Struggling means different things for different people. Take my mum and I. We both knit. We both practice yoga.
I find knitting pretty easy. I can breeze through a lace shawl, work a fair isle project without getting the yarn tangled, and fix a dropped stitch 20 rows down a cable (these are all super impressive, in case you don’t know what any of that means). My mum, on the other hand, calls me in a panic when she realizes that she purled one instead of knitting one and she can’t find her way out of the mistake.
Yoga is a different story. Mum can hold scorpion pose for 20 minutes, completely fold her upper body over her legs so easily it looks like she could comfortably nap that way, and handstand jump into chaturanga (all annoyingly impressive). Meanwhile, I’m just hoping someday maybe I’ll be able to touch my toes.
If you told us that we each had to give up an activity, we would probably both immediately think about giving up the one that makes us look a little bit foolish. Mum could keep being the strongest, most balanced, most flexible person in a room full of bamboo-cotton-spandex blend leggings. And could comfortably eat oatmeal raisin cookies and wow the ladies at knitting circle with my adorable double-knit bunny print blankets.
Unfortunately for our egos, that would be the wrong choice. It turns out that when mum curses over a stitch or I try to figure out exactly how a person can be expected to twist into a bizarre eagle shape and still breathe, we’re making our brains stronger.
Scientists call this Productive Struggle. They say that working hard on a difficult thing makes your brain produce something called myelin. It’s a fatty white substance that surrounds the parts of neurons that communicate with other neurons. Think microscopic ice cream around microscopic popsicle sticks. Much like I do, neurons absolutely love being surrounded by ice cream (or myelin. Whatever.) and it makes them send out stronger and faster signals.
That’s as far as I’ll go about the science part. I’m not a neuroscientist. Those classes would have been really hard, and I didn’t know about the whole struggle-is-good thing when I was in school.
I will tell you what I think this Productive Struggle thing has done for me. For most of my life, when faced with things that have been scary to start or difficult to master in my life, I avoided them whenever I could.
But some things I couldn’t avoid. For example, I couldn’t avoid getting into running because my partner reverse-psychologied me into it like a pro. I could jog (it’s being nice to call it that) for maybe two minutes at a time the first week. It was embarrassing. I only kept at it because I wasn’t going to give smug it’s-easy-to-run-McGee the pleasure of condescendingly telling me I did my best. Pretty sure the phrase “hot mess” was invented by someone who walked by me the first time I tried to go a full mile without stopping. Every second was a struggle.
Until it wasn’t. Because eventually I wanted to get up every morning and run several miles while the sun came up. The struggle of running made me learn that I was powerful. The things I only did because I couldn’t avoid them taught me all the good stuff. The things that made me the most afraid taught me confidence and bravery. The classes that made me want to throw textbooks in frustration taught me to believe in my own intelligence.
A few years ago, when we were all wondering if we would ever leave our homes without PPE again, I read an almost unreadable research paper about Productive Struggle, compared it to my life as I did for you above, and I decided I was bored enough to make a resolution. When faced with multiple options, I would always choose the hardest thing. It might be the only resolution I’ve kept.
Personally, I have grown in every imaginable way. “Including ego,” you might say if you’re reading this, and I hear you and own that. But personal growth isn’t the biggest win from my decision to embrace hard things. The biggest win is that, when the hardest thing I’ve faced so far came along, my ice-cream coated brain knew exactly how to face it. But that’s a story for another time.
