Activation Energy: go the distance
Part 5 of 9 in the General Mental Models series
After we got married, my wife and I moved to a rented place that had been very lovingly built for a lifelong bachelorette. There was a hole in the wall separating one of the bedrooms and living room that was just the right size to fit one of those old-school cathode ray tube televisions (CRTs). If you can remember, these CRTs were bulky and boasted a long picture tube while the screens were small and curved. Which meant that we, moving in years after vacuum-tube technology had died, could only have a small 24-inch flatscreen un-smart monitor to fit the hole.
Cut to three years later when we became homeowners. The first thing we did was buy a big-screen smart TV and install it on the living room wall such that it could be seen from anywhere in the room. Then we made sure the couch, the chairs, and every other item of furniture faced the wall.
How did that matter? In the rental pad, where the entertainment set-up left a lot to be desired, we spent more time having friends over or trying out recipes in the kitchen, whereas at our own place, we spent evenings glued to the big screen. The environment we had designed for ourselves influenced our habits far more than we were aware of. The energy needed to get off the couch and do something productive was far more when a giant screen was always in the eyeline.
What is activation energy?
Activation energy is a concept in chemistry that refers to the minimum energy required to start a chemical reaction. It is an energy barrier that a set of reactants (matchstick and matchbox) have to cross in order to irreversibly produce something new (light and heat). Activation energy is the external input of energy needed to sufficiently disturb molecules such that they can overcome forces keeping them in place and irreversibly move to a new state.
Actuating a chemical reaction is like climbing a hill of energy. The height of the hill is determined by the activation energy. The higher the summit, the more the energy required to climb it. This is a necessary precondition or else coal and wood would spontaneously combust and there would be no difference between being flammable and being on fire.
Taken broadly, the model of activation energy explains a number of phenomena across domains: hockey stick business growth, compound interest, or finding product-market fit. Understanding activation energy helps come to terms with feelings of being overwhelmed in the initial stages of any substantial endeavor. It helps to know that getting started is always the hardest.
Applications of Activation Energy
All decision-making happens in the prefrontal cortex. The harder the task, the more decision-making capacity it demands, the more intermediate steps there are to get through, and the more activation energy we need to start off a process of change. That is why any new behavior is hardest to replicate the first time. But as we repeat a behavior, it starts becoming a habit–that is, becoming part of our muscle memory–and the action shifts to the basal ganglia, which is known for pattern recognition and memory. This shift frees up space in the prefrontal cortex, allowing us to devote more of it to deliberate thinking on high-leverage tasks. Experts in a domain are those who have managed to turn complex tasks into automatic behaviors by relying on muscle memory and minimizing active decision-making. In other words, experts don’t need to climb that hill of activation energy. They are perennially at the summit and ready to roll. To get to this place of deep expertise and synonymously of familiarity, however, most of us need to drum up the necessary activation energy for change.
Ever wondered why pilot episodes are so much more eye-catching than the rest of the show, with a lot more gratuitous violence or sex thrown in? The showrunners are simply trying to infuse the activation energy necessary to catch the viewer’s attention and lock her in for the season. Or why training a puppy feels so tiring? Because the activation energy to set in place a semblance of routine in an overstimulated pup’s life is high.
The model of activation energy is at work across areas of our life. The first months or years of child-rearing are the hardest for parents and makes them question their sanity. Building a new team and instituting a new culture is the most challenging task for any leader. Many uprisings promise to bring about lasting change but only a few translate into sustainable social movements.
How to Reduce Activation Energy to Start Something Good
The mental model of activation energy is most important for habit change. Replacing a pattern of unproductive behavior with a productive one without reversal requires a surge effort at the outset. While a strong motivation to change is necessary, it is hardly sufficient. What helps is practical strategies to push us through the uphill phase. Here are seven most effective ones:
Make use of fresh starts: Katy Milkman, author of How to Change, believes that a new setting can act as a clean slate and offers us a chance to reset. This explains how people pursue ambitious projects at certain times/situations such as a new year or a birthday, relocation to a new place, or career/job changes.
Make rules beforehand; don’t decide in the moment: Shane Parrish from Farnam Street suggests making rules for healthy habits you want to cultivate: no emails in the AM, no desserts after dark. The logic is that any kind of in-the-moment decision-making is susceptible to peer pressure and momentary temptations. People generally argue less with rules.
Use your environment as a catalyst: Humans are inherently lazy. We tend to adopt the path of least resistance. But if the unimpeded path leads to a healthy outcome, we don’t need much pushing. James Clear proposes setting up our living spaces in a manner that makes the default healthy (fruits on the counter, clean work station, running shoes out).
Make a public commitment pact: Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable, advises publicly betting something very valuable to you on successful project completion. Such pacts carry the dual prospect of losing a valuable possession (burn money or cut off hair) and losing your face (because you made a public announcement of your intentions). Even just tracking your goals publicly, like solopreneur Justin Welsh does, makes you work to save face.
Bundle temptations: We tend to overestimate our willpower when pursuing goals. Research shows pairing what we want to do (play video games or listen to your favorite audiobook) with what we should do (learn a new skill or work out) reduces guilt and helps solve the problem of self-control inventively.
Do category cleaning: While identifying areas of change (nutrition, fitness, relationships) in our lives, it may help to look at inter-connected behaviors within an area and tackle them together. This helps circumvent the problem of compensation that may arise when we address habits one at a time. For example, giving up only drinking if you’re a smoker too may spike your nicotine intake as your body needs to seek refuge in something pleasurable. To avoid such a scenario, it may be worthwhile to give up both at the same time.
Make the long-term palatable; if not sustainable, drop it: Think why crash diets or beach body plans are hard to sustain. Because once the goal-driven motivation wears off, the activation energy needed is too high. Attempting sustainable habit changes is important, or else any change will only be short-term.
If the thinking behind positive habit change is to reduce the activation energy required to get into a healthy routine, the opposite approach is helpful for quitting harmful behaviors. When we’re trying to reverse an unproductive habit, we’re better served by building a wall between our thinking selves and our harmful tendencies. Anything that disrupts the flow of a negative habit introduces a moment of pause in an automatic cycle and thus offers a chance to regress to a neutral pre-habit state.
Conclusion
We are a product of our immediate environment and the way we have chosen to design it. When the pandemic hit last year, I made use of the flatscreen in my living room to catch up on all the content across streaming platforms. And because watching my favorite show only felt better while sipping my favorite drink (not the right kind of temptation bundling!), for three months that became my routine. It took time and effort to emerge from this sinkhole and replace my indulgences with healthier habits.
We possess a general awareness about the magnitude of activation energy needed for certain kinds of change even when we may not have made any prior attempts. For example, we know that effecting a social change requires energy orders of magnitude more than changing your team’s culture. While this sense offers a reference point for us to navigate the external world, we may be unaware of the activation energy needed to get our lives back on track. But reminding ourselves that the start is always the hardest helps kickstart the process of change.
We tend to measure the difficulty in any habit change just by the effort needed to cultivate it. A workout habit is harder to cultivate than a flossing habit is, and a meditation habit demands more from us than a workout habit does. Yet, that’s not all there’s to it. There’s another variable here that slips under the radar: consistency. A flossing habit for life is arguably harder to practise than a workout habit for one summer. Consistency demands a measure of activation energy that we tend to discount or at least underestimate. If we define our goal as mastering the complexity and consistency in exhibiting a certain virtuous behavior, we can more accurately corral the activation energy needed for a lasting habit change. Like Akshat Shrivastava, career coach and LinkedIn influencer, opines, “the audacity is in the consistency.” This reframing of what audacious means in the familiar context of big hairy audacious goals is worth striving for.