Why it's so Hard to Sit Down and Study By Jordan Peterson

Think about when you sit down to study. Your conscious intent is to study. But you know perfectly well that the moment you sit down, all sorts of distractions and fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination, non-stop and annoyingly. And there isn't a lot you can do about it except maybe wait it out.

You'll be sitting there reading, and your attention will flicker away. You’ll think, "Maybe I should watch Jane the Virgin on Netflix," or "Maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich," or "I should really clean those dust bunnies out from under the bed," or "I need to go outside for a cigarette," or "It’s time for a cup of coffee."

What is happening is that all these psychological and biological subsystems inside of you that want something are not very happy just sitting there while you read a paper you are actually bored by. So, they pop up and try to take control of your perceptions and your actions. If you are really trying to avoid doing your homework, you can take it even further: "This is a stupid course anyway. Why do I have to read this? What am I doing in university? What is the point of life?" You can really get yourself going.

Then you might ask yourself: What is it in you that is trying to avoid the work? After all, you took the course, and you explicitly told yourself to sit down and study. Why don't you listen to yourself?

Because you are a mess, basically. That is why. You do not have control over yourself at all—no more than I have control over a complicated piece of technology.

The Functions of the Unconscious

When you look at this lack of control, you have to understand the different functions of the unconscious mind.

1. The Dissolutive Function (Procedural Memory and Habits) The unconscious contains habits—actions that were once voluntary but have now become automatized and dissociated from your personality. They can lead a parasitic existence. I relate this to procedural memory.

When you practice certain habits—let's call them bad habits—they become wired into you. For example, maybe when you speak, you say "like," "you know," or "um" a lot. You've practiced that so much that you are really good at it. You would like to stop, but you don't get to, because you have built that little machine right into your neurology. It is no longer under conscious control. Anything you practice becomes a part of you, living in the unconscious.

2. The Creative Function Then there is the creative part of the unconscious. You are sitting around trying to write something, produce art, or maybe you are just lying in bed dreaming, and you have all these weird ideas. Where do they come from?

Dreams are almost impossibly weird. The strangest thing about a dream is that you are an observer in it. A dream happens to you. Theoretically, you are the one dreaming it, so how can you just be an observer? It is like you are watching a video game or a movie, but you are producing it.

The psychoanalysts would say, "No, your ego isn't producing it; your unconscious is producing it." Carl Jung would go even deeper and say the collective unconscious might be producing it. In a sense, it isn't "you" exactly—or at least, it isn't the "you" that you identify with consciously.

The Ego, the Id, and Animal Subsystems

From a Freudian perspective, the "you" that you identify with is the Ego. Outside of that is the unconscious, specifically the Id.

The Id is the place of impulses. You can think of these as the biological subsystems that govern things like hunger, sex, aggression, and basic instincts. These are subsystems that we share with animals—with mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and even all the way down to crustaceans (like dominance hierarchy circuits). These are incredibly ancient neurological systems.

The idea that you are entirely in control of them is false. You are not. I would argue that the less integrated you are as a person, the less you are in control of them, and the more they are in control of you.

When this gets severely out of hand, you see clinical manifestations. Take people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). OCD represents the dissolutive elements of the unconscious taking over. People with OCD spend half their time driven by strong impulses to do things they cannot control, and they panic if blocked. Or look at Tourette's Syndrome, where people uncontrollably perform physical tics or spout obscenities. It is as if autonomous, semi-spirits have gripped control of their behavior.

But you do not need a clinical diagnosis to see this in your own life. Think about when you become deeply attracted to someone—even someone you know you shouldn't be attracted to. You find yourself texting them at 2:00 AM when you know perfectly well you should be going to sleep. You are in the grip of something ancient and powerful, and you cannot easily control it.

That is the power of the unconscious. That is exactly what Freud was studying, and that is exactly why simply telling yourself to "sit down and study" is rarely a simple task.