Thinking Space

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his study defined the terms Elephant and Rider for our emotional and rational sides.
Although Elephant (emotional self) has its visible weakness of being lazy and we tend to blame the Elephant for its inaction for change, however the rider (rational self) has its own problems of over-analysing the change and exhausting itself in the process.
In an experiment researchers asked two group of students to taste the sample of foods and record their liking.One group of students were given freshly baked cookies and radish and were instructed to only eat cookies, while the other group was instructed to only eat only radishes. After the experiment, another team of researchers in a seemingly unrelated study asked both the groups to trace on difficult/unsolvable geometric shapes without lifting up the pencil. The cookie eater tried for nineteen minutes before giving up, while the radish eaters gave up in eight minutes only.

It was concluded that radish eaters exhausted all their self-control in the first experiment.

So what looks like the laziness for change is often the exhaustion.

Sources and adaption based on ‘Switch’ by Chip and Dan Heath.