Elliott Botterill explains why your brain, which is only 1-2% of your body weight, burns 20% of its energy. Because of this demand, your brain defaults to the easiest path. High performers have to fight this bias to reach goals that require real effort.
There are two key principles when it comes to our brains that you should understand, because as humans trying to operate at high levels, we have a responsibility to understand the biological parameters in which we have to operate in. And the first one is the energy conservation principle, which is you've got to understand that this brain, which accounts for 1-2% of our body weight, consumes 20% of our body's energy. But what this means is it's using so much energy, it will forever try and conserve energy where possible, which means if there is an easy route to keep you safe, to keep you happy, to keep you warm, to keep you alive, that is what the brain will default to. Now, you and I know that often in life the greatest things that we are striving towards are on the other side of quite long and arduous things that we have to do.
