Emily McDonald explains effort discounting, a cognitive bias where your brain devalues rewards based on how hard they seem to get. A snack in front of you looks great, but the same snack at the top of a five-mile hill suddenly feels worthless, even though nothing about the snack changed. Your brain generates excuses to avoid the climb.
Effort discounting is what happens when your brain perceives the amount of effort something's going to take as greater than the reward you're going to get at the end. Let me give you an example. Let's say I put your favorite snack right in front of your face. You would probably reach out and grab it. You'd probably reach out and grab it and take a bite and get some dopamine from it, because why not? It's so easy. It's right in front of your face, especially if you're a little hungry. You would probably take a bite. But let's say I put your favorite snack, just a handful of whatever your favorite snack is, at the top of a 5-mile-high super steep hill. What are you going to do? Your brain is probably going to go, oh, it's not that good of a snack. I'm not really that hungry, right? You're going to start to come up with reasons why you don't really need it. What happened? The reward didn't change. The amount of effort changed. This is called effort discounting, right? And this is what happens. This is what your brain does to normal everyday tasks that you need to complete. Except it's not a real 5-mile-high mountain. This is just what your brain perceives it as. And this is why it's so difficult to do the thing that you need to do.
