Make A Habit Out Of Making Your Life Challenging

Research shows that vitality is improved by challenging avoidance, stasis and soothing habits—and instead leaning into uncertainty and discomfort. Make A Habit Out Of Making Your Life Challenging

We’ve built a world that can numb discomfort instantly, and we’re surprised we feel less alive.

As artificial intelligence makes life frictionless, we risk removing the very frictions that keep human beings healthy: effort, challenge, learning and forward motion. The next public-health crisis may be stagnation, not stress.

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The fix isn’t another pleasure. It’s progression.

Progression is not simply about moving forward; nor is it about constant achievement or relentless productivity. It is about adaptation: the way a muscle grows stronger when challenged, or a mind becomes more flexible when it explores.

Progression is engaging in challenges that expand our future capacity—physically, behaviorally and mentally.

When we do this consistently, as research conducted in my own labs (as well as many others) shows, we improve mood, strengthen resilience, enhance health and slow many processes associated with aging.

Humans thrive when they grow. This matters biologically.

Sustained engagement with manageable challenge produces a condition scientists call vitality: a functional state in which the body and brain become more resilient and flexible, and stress-regulation and brain plasticity systems operate efficiently and in coordination.

People in this state show greater long-term health.

Over time, vitality influences many of the biological processes that drive aging and age-related diseases, including chronic inflammation and loss of cellular repair efficiency.

Today, six in ten young adults, eight in ten in midlife and nine in ten older U.S. adults report one or more chronic diseases, according to analysis from the CDC. Roughly half have two or more.

Progressively active, engaged lifestyles help regulate many of these disease processes.

The result is not necessarily a longer maximum lifespan, but a slower decline and a lower disease risk; what researchers increasingly call better healthspan.

Progression shows up in three everyday domains.

Move Your Body Forward, Boost Your Life

The most familiar form of progression is physical. Aerobic exercise improves mood, cognition and cardiovascular health while reducing inflammation and stress. But the benefits do not come from movement alone.

They emerge when effort gradually increases—when endurance, strength or skill expand over time in what is called progressive overload.

The body adapts to challenge, building capacity that remains after the workout ends.

Advance with Small Actions, Gain Big Momentum

Progression also operates in daily behavior. In clinical psychology, a treatment known as behavioral activation helps people recover from depression by re-engaging with meaningful activities instead of withdrawing.

Even small actions—a walk around the block, calling a friend, finishing a task—can interrupt cycles of avoidance and restore momentum. Mood often improves after action begins, not before.

Merely setting a goal is not enough, and simply increasing activity volume is not enough either. Forward movement itself is the ingredient that rekindles energy and a sense of agency.

Explore Uncertainty, Improve Your Mood

Thoughts can progress as well. The mind can become trapped in narrow loops of worry and rumination, or it can move outward, forming new associations and imagining multiple future possibilities.

Our own research shows that when thinking is broad and exploratory, taking novel and uncertain mental paths, it can improve mood, cognitive flexibility and creativity.

Thinking that is instead repetitive and narrow—like circling in our mind around that tactless comment from last night, or all the possible ways an upcoming trip could go wrong—is linked to depression, anxiety and diminished vitality.

When thought moves forward, it recruits the brain systems involved in learning, motivation and future planning, and this forward engagement helps energize the very physiological systems that support resilience and well-being.

Nature, in its ingenuity, built an incentive system to guide us toward these benefits. Behaviors that promote progression often improve mood and well-being, nudging us to continue.

Yet reward alone is not enough. Many pleasurable habits, from scrolling and sugar to alcohol and passive entertainment, can temporarily elevate mood without building capacity.

They soothe without strengthening.

Progression is different. It may involve effort, uncertainty and discomfort, but it leaves us more capable than before.

This distinction may help explain why achieving a goal produces only fleeting satisfaction, while sustained engagement in challenging pursuits predicts longer-lasting well-being and reduced mortality risk.

The key is not the reward at the finish line. It is the accumulation of forward movement along the way.

In an era marked by burnout, sedentary lifestyles and rising mental-health struggles, progression offers a practical compass.

We do not need to overhaul our lives overnight. Progression begins with manageable challenges.

In practice, this can be simple: walking a little farther than usual, returning to one avoided activity before you feel ready or allowing the mind to move beyond its usual loops by exploring a new idea or perspective.

The question should not be “does this feel good right now?” but “does this move me forward?” When we move forward, in body, behavior and thought, vitality follows.

And over time, vitality protects what matters most: our capacity to adapt, endure and remain fully alive.

Algorithms optimize for efficiency. Human beings are optimized by effort.

Moshe Bar is a neuroscience professor at Bar-Ilan University and at Massachusetts General Hospital. The author of “Mindwandering: How Your Constant Mental Drift Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity,” he formerly served as the director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Brain Research at Bar-Ilan University.

Make A Habit Out Of Making Your Life Challenging

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