Exploit Your Lizard Brain
Using Your Primal Instinct to Your Advantage
This is how I generate motivation at will.
The Theory
Why do you eat that cheesecake when you’re trying to stay in shape?
Why do you stay up so late binge-watching Netflix, when you have that big event tomorrow?
It’s the Lizard Brain.1
The Lizard Brain demands a lot, from eating and sleeping to doom-scrolling.
It wants all sorts of short-term gratification. And because of that, we also end up procrastinating. We can basically blame most of our daily struggles on it. It’s just like wisdom teeth, which may have been helpful to our ancestors but bring nothing but trouble in modern times.
However, what if we can exploit it to our advantage?
The Application
Chances are, you’re already doing it in some way.
1. The most common way is to reward yourself for completing something challenging.
For example, treating yourself to a nice dinner for getting your driver's license. By tricking the Lizard Brain into thinking the challenge had something to do with the reward, you turn it into your ally, so you can tackle that challenge together.
One reason the Pomodoro technique works so well is because it uses break time as a reward for focusing on work.
Building on this simple idea and Simon Høiberg’s 50-30-20 rule, I recently came up with a technique called Eat the Dessert, as opposed to Eat the Frog. The idea is to frame a fun and joyful part of the work as dessert and put it away. Until I complete the dull part of the work, then I get to reward myself by eating the dessert. Essentially reward working with more work.🤣 And my Lizard Brain totally bought it. I ended up working too much and messed up my sleep schedule.
Based on your interests and circumstances, you sure can find your own way to effectively bait your Lizard Brain.
2. The more systematic way to exploit the Lizard Brain - Gamification.
Besides rewards, there is this whole discipline dedicated to (in one way or another) exploiting the Lizard Brain. It’s called Gamification.
It takes what makes a game fun and puts it into places other than the game. It has proven effective in various fields like education, management, and product design. However, applying its techniques to personal productivity can be challenging.
I’ll focus on the most approachable technique - Instant Feedback.
In games, that would be something like health bars, experience bars, or achievements.
When applied to personal productivity, it can be translated into anything that helps us sense progress. For example:
To-Do lists
Working hours
Word count
By having a better sense of progress, it’s more intuitive to connect our efforts to the outcome. And your Lizard Brain likes it, resulting in you feeling more motivated.
This is why people love those fancy Notion templates; they give a sense of progress.
The Segue to My App
Besides health bars and experience bars, there is another kind of feedback that is even more “instant“ in game design.2
Game designers call that “juice”.
A juicy game provides all kinds of instant feedback corresponding to the player’s input, such as screen shake, punchy sound, and controller vibration.
And I unintentionally applied the juice to my app. And it works surprisingly well.
That ring is a visual representation of the item counts. The animation triggers when the item count is changing.
The goal of the app is to help people capture their thoughts and then process them. The biggest challenge for me is to encourage people to do the processing.
I added the animation just for fun. Didn’t expect a simple and silly animation to have any usefulness. But surprisingly, it ended up fooling my gullible Lizard Brain again.
Because I wanted to see the progress ring to do that silly bouncy animation. I unintentionally do the processing over and over again. Before I noticed I already had cleared all my items in the Inbox.
Download my app to receive all the juice that I’ll pour into the app!
Takeaways
To motivate yourself to do things:
If it’s a simple task, promise you’ll treat yourself after you complete it.
If it’s a long-term project, break it down into multiple steps, and acknowledge your every effort is connected to each of those steps.
Do whatever you can to visualize/ quantify your progress.
Download my app.
Subscribe to Weekly Productivity Upgrade.
The term “Lizard Brain” comes from the Triune Brain hypothesis which is no longer widely accepted by scientists. However, it is still a useful metaphor to refer to the primitive and instinctual part of our mind.
The following video is the gameplay footage of Nuclear Throne, clipped from a YouTube video from Alex Phillips’ channel.