How to Achieve Higher Performance in Your Everyday Life
When you think of high performance, you might think of a test or a race. However, we can also strive to perform at a higher level in anything we do in our everyday lives.
The focus of this post is on one particular mechanism to achieve this: When we reduce how effortful our tasks feel, we enable ourselves to sustain greater objective effort (and can achieve greater mental and physical endurance).
Imagine you're running on a treadmill, and someone is gradually notching up the speed. You'll reach a point where the effort feels too much, and you'll decide to step off.
It's clear that our perception of effort will go up when what we're attempting is objectively more strenuous. But, in fact, identical actions can feel more or less effortful depending on the circumstances. We've probably all felt this. Some days our daily routine feels harder than other days.
The topic of perceived exertion has been extensively studied in endurance sports (like long-distance running and cycling), but many of the same principles (and some of the same techniques) carry over to activities that only require mental........
© Psychology Today
