Comment by crazygringo
3 hours ago
This is literally the reason that the emotion of frustration exists.
Our brain is aware of when we stop making progress towards a goal we care about. The feeling of frustration builds until it becomes so strong it essentially forces us to stop.
Then, to get rid of the emotion, we have to step back and reassess. And then either see if we should try a different approach to the problem, give up on the problem entirely, or triple-check that the same course of action is still worth pursuing and thus "re-energize" ourselves.
If we never felt frustrated, we'd keep attempting futile goals for so much longer. When you feel frustrated, the answer is never to just ignore the feeling and try to "power through". It's to step back and reassess at the first opportunity.
It's easy to confuse laziness for frustration though. I think a key requirement in your comment is that you're grounded emotionally and know what you're feeling when you do. I know too many people that give up at the first indication of resistance but I'm fairly confident its their laziness.
The difference is whether it's a goal that is important to you.
If you encounter an obstacle and just stop without feeling frustrated, then you just didn't care much in the first place. That's fine. It's not laziness, it's just not valuing that particular outcome much.
Frustration is generally a very easy emotion to identify because you tense up, get irritated, have a feeling of wanting to shout or swear, growl, etc. Even if you're in a professional environment where you can't do those things, you feel the impulse to. There's no confusing that feeling with laziness.
"Laziness" is generally a value judgment imposed by a third party, that you're not doing the thing they value as important. An employer might think an employee is "lazy", when the employee thinks they're underpaid and chooses not to do anything above the bare minimum.
I feel that's overly easy to label someone else as lazy. Some people might be of course, but we dont have insight into their inner selves. And so we dont know ehat burdens they are carrying and grappling with currently.
What looks like laziness might actually be very prudent resource conservation if you know the whole story.
It's so difficult to explain this to people who have never been burnt out. It adds to the frustration and depression when people see you that way and don't recognize how much you've been grinding in your day job while working on something else or other. It's deeply demoralizing.
But sometimes you gotta power through it, you just need to plan for it in advance, so you might feel frustrated, but know you are not mad for not stopping.
Disagree strongly, frustration is like the setup before the payoff, it's what makes figuring out something "worth" it - the more frustration, the bigger the payoff.
That's not what any psychologist would say. This isn't my opinion on frustration, this is just the standard interpretation under emotional appraisal theory.
Also, it is absolutely not the case that more frustration leads to higher payoff. There are tons of cases where frustration leads to zero payoff, and where you get complete payoff with zero frustration.
Frustration is not the same as hard work. If something takes a lot of hard work but progress is constant and clear, there's no frustration involved.
Maybe it's how frustration with what things are before can make you want to do something to change it?