Psychic Activation Energy: Why Everything Good Now Feels Too Hard

You already know the feeling. I certainly do.

You’re about to open the book on your nightstand, or finally start the project you’ve been thinking about for six months. For a split second there’s a faint “spark” of intention.

Then you eye your phone.

A notification, a TikTok clip or two, then a quick scroll on X “just to keep up with things” -- and the spark is gone. The moment came and went. You didn’t consciously choose not to do the harder, more meaningful thing; the spark just didn't light any fire. Nothing happened.

That lost moment (and momentum) is an example of psychic activation energy: the mental cost you have to pay up front to get anything worthwhile started.

And right now, our society is systematically swiping away any semblance of capacity to pay it, with monumental down-stream consequences.

Fire, chemistry, and why nothing happens until it does

We kept a dry log sitting in our fireplace when I was growing up. Quaint, right? Fortunately for us, this room was also full of breathable oxygen. Chemically, the log was surrounded by everything it needed to burn. The cellulose in that wood is basically long chains of carbon and hydrogen just waiting to react with O₂.

So why didn’t it ever spontaneously burst into flames?

Because of activation energy. For wood to burn, those long-chain molecules have to be pushed into a high-energy, unstable configuration - a transition state - where bonds are stretched and twisted just enough that breaking them becomes favorable. That “push” into breakability costs real energy, often on the order of hundreds of kilojoules per mole for solid fuels. Heat from a match or spark raises a tiny patch of wood to a high enough temperature that:

Cellulose begins to pyrolyze - breaking into smaller fragments, gases, tars, and a carbon-rich char.
Some of those fragments react with oxygen to form CO₂ and H₂O, releasing heat.
That heat feeds back into the log, pushing more of it over the activation barrier, and the reaction runs away into full combustion.¹ You start the fire with a match, then the fire keeps the fire going.

By the time the fire is going, each kilogram of dry wood is releasing roughly ~19 megajoules of energy - enough to boil a large bathtub of water - from a process that initially needed just a few joules from a match.² So you can release a million times more energy with the match than what is contained in the match. This is a profoundly important little detail.

The log and the room are perfectly content to sit there doing nothing for years. No spontaneous combustion ever burned down my childhood home. The chemistry works only after something forces a minute piece of that wood through a painful, unstable in-between state.

No spark, no transition state, no fire - no matter how much stored energy is sitting in the wood that could potentially be liberated (here, millions of times more). And we didn't have to light the whole log, just a tiny piece of wood to get the chain reaction to keep itself going.

Psychic activation energy

Your mind works the same way. Stay with me here, the metaphor will pay off.

Almost everything that matters - real friendship, your life's work, building a marriage, starting a company - is hiding behind an internal barrier. A few basic examples of the hard start:

The first 10 minutes of reading before your brain settles into the situation. It would be easier to pick up your phone and sometimes it feels like your brain is screaming to just scroll instead of turning these stupid pages.
The first awkward realization that the person you are dating is not perfect-in-every-way and you’re dealing with a flawed being you will have to make compromises with-and-over. Yeah, you could bail. And until this message sinks in you probably will have bailed on many decent potential partners. It's part of the process.
The first 15 minutes of writing when every sentence feels like the worst writing that has ever besmirched a piece of once untarnished paper. It's the only way the good writing ever gets unearthed. It's waiting under all the garbage that has to be purged first...but you have to be able to tolerate generating actual trash for a while.

That up-front/early discomfort is psychic activation energy. It’s the unstable in-between state where nothing is settled yet and all you can feel is resistance. The urge is to bail out. Find something easier. Maybe the next guy you match with on Tinder will actually be perfect-in-every-way or tomorrow the writing will flow out of your pen effortlessly. Just pick up your always-available phone and you’ve got that easy, breezy, dopaminergeezy opportunity to flush the badness away.

However, if you can sit with the discomfort, tolerate it, push through it, suddenly things start to self-sustain; you don’t need to keep holding a match up to a log that is burning. You don't need to light the whole log. Just a tiny patch of it. Somehow, after the unstable transition period, you mentally light that tiny patch and are able to focus. You get into a conversation on a date that has a depth you couldn’t have reached without gritting through awkward lulls. The person you are dating, who is not perfect-in-every-way, reveals himself to be a genuinely interesting and kind soul worth your time and effort.

But if you never sit with the match to the wood, waiting uncomfortably (albeit pretty briefly) for the log to catch fire, it will never light on its own. The potential in your life just sits there like unlit firewood; and you, shivering in the cold, wondering why it’s “just not happening” for you.

Smartphones as low-friction solvent

Now, how do my favorite focus-destroyers actually destroy so much more of life?

Any time you approach a moment that requires real psychic activation energy--boredom, awkwardness, uncertainty, mild anxiety--you have a competing option whose activation energy is effectively zero. It’s always there and it’s always willing to give you something easy. The most corrosive component of smartphones is their permanent availability. It is the infinite scroll doom machine of mediocrity that is always there in your moments of vulnerability. And it does relieve short-term tension (by basically wiping your short-term memory).

These devices are not neutral.

We now have multiple experimental and meta-analytic lines of evidence that even just having your phone present taxes cognitive resources in the background:

When people do working-memory tasks just with their own phone on the desk (vs. in another room), their scores drop - even if the phone never sends them a single eggplant emoji.³
Replications and meta-analyses of this effect show small but consistent reductions to working memory (around d = −0.20).⁴ ⁵ ⁶
Other experiments show that merely having a smartphone visible can reduce performance on demanding attentional tasks, consistent with the idea that part of your brain is quietly working to not look at it...or remains ever-aware that your sweet, sweet smartphone might have something more pleasant just a swipe away.⁷

So before we even examine SFV and our other great societal brain-rotter that is TikTok, there is a constant reduction in capacity to pay activation energy just having an always-connected escape hatch for discomfort. Every time you sit down to do something that requires a spark, part of your limited attentional budget is being paid to your phone that is not going to the task that matters to you. You're trying to light a match in a hurricane. The thing is going to be blown out.

Short-form video and the further erosion of cognitive endurance

Then we super-charge the reduction in our capacity to pay activation energy with short-form video.

Short-form video (SFV) platforms like TikTok, IG Reels, and YT Shorts are in their own research category. A recent meta-analysis pooled 71 studies and ~98,000 participants and found that heavier SFV use is associated with worse cognition overall (r ≈ −0.34), with the strongest associations in:

Attention: r ≈ −0.38
Inhibitory control: r ≈ −0.41

The same paper found modest links between heavier SFV use and worse mental health (stress, anxiety, etc., around r ≈ −0.3).⁸ You need to be able to pay attention and inhibit the impulse to disengage when you are in the brief-but-uncomfortable activation-energy phase of a task/relationship because that is how you get through to the end of it. This is how the fire gets to sustaining itself. Attention and inhibitory control allow you to metaphorically hold the match to the log long enough to get it burning.

In a different study that looked at EEGs of SFV users, adults with higher scores on a short-video addiction questionnaire showed worse executive control on an attention network test, alongside weaker frontal theta signals - one of the key markers of cognitive control - and lower self-control scores.⁹ In other words: the more your brain is trained on rapid, context-divergent clips, the less efficient it becomes at sustaining attention and inhibiting impulses when the task actually demands control. SFV is like a person standing next to you just slapping the match out of your hand before you can even strike it against the box. It will not let you light the log, it will not even let you light the match. It kills the possibility of a spark.

If your baseline attention has already been impaired by SFV, and your inhibitory control is weaker, then the cost of pushing yourself into a demanding state--a conversation, a book, a blank page--feels even higher. At the same time, the reward for not doing the demanding work - e.g. escaping via easy digital stimulation - is always right there.

Chemically speaking, with SFV we:

Raised the activation energy required for meaningful tasks (they feel harder to start) because we’ve made ourselves worse at the things that get us through the challenge, e.g. attention and impulse control.
Lowered the activation energy for cheap alternatives (they’re one swipe away). Phones do this already but this is where most people go when the phone gets opened.
Degraded the “reaction pathway” in the brain that sustains effort once you do begin, assuming somehow you actually get through the initial phase, the “wood” you are burning has essentially been soaked, making it harder to self-sustain.

The predictable (almost inevitable) result of SFV + “smart” phones is a culture where almost everything good feels “too hard,” not because it actually is, but because we’ve perversely done multiple things to make "good" work much, much harder.

What the spark really is and does

Back to the log sitting peacefully in my boyhood fireplace.

When you put a match to wood, that tiny burst of heat doesn’t “do the whole job.” It doesn’t burn the log to ash by itself. It simply creates a thin region on the log where the temperature, gas mixture, and molecular chaos are high enough that a few bonds start breaking and reforming into CO₂ and H₂O. Some of those high-energy fragments (radicals) are short-lived, unstable, and uncomfortable states for the system to occupy.

That mess--that unstable, high-energy transition state--is the point. Without it, you never get to the clean, low-energy state where the log has become ash and (much more importantly) generated heat.

Psychically, the “spark” is the part of you willing to:

Tolerate the restlessness in the first ten minutes of reading.
Sit in the awkward silence after you ask your date a real question or have to process a response that isn’t perfect-in-every-way.
Stare at the blank document long enough for a first bad sentence to show up, and once the bad ones arrive, to keep writing.

It feels uncomfortable in-the-moment because it is a kind of instability. You are changing state. The mental wood is metaphorically going from unlit to lit. Your brain is moving from one basin of attraction (“scroll and escape”) to another (“focus and build”).

If you repeatedly snuff that spark out with lazy smartphoen swipes (or let SFV stand by your side a slap the matches from your hand), you’re not just “taking a break.” You’re training your brain that any movement toward the transition state should be aborted and replaced with the worthless comfort of digital dopamine drips.

Over time, your subjective experience starts to match our high-school chemistry metaphor: everything with a real payoff feels like it costs too much to get started.

“Hard” is data, not a deterrent

One of the lies embedded in our current digital environment is that anything that feels hard at the start is a sign something is wrong:

“If reading were the right thing for me right now, I wouldn’t be bored.” This doesn't mean you keep reading something worthless if you've given it a genuine chance. It means your reflexive instinct that you give up needs to be sat on for a bit.
“If this relationship were right, it wouldn’t feel awkward to bring this up.” This doesn't mean you stay in a terrible relationship. It means your reflexive instinct to cut bait at first signs of imperfection are sat on for a bit.
“If this project mattered, I’d be naturally motivated.” This doesn't mean you work your whole life at a job you hate. It means your reflexive instinct to whine about a task and jump to something new needs to be sat on for a bit.

If you look at a log and say, “If this were meant to burn, it wouldn’t need a match,” you’ve misunderstood this whole post. The fact that you have to pay a cost up front is not a sign the reaction is wrong. It’s a sign the reaction is non-trivial. The same is true psychologically.

The first few minutes of discomfort are not a diagnostic signal that you’re on the wrong path. That’s important data, and the discomfort is actually a feature of any transition from low-effort, low-meaning states to high-effort, high-meaning ones.

The problem isn’t that things feel hard or awkward or uncertain. The problem is that we’ve surrounded ourselves with apps tuned to interrupt that difficulty before it has a chance to flip into something self-sustaining. Again, the log, once lit, will burn on its own. But it will not begin burning on its own. It needs to be lit by you.

Rethinking your own activation energy

You can’t supplement your way out of this. (Says the guy who runs a supplement company.) There's no milligram equivalent that will do this work for you.

You can, however, deliberately re-shape the psychic energy landscape so the meaningful stuff is easier to light and the lazy, mediocrifying stuff is harder to access.

Some quick paths to longer-term wins:

Physically separate from your phone.
In the “smartphone present” experiments, the difference between “phone on the desk” and “phone in another room” was enough to change working-memory and fluid-intelligence scores.³ ⁴ That’s not a huge life overhaul but this is low-hanging fruit.
Treat the first 10 minutes as the whole job.
When you sit down to read, write, or work, define success as “I stayed in the transition state for 10 minutes without bailing.” If the metaphoric log catches fire, great; if it doesn’t, you still practiced paying the activation cost. Remember: the spark and the burn are completely different things. Get used to the process of sparking, over and over, and the burn will happen on its own.
Raise the activation energy for junk.
Delete the apps that are pure slot/slop machines (read this). Or at least bury them in a folder you have to swipe a few times to reach. Make the impulse to “just check” run up its own tiny activation energy hill.
Lower the activation energy for the stuff you say you care about.
Put the book on your side table. Keep a pen and notebook bedside. Stack the deck so the smallest nudge helps you toward the things that matter to you. The harder work of keeping the match lit is still to come, but don’t soak your matches before you start.
Re-label the discomfort.
Instead of “this feels bad, so something is wrong,” try “this is the part where the log hasn’t caught yet.” You’re not failing; you’re in the necessary unstable state between states. It’s data and it’s a good thing.

None of this is overly complicated. It can be expensive, in terms of attention, time, and willingness to sit inside a moment that hasn’t “become” anything yet. Not every log will catch fire and that’s okay. Not everyone you date should end up being your spouse. The point is to understand and execute the process (of lighting the match and keeping it lit long enough) and the results will take care of themselves.

Don’t waste the wood

The uncomfortable reality is that most of us are sitting on an absurd amount of unburned mental wood – interesting ideas/projects, potential relationships and unbounded creativity – in a room where the air is already oxygen-rich. Your log is already there in the fireplace, waiting patiently.

The limiting reagent for amazing things happening in your life is not opportunity. It’s not talent. It’s not even time.

It’s the willingness to endure the psychic activation energy long enough for the reaction to catch. You have to pay the price. You have to strike the match and hold it up to the log without knowing exactly what will happen. You might burn the tips of your fingers a bit, but you probably won’t. You just need to hold on to inspiration or desire long enough to let the reaction sustain itself. It will.

But you can’t outsource the spark/lighting the match. There is no app or supplement that will pay the cost for you. At best, you can take away some of the competing low-friction spark-blockers and build habits that nudge you toward the unstable, awkward transition states where things actually change. It’s up to you to tolerate paying the activation energy price if you want meaningful things in your life. It is worth it.

References

C.F. Nielsen. What is the calorific value of wood? Accessed 2025.
C.F. Nielsen. Energy content for various biomass (dry weight basis). Accessed 2025.
Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154.
Böttger, T., Poschik, M., & Zierer, K. (2023). Does the brain drain effect really exist? A meta-analysis. Behavioral Sciences, 13(9), 751.
Parry, D. A. (2024). Does the mere presence of a smartphone impact cognitive performance? A meta-analysis of the “brain drain effect”. Media Psychology, 27(5), 737–762.
Skowronek, J., Seifert, A., & Lindberg, S. (2023). The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance. Scientific Reports, 13, 9363.
Thornton, B., Faires, A., Robbins, M., & Rollins, E. (2014). The mere presence of a cell phone may be distracting. Social Psychology, 45(6), 479–488.
Nguyen, L., Walters, J., Paul, S., Monreal Ijurco, S., Rainey, G. E., Parekh, N., Blair, G., & Darrah, M. (2025). Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use. Psychological Bulletin, 151(9), 1125–1146.
Yan, T., Su, C., Xue, W., Hu, Y., & Zhou, H. (2024). Mobile phone short video use negatively impacts attention functions: An EEG study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18, 1383913.

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