was an ordinary consequence of challenges or imperfect decision-making in order to avoid the additional irritation of misplaced concern. Even in situations where nothing can be done about a source of discomfort, it is the expected default that everyone involved will agree that "we should make a change," even when no better option is apparent.

My guess is that if people deal with a lot of misery, it's not because they prefer it or think it's instrumentally useful.

One alternative explanation is that people pursuing accomplishment are usually in the midst of a learning process. Trying to refine it to the point of "doing it right" would actually be harder than pushing through the pain to get the basics before refining the details.

For example, I'm currently in the midst of a journey into grad school. I am taking lots of hard classes, working, doing applications, and trying to maintain relationships in the midst of a pandemic. Sometimes, I miss sleep. Sometimes, I fritter away my free time playing online chess. Sometimes, I eat take 'n' bake pizza several days in a row. Sometimes, I feel really frustrated with my classes.

The way I see it is that I've never tried to do this before. I'm in the midst of figuring out how to balance and accomplish all of life's demands. If I made "be happy on a day to day basis" my top priority, I think it would be extremely hard to also accomplish my career goals. Instead, I put my career goals first, and aim to have as much happiness as possible within the pressures that puts on me. Sometimes, that amount is "not very much." But I hope that it will grow with time.

In other words, "sometimes, people trade pleasure in the moment for long-term meaning or investment, and fail to get both because it's a harder task to be happy and successful than to just be happy or just be successful."

If you want to achieve a goal, you usually need to do many things. Some of them are unpleasant. Avoiding unpleasant parts means you will get the work half-done, and then give up.

Even if you do the right thing, being too comfortable probably means you are not doing as much as you could have.

This would suggest that the right way involves a lot of pain: you do the unpleasant thing, and you do a lot of it. So people will interpret your lack of pain as a signal of failure (either to do the right thing, or to do enough).

Unfortunately, per Goodhart's Law, you cannot find the right way by simply trying to maximize pain. Some useless or harmful things are painful, too. Also, after a difficult exercise, muscles need some rest to recover.

Unfortunately again, from outside "understanding that you cannot find the right way simply by increasing pain" seems very similar to "avoiding the unpleasant parts, and rationalizing it". If your reward depends on other people's judgment, you better include some useless pain, too.

Personal experience:

I used to be good at math. But I never studied hard. I mean, I was reading math books in my free time, I thought about math a lot, and I participated in many math competitions. But I never did this: "take a book with hundreds of exercises, sit down and solve the exercises one after another, then report to some adult that you did this". As a result, even after winning a few math olympiads, my teachers believed that I mostly got lucky, and I didn't get some rewards the school gave to classmates who had comparable results but "actually deserved them".

Curated. The anecdotes and antidotes shed light on what seems to me to be a pretty prevalent error mode, and I appreciate the clarity the post brought to discussing it and helping see past it.

I recently read David Goggins "Can't Hurt Me". On one level it does glorify superhuman pain tolerance. But a constructive perspective on such attitudes is: they illustrate courage. Do not tolerate pain, laugh at it! Do not tense under cold shower, relax into it. Do not bear problems, solve them.

I like this.  A lot to chew on for me. Especially the "optimize for the appearance of suffering" part.

A corollary of this is that when things are too easy (low pain) they are "cheating", "don't count", or somehow "illegitimate".  I may have been making things too hard on myself for just that reason. 

There are different kinds of pains. Different pains provide different signals. Some of those are useful while others aren't. 

If you do sports and stretch yourself, it comes with a specific kind of pain that's part of stretching. On the other hand there's pain that's a sign of doing things wrong. 

One of the key Radical Honesty teachings is being able to distinguish when having a touch conversation is good pain and when it's just needless suffering. The same goes for other domains. Striving to feel no pain is a bad plan as is striving to feel as much pain as possible. It's about being open for the right kind of pain in the right context. 

It seemed to me that "actually trying" - aiming the full force of your being at the solution of a problem you care about - is self-evidently motivating and requires zero extra justification if you care about the problem.

This is basically my mindset as well. In situations where I would ask "Why is nobody actually trying?" it would mean something like "I wish everyone else would care about this outcome as much as I do." If people aren't optimizing for results, they could be optimizing for appearance of effort (which would in some circumstances look like optimizing for pain), or they could be optimizing for something else entirely, such as enjoying themselves, personal growth, or impressing a particular person or group.

The specific "happiness means you're not trying hard enough" mentally is not one I remember encountering, though I also haven't had that concept available as a hypothesis, and my prior was against it since it seemed so obviously confused, so maybe I just didn't recognize it when I saw it.

This is one of those posts, like "when money is abundant, knowledge is the real wealth," that combines a memorable and informative and very useful and important slogan with a bunch of argumentation and examples to back up that slogan. I think this type of post is great for the LW review.

I haven't found this advice super applicable to my own life (because I already generally didn't do things that were painful...) but it has found application in my thinking and conversation with friends. I think it gets at an important phenomenon/problem for many people and provides a useful antidote.

As someone with a various cocktail of (admittedly well-managed) mental illnesses, I actually find this post very helpful! I've often observed a lack of correlation between the pain someone is enduring and their overall productiveness/life enjoyment/etc. I think this is a really useful way to address that the reason this doesn't correlate is because there really isn't a correlation. 

I wonder if you have any thoughts on better units of effort to use instead (either convoluted ones to ponder or Quick Tricks that could be quickly implemented into one's mental framework) ?

I think this post does a good job of focusing on a stumbling block that many people encounter when trying to do something difficult. Since the stumbling block is about explicitly causing yourself pain, to the extent that this is a common problem and that the post can help avoid it, that's a very high return prospect.

I appreciate the list of quotes and anecdotes early in the post; it's hard for me to imagine what sort of empirical references someone could make to verify whether or not this is a problem. Well known quotes and a long list of anecdotes is a substitute, though not a perfect substitute.

That said, the "Antidotes" section could easily contain some citations. for example:

If your wrists ache on the bench press, you're probably using bad form and/or too much weight. If your feet ache from running, you might need sneakers with better arch support. If you're consistently sore for days after exercising, you should learn to stretch properly and check your nutrition.

Such rules are well-established in the setting of physical exercise[...]

There are 4 claims being made here, but if the rules really are well established, shouldn't it be easy to find citations for them?

I don't doubt those claims, but the following claims:

If reading a math paper is actively unpleasant, you should find a better-written paper or learn some background material first (most likely both). If you study or work late into the night and it disrupts your Circadian rhythm, you're trading off long-term productivity and well-being for low-quality work.

I'm more skeptical of. In many cases there is only one definitive paper on a subject in math research. Often it's a poorly written paper, but there may not be a better writeup of the results (at least for modern research results). Studying late into the night could disrupt one person's Circadian rhythm, but it could be a way for someone else to actually access their productive hours, instead of wasting effort waking up early in the morning.

These aren't criticisms of the core point of the post, but they are places where the focus on examples without citations I think move away from the core point and could be taken out of context.

The comments outline a number of issues with some of the framing and antidote points, and I think the post would be better served by making a clearer line about the distinction between "measuring pain is not a good way to measure effort" and "painful actions can be importantly instrumental."

I can imagine an experiment in which two teams are asked to accomplish a task and asked to focus on remembering either "no pain no gain" or "pain is not the unit of effort" and consider what happens to their results, but whether one piece of advice is better on the marginal seems likely to be very personal and I don't know that I'd expect to get very interesting results from such an experiment.

This is not quite right - pain isn't the unit of effort, but for many things it's correlated with whatever that unit is.  If you avoid unpleasantness, you'll likely be putting in less actual effort than is rewarded for many of your goals.

Unfortunately, all of the relevant inputs are hard to measure, so it's VERY hard to know when it's too much or too little.

Love much of this post.

Related realisations for me:

1. Making my work more pleasant and cosy is not an inherently bad thing, to the contrary. If I feel vulnerable and need to get some stressful work done at home, lighting some fairy lights, putting on noise cancelling headphones with rain sounds, snuggling into a warm blanket, with a hot cup of cocoa and a bowl of berries, will make the whole experience far, far more cosy. That makes me want to happily do it longer, and feel less tense, less stressed, less overwhelmed. This makes me more effective. I could take these dirt cheap comforts away, and that would make fighting my way through a confusingly worded and yet very important funding form far more stressful - but it won't get me to finish the form with more speed or accuracy, just leave me more miserable, which is neither productive nor sensible. If I want to do more and better work while staying calmer, I should make everything about it that I can awesome. As a consequence, I restructured my work space - my desk looks inviting, and I have a cosy reading nook; people step into my office and say it makes them want to work there. It makes me want to work there, too, that is the whole point.
2. The physical exercise that actually makes me feel best on an everyday and long-term level is not training though pain until failure. There is some "good pain" involved in training, of course - but you shouldn't have bad pain. I used to do that, and as a result, I had muscle ache essentially every day until the morning on which I would train again, meaning while I looked very muscled, I tended to be too hurt to actually be able to use them effectively for real life - you know, lifting things for a friend, fucking my girlfriend hard, the reasons I had actually wanted muscles in the first place. I also kept injuring myself, badly, over and over, with some of those injuries permanent, and most of them disruptive. How silly is that, when I am primarily working out for health? Nowadays, I train more often, but with good form, while listening to my body. I've incorporated swimming, sauna, yoga, low impact cardio on a crosstrainer. I still get intense training impulses for my muscle and get my heart rate up, but my workouts are enjoyable, and when I leave them, I feel pleasantly spent, not destroyed. And nowadays, my workouts are helping protect my body for life, not break it down. My former self would have said I am not hardcore enough. My former self was less strong than I am now, though.

That said - I took far (!) more classes than advised at school and uni (had to go to the counsellor and all), just because I was so excited about everything, and I genuinely loved and didn't regret it. I didn't do it because it was supposed to be hard/painful, but because I thought school with competent teachers was fucking awesome (I went to a school for highly gifted people, and that place was heaven on earth). The idea that a moderately intelligent, moderately rational, highly educated person who had put active thought and training into teaching and had comprehensive knowledge on the topic at hand would be able and willing to tell me, at length, about mysteries that scientists hundreds of years ago would have given their right arm for, with me allowed to ask any questions, and see the equations and examples and data, handle the tech, build my own robot, paint my own painting, apply these ideas in writing, and immediately get feedback... it is like reading a paper, and when you run into something that doesn't make sense, you can immediately prod the author, and they will immediately sketch another graph, mix you a demo, recommend a book that goes deeper on this. As long as the classes were something worthwhile - and for me, that was basically anything that wasn't lessons in religion or knitting - and as long as the teachers were competent, it felt like an incredibly precious opportunity; a person whose sole qualification was teaching this very thing, and I had them nailed down in a room. I didn't want to miss biology or math or art or Japanese or theatre or history or physics. And later, I didn't want to miss philosophy of mind or phenomenology or logic...

And one of my happiest memories of studying philosophy is me reading in a library that was open 24/7, at around 2 am, in halls nearly empty, quiet, with starlight shining through the windows above, the scent of books, the rare rustle of a page or scratch of a pen. Knowing I get to study philosophy, that its wonders fill the night, that I have just now finally unpuzzled something in the book, and quietly hold a piece of truth in me, and noone else yet knows that I found it. And around me are books and journals as far as I can see, and my laptop is next to me, all filled with questions to answer, secrets to uncover, wisdom to learn, mistakes to point out and fix, thousands of years of human knowledge here at my finger tips, so exciting I cannot sleep, and yet, with a quiet and clarity that is truly beautiful. I know sleeping rhythm wise, this sort of thing does not make sense, but it felt... magical. There is a special atmosphere in a library at night, and it is a special, wondrous thing. I wanted to be there, and was glad of it. I think back on it often, and always smiling, and I never stopped hating it when I switched to a different university for my Master and that one closed at 23:00.

Just to underline the fundamental question: if pain isn't a good metric (and I agree that it isn't) what is a good metric?

I'm recommending Bruce Frantzis' tai chi, qi gong, bagua etc. classes at Energyarts.com.

One of the fundamental principles is to put out reliable 70% effort-- this is enough to create progress without much chance of injury or burnout. Considerably less effort if you're sick or injured.

This is harder than it sounds, if you're from a culture which assumes that more effort = better results and is a sign of more virtue. 

Your effort level is what you can do that day. You aren't competing with yourself. You aren't expecting that you can make yourself do today what you could do yesterday. You may not be able to do as much with one side of your body as the other. Respect that. In fact, let the stronger side match the weaker side.

I tend to think of overvaluing effort as an American issue, but it appears in other cultures, too. Frantzis teaches water method-- the 70% approach-- but there's also fire method in Chinese tradition, which involves pursuing enlightenment or whatever with as much force as you can muster.

This sort of steady effort might be best for sports and qi gong, but it's my impression that high effort followed by relaxation is better for intellectual work.

For me, the main point of the post is that the role of pain is often misunderstood. Compared to the article my perception was actually kind of the opposite: That the people I knew avoided pain more than needed. They saw it as an indication of a lack of success. But the result is the same: The role of pain is often seen either as highly correlated (positively or negatively) with effort or success. 

But the pain-space is large and non-uniform. People don't always mean the same thing with pain. It can be physical harm, exhaustion, stress, mental fatigue or suffering, persistent illness, but also lack of free time or freedom, some tiredness or distraction. It goes from small to large things and people draw the boundary differently. And if you are below that imaginary boundary people don't call it pain. Don't even feel or notice it at all. Like an accepted pain set point. Parents who have adjusted to their life as parents typically accept a lot more discomfort as normal than before they had kids. As another poster wrote: The level of physical hurt we (society) accept has changed a lot over time.

And people are different. The OP describes some and is describing me here:

My classmates would sign up for eight classes per semester when the recommended number is five, jigsaw extracurricular activities into their calendar like a dynamic programming knapsack-solver, and then proceed to have loud public complaining contests about which libraries are most comfortable to study at past 2am

(though not the complaining part or about "how many pages they have left ... due in three hours"). 

I did write a program to fill the calendar with all the most interesting courses. The key here is the most interesting ones. I enjoyed it. I was not stressed. If I was not feeling well or had something else going I would just not attend the class. On the other hand, I didn't attend parties. These were stressful for me. I couldn't understand how people could enjoy these. Those seemed to be bad choices.

The upshot for me is is that you can hurt but be happy at the same time. It is pretty common in sports I think. But it also works for mental or psychological stress. My mother called this eustress. 

I think that is what Mark Manson means when he writes about what pain can you sustain. I even did an LW poll back then [LW · GW] about that question - adding more pain dimensions. What is pain for one person is something that is in the healthy range for another. Note that I am talking about the exact same objective level of hurt or effort. A young athlete clearly can endure much more hurt than an untrained or old or healthwise unlucky person. I remember a post about the acceptable window with some people having a wide range and others barely any non-hurting maneuvering space but can't find it. I think there should be a conversation about what your healthy and sustainable pain level is.

Brienne Logan gives some advice on figuring our physical pain. But I agree with the OP that we need more guidance on mental pain. Your task is to find ways to be happy with a moderate level of pain. 

Related: George on Seinfeld acting angry at work to make it look like he's busy.

"If sex is pain in the butt, you are doing it wrong!" was a semi-humorous reminder from one of my former coworkers in situations like you describe.

This is a wonderful point made well. I know who have fallen into the trap of taking the path of most resistance for reasons like those you lay out.

My own (less clear) version of a similar concept was a strong dislike of the saying "work ethic". What is ethical about working?

Some comments:

(1) I have noticed some cultural correlations in this area. In my limited experience Danes approach this issue in a more healthy way that the English. A colleague who used to work in Japan complained bitterly about his Japanese colleagues making themselves (and him) miserable with mountains of needless and unproductive busywork - which sounds like a strong manifestation of this effect.

(2) Early PhD students seem to be very susceptible to this thought-trap. 18 months into a typical physics PhD you will have nothing tangible to show for your efforts. Your code/maths/experiment will either not work or you will have discovered that the result it gives is trivial. At this point many PhD students start trying to latch on to anything that is a demonstrable time-sink. I suspect that the less tangible the output the stronger the effect you describe is likely to be.

I agree pretty much with everything you said, and most of this stuff applied to me at some point in my life.

In high school and for years afterwards I was really big on powerlifting. I had a friend who I trained with, and this guy was very very hard on himself. He always seemed to push himself 100% and beyond. I was by nature more lenient to myself, but the idea of trying and going really hard got stuck to me. I did get pretty strong, sure. But also at some point I started dreading the gym. But I was afraid to quit, because I didn't want to lose my gains. I also became much more concerned with food than I used to be, and had strict rule that I could eat snacks only once per week.

At some point I started therapy for other issues, and along the way realized that I was clinging to gym and pushing myself for really no benefit at all, actually to my own detriment. I quit the gym, allowed my self to snack, and picked up a new hobby I liked. None of my fears came true. I lost a lot of weight of which pretty much all was fat, so I was feeling great. I loved my new hobby (alhouthg I brought with me the need to push myself) and felt better emotionally too. Eventually I l relaxed with the new hobby too. Now I wonder why I was doing all that forcing before? I'm feeling so much better all around after letting go of that must do mentality. I do still push myself, and sometimes find myself thinking I'm not doing enough, but I'm more aware of it.

Thank you! I needed to read this.

Also, A lot of stuff written about here are worse in communities where prosperity is recent or yet to come.

The more bitterness you swallow, the higher you'll go.

―Chinese proverb.

Do you have the original Chinese?

I personaly only put 20% effort into 80% of everything. Getting in the Pain region of "how hard you try" should only be done when you know the effort is worth it.

It seems that getting into pain is not the problem. Rather contrary, i think knowing that the pain was worth it and one has achieved something incredible is fundametaly positive. At least for me. 

The problem seem, that people are constantly in pain for things they shouldnt be. Family, kids, jobs, hobbies, looking attractive, studying for best grades,... they want to reach 100% in all areas. Which is per definition not possible when your scale are the performances of others.

Putting 20% effort into as many areas in live as possible, with selected bursts of maximum effort, seem to be at least for me the better strategy to be happy. 

I find your first anecdote quite interesting. It speaks of a much larger fallacy: the convention of using rewards to make ourselves feel better in an emotional trough. I watched Eric Edmeades once speak on this topic. If our go-to behavior when we feel bad is to do the things we enjoy, in an understandably naive attempt to feel better, are we not reinforcing the same behavior that got us there in the first place? Although far from a full-fledged behavioral theory, I think this idea is worth contemplating.

On a different note, something my yoga teacher once said really struck me. His claim was that when we adopt a "no pain, no gain" attitude, we condition our success and happiness on suffering, and do not allow ourselves to experience the full extent of life's pleasures. (Not hedonistic pleasures, but ones of the heart — whatever that means to you.) I know Alan Watts talks about these ideas as well — the fact that you can suffer immensely and achieve unimaginable things, but none of them would bring you closer to your true self — although I cannot seem to find the source I am thinking of right now. In adopting these "alternative" perspectives, it seems almost foolish that we should ever condition our happiness on suffering.

After that conversation, I realized that in focusing on pain as the unit of effort, as you say, I lose the ability to focus on the effort itself. In this sense, effort does not imply suffering, but merely the act of doing something. I cannot nurture deep focus when my mind is constantly refreshing my perception of pain and optimizing for it. ("Perception" here might be key.)

The predominance of this mindset might be the result of a simple failure to distinguish between "progress often requires pain" and "pain leads to progress". It might also be a much deeper issue with predominant cultural archetypes and expectations. An interesting question to consider, thank you for starting this conversation.

I think there's another aspect that you haven't mentioned.

I've found that when I've overburdened myself with work, I tend to cope through copious amounts of caffeine. Over time, this habit limits my overall productivity, and forces me to undergo painful withdrawal symptoms to return to normal. When someone turns to alcoholism to escape the stress in their life, they limit the amount of productive time they can spend solving the problems that lead to their stress. The same goes for many ultimately destructive habits: binge eating, gambling, smoking, memes (yeah, they do decrease productivity), television, video games, violence, promiscuity, procrastination, and so many others.

I'm an undergraduate student, and the thing I've noticed about my unsuccessful friends is that pretty much all of them fell pray to one or several of the above and could not put them down. Habits that develop in the sake of escaping immediate pain ultimately produce more pain.

However, if you don't have any of these habits, I've found that the process of learning can be quite fun.

So, I suppose I agree with you, in a roundabout way. The relatively pain-free lifestyle is better, but I think it's a result of knowing how to spend your time on things that don't immediately feel good and less about being inclined to appear as though you suffer.

relevant meme https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/k3u4z9/never_give_up/

Wow, this post describes 100% of my life.

I may add, from experience, that this condition is quite complex to cure. I understand that there are tasks that either can't be cheated through or maybe you just need to be very-very lucky to do them without much effort, because all the tasks with that property have been automated and the world is not heaven yet. Therefore all the things that tell me "you shouldn't experience pain to make an effort towards a task" make me not believe in them, because pain IS effort, and such allegations propose to cheat the way through every task possible. It's much like a lot of syllogisms that cut greek philosophers the mental effort to actually understand reality and thus allow them to instantly "understand" all of existence — I just don't consider that as anything serious and often don't even try.

When I occasionally try to address the issue of too much pain during my effort, it is instantly, immensely painful, because if successful, it would cut a lot of pain-effort from all other tasks and therefore must be the hardest-painful task I will ever accomplish. This sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but "this just CAN NOT be easy, this must be painful" is what I feel every time I am presented with a trick to make my work less painful.

The general issue I am "working" with in therapy (rather, complaining about it, because it does not require effort, and I like my therapy sessions) is my anxiety. It is the primary source of the pain from my efforts for the last couple of years. Recently I have experienced a sort of epistemological shock that triggered a lot of reflection on myself. I have confronted the question of "why do I not keep main questions related to my job always in my head, and why do I not consider my actions from the point of these questions but instead do it just when the actions feel cool, or worse, if the action will seem to others like I'm doing the work". The stance my brain has taken is that the point I just can not push myself through is the point of setting the goal. Like, I just cannot let the profit or some other objective stat to guide my decisions, I actively resent it and continue to "keep with the flow of my mind". To set a goal, to let the numbers guide my decisions even for a few hours, seems very wrong and excruciating. I don't know how to come out of this pit yet.

Also I am very surprised with why do I even make as much money as I make now, with such a severe case of this effort-pain bias, given that my colleagues do not have it as bad.

Chinese webnovels are addictive. 

On a more serious note, in between seeing face slaps and beatdowns, I do sometime read about the overarching themes behind these novels. 

If you prefer urban novels in modern China, the focus on 'success' is lots of face slapping on people who looked down on you. Lots of "Junior, do you dare" and Jade beauties falling in love. Climbing up by stepping on others and having conspicuous signs of wealth. I take it as a sign of an ultra competitive society.

The protagonists of Chinese webnovels are sometime murder hobos and self centered. Systems and old magical grandpas offer an easy way to escape the Rat race and get to the top - whatever that means. I think it does reflect the preferences of the millions of chinese youngsters who face gruelling hours of exam prep and millions of potential rivals for few spots.

Contrast with Japanese novels where protaganists are sometimes irritatingly dense and introspective. Perhaps it reflects the different nature of pain and success in Japanese novels. 

This might seem like an off beat post and it is. But there are few things as revealing as cheap webnovels written for the lowest common denominator. Espescially given the prevailing rates of exhaustion among Asian youngsters. Me just wanting to talk about webnovels is entirely unrelated.

"Losing money to become a tycoon" is genuinely an amazing novel that I would recommend as it indirectly covers these topics of 'pain' and success. Mao Ni is also amazing but has absolutely nothing to do with the topic.

At one point, IIRC, I thought pain, or at least exhaustion, was meritorious. My mother and grandmother sure did. They'd have contests!

Later, I saw thru that. Play is more productive than work for the same task. Go for the joy. That sort of thing.

But think about it from the perspective of someone with chronic illness, or severely overworked, or in a great deal of emotional pain (death of a spouse or child, or other reasons). You'll have heard the analogy of spoons (https://www.healthline.com/health/spoon-theory-chronic-illness-explained-like-never-before). Such a person must plan out the amount of effort she's able to put forth in the day, and allocate it to what she finds most important. And suffering pain does take it out of people.

I'm not ill, but I am getting old (first time I have ever said that!), and I am being gentle with myself now. If there's something that is really unpleasant, I let myself take major breaks before or after or both. 

Yet I still tell students: your work should be joy to you.

I think both sides are right.

I have heard the idea that some people especially regard having children as a feat, that you are a good (not frivolous) parent only if you don’t get enough sleep all the time, spend all the time cooking for the child, you can’t go to the movies, go on vacation and so on.

I enjoyed reading this. I also have a few thoughts about what it means to master something and what that journey looks like. 

Is it possible to truly become a master of a field if you're not putting in a superhuman effort? I agree that pushing yourself to the point of burnout is not the answer; but on the other hand, as a teacher, I once was with a parent who allowed their child to take a break after writing just a few letters when the assignment was to write all twenty-seven.  As long as the assignment gets done eventually, that's fine; however, we want to build up our endurance over time so that later we can also do more and achieve more. I'd agree that saying "No, write ALL twenty-seven now, no matter what!" is probably not a good solution... But maybe we could have said, "Okay, you want a break? How about we get to 10 letters and then you can have a short rest.  Agreed?" 

My point is: Maybe people don't need 'pain', but maybe they do need the 'push,' or at least some of them do. We do want to instill in our children a drive to succeed and to learn even when it's not easy... Because as a teacher I know that learning is NOT always easy and it's not always possible to make it fun. Sometimes you just need to learn it and get it over with.

This is probably exacerbated in China where there are a LOT of people willing to push themselves too far, so if you're not one of them, you'll fall behind fast. This is not a healthy learning environment either, because people will become jaded and fall out of love with the thing they love to do. 

Shuzan held out his short staff and said: "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"

I think the dichotomy you are proposing is one of many paradoxes where it just depends. Yes, if you break your wrists trying to bench press too much, you’re doing it wrong. If you try to bench press just under too much, you will achieve maximal strength gains overt time. You will also be very sore and experience some joint pain.

Absolutely agree we live in a culture of almost performative pain and sacrifice. Like the whole “rise n grind” scene, etc.

I prefer to think of growth and achievement as best done by “working smart” rather than “working hard”. I think it’s what you are saying essentially but in my conception of “working smart”, there definitely is room for strategic pain and in some cases the optimal approach is take on as absolutely much pain as you can stand (up to perhaps “injuring” yourself) to even have a chance of achieving the cases’s goal. Think of [practically] one-off concerns like taking the LSAT or qualifying for the Olympics before you are too old.

Answering emails at midnight and appearing fatigued at meetings are somehow taken to be more credible signals of effort than actual results.

I suppose this is not the point of the post, but I find this to be good advice in competitive settings with this belief. 

Not actually getting close to burn out, but just appearing like you are about to, while pretending to be trying not to show it...

Psychology has good evidence that there is an "optimal level of effort" you need to reach to improve optimally at something. If you find something to be easy that's good for you and means you can do what you needed to reach your goal quickly, but your brain won't likely be improving much when you are doing it. 

Usually this "optimal challenge" feeling is pretty pleasant, you get the feeling of being totally immersed in what you are doing and of having meet a tough, fun challenge. 

If you are in any pain you feel discomfort about it, you're generally past this point and I'd agree you need to turn back, I don't think someone can genuinely confuse the two feelings, but people seem to reason "bit of pain = bit of progress, lot of pain = lot of progress.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Is from Nietzsche (well before Clarkson or Kanye)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_does_not_kill_me_makes_me_stronger

This is nice. But of course sometimes it hurts to try to do something you should in fact do.

Then what is the unit of Effort? Any ideas?

As a generalization I think this is true but I think it is important to push yourself in instances not for semesters or anything but for a week or a day. This kind of pain in my experience leads to a lot of satisfaction. I agree that subjecting yourself to continued work along with sleep deprivation and prolonged periods of high stress is not a good idea. 

I agree that pain shouldn't measure how hard you are trying.

However, I feel like grit, while not always particularly enjoyable, is what leads to true greatness. Persevering with a challenge, that is.

Of course, there's a difference between that and meaningless suffering. I was always at odds with people working very hard on something that can be easily automated / sped up.

Hello - I am new to less wrong and I thoroughly enjoyed this short essay.  Comments:

I agree with you that many people, unfortunately, equate pain with work.  The viewpoint is actually absurd given that work is an objective measure of output and pain is an internal state.  

According to Buddhism, pain is the inevitable result of expectations and desires, because anyone who has these is bound to be disappointed at least once or (more likely) many times.  In the case of work or student life, pain is caused by the expectation of happiness being thwarted, or the desire to be doing something more pleasant.  When viewed from this perspective, it's obvious that pain will inevitably reduce output, and therefore the presence of pain is a sure sign that LESS work is being done.

When a person is producing output (working) in an arena that they find pleasing, they experience no pain because they are doing a thing that they love.  This is why musicians spend hours practicing and barely notice the passage of time.  They are objectively working, but they love the work.  When a professor challenges a student by giving that student a difficult assignment, the student will probably experience pain in the completion of that assignment for the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph - it was imposed on him, not chosen by him.  Naturally, if the student loves the subject matter, the student will do better work and experience no pain....which brings me to my next point: 

People who are experiencing pain in their work or student life are in the wrong business.

While the pain=work fallacy is pervasive and destructive, I want to bring up a related fallacy that is even worse - the idea that "if I suffer through this now, I'll be happy later."  In other words, if I experience enough pain now, I'll never have to experience pain again.  To the contrary - since pain is a sign that someone is in the wrong line of work, pain now is a sure sign of more pain later.  Compounding this, when one arrives at the point where he/she was sure they would no longer experience pain, and it's still happening, it causes even more pain.

I feel like the best "work" we all need to be doing is finding our correct place in the universe.

Rule of Power 30 from Robert Greene " Make your Accomplishments seem effortless". The people who truly do succeed in building a successful life pursue a path were any unproductive pain is avoided if not all pain. 

Pain, like money, is a measurable metric compared to skill level which is a much more abstract set of metrics to be measured on. We generally use tests and competitions to measure skill level, but during the personal growth period where those options aren't accessible, people tend to equate suffering as a result of learning to measure progress. Like you said, it's not very reliable since there is really no correlation between pain and skill level. Also your speed of learning can change how much time/enjoyment/suffering you go through as you learn, but ultimately real progress can only be measured by putting those knowledge and skills to work. That's why grades don't really matter after finishing school. There are better and more practical measures of your ability than some tests somebody came up with.

Pain is the unit of change. Effort, including of others, can be applied to minimize the necessary pain.

Unwanted or forced change is an injury, a wound, or trauma

Wanted, natural, and needed change (including healing) might hurt as much but your actions, medicine, and technology can minimize pain.