Why making things harder might be the most useful thing you do today

Why making things harder might be the most useful thing you do today

I’ve been thinking about effort lately. Specifically, about how much of my life is set up to remove it.

My phone is always within reach. My coffee machine heats up in thirty seconds. Recipes appear on a screen the moment I type a few words. I don’t have to remember anything, wait for anything, or work for anything. And on the surface, that sounds ideal.

But there’s a growing conversation happening about whether all this convenience is quietly costing us something. It goes by the name ‘friction maxxing’, which, admittedly, sounds like something a tech bro invented in a productivity podcast. Bear with me, because there’s something genuinely interesting underneath it.

The idea is straightforward: deliberately building small amounts of effort back into daily life. Not suffering for the sake of it. Not going full Luddite. But choosing, sometimes, the slower route. The manual method. The thing that requires a little more of you.

Your brain, as it turns out, quite likes this.

There’s a principle in cognitive science called desirable difficulty. The gist of it is that learning and memory are actually strengthened when things are slightly harder to process. When you have to work a little, your brain encodes the experience more deeply. When everything is frictionless, it barely registers at all.

You’ve probably felt this. The recipe you read on a screen versus the one you scribbled in a notebook and half-memorised because you had to. The walk you planned yourself versus the one your phone narrated at you turn by turn. The book you held in your hands versus the one you scrolled through on a device, half-distracted by notifications two swipes away.

That last one is worth sitting with. Reading a physical book is one of the purest examples of chosen friction. You have to find it, carry it, hold it open. You lose the ability to tap a word for an instant definition, or jump to the end in seconds. And because of all that, you tend to actually read it. Your attention settles in a way it rarely does on a screen. There’s research suggesting that reading on paper supports deeper comprehension and better retention, and anecdotally, most people I speak to say they sleep better after a chapter of a real book than after the same amount of time on a phone.

The friction is where the thinking happens. And the thinking, it turns out, is good for you.

I notice this most in the kitchen. When I’m tired, I want shortcuts. I want speed and ease and minimum decision-making. But the evenings I actually chop something, smell something browning, taste and adjust and figure it out as I go, those are the evenings I feel most like myself. There’s something about the sensory engagement of cooking from scratch, the attention it requires, the small problem-solving, that settles the nervous system in a way that ordering something to the door simply doesn’t.

This isn’t just me being romantic about cooking. There’s real evidence that engaging your hands and senses in low-stakes tasks reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, and supports what’s sometimes called ‘active rest’, a state where your mind is gently occupied rather than either frantically stimulated or switched off entirely. Cooking, kneading bread, shelling beans, slicing vegetables; these kinds of repetitive, tactile tasks sit right in that zone. So does writing something by hand. There’s a reason journalling still has such a loyal following in an age when you could type the same words in half the time. The physical act of forming letters slows your thoughts down enough to actually process them.

Walking without your phone does something similar. Not a fitness walk with a podcast in your ears and a step count ticking over, but an actual walk where you look at things and think and let your mind wander. It feels uncomfortable at first, which is precisely the point. Your brain, accustomed to constant input, doesn’t quite know what to do with the quiet. But it adjusts. And what tends to emerge in that space is often more interesting than anything you’d have streamed.

Even music can be part of this. Putting on a full album and listening to it, all the way through, in order, is a different experience to a curated playlist that never surprises you. Albums have intention behind them. They were designed to be heard as a whole. Letting them play without skipping anything is a small act of patience, and patience, like most things worth having, takes a bit of practice.

Which brings me to the practical question: how do you actually bring a bit of friction back without making your life harder than it needs to be?

None of these things are chores if you reframe them as choices. The difference between resenting the effort and appreciating it often comes down to whether you feel like it was imposed on you or chosen by you. Autonomy changes everything in behaviour change psychology.

I think this is why so many people are quietly burning out on optimisation. When everything is hacked and streamlined, there’s nothing left to do but perform wellness at yourself. Friction maxxing, underneath its slightly irritating name, is a small rebellion against that. It’s a reclaiming of process. Of presence. Of the satisfaction that comes from doing a thing rather than having it done for you.

So this week, I’d gently invite you to let something take a little longer than it needs to. Not because efficiency is the enemy, but because sometimes the slow way is also the nourishing way.

Kim