Why 'this should be easy' is the thought that's hurting you

The therapy room seems to have permeable walls, with knowledge flowing in from the outside world and lessons learned inside informing my life externally. One of the most foundational lessons I’ve learned throughout my time in practice is to be alert for when we mistake simplicity for ease.

This is such a common mistake that I find it to be almost invisible to most people, as it was invisible to me for many years. But once I noticed it, I began to see it everywhere. So let’s start with what this mistake is, and then I’ll explain why I think it has such an oversized impact on our wellbeing.

People will often tell me of something they are struggling with and complain with exasperation that what they are trying to do is easy, and the fact that they can’t perform such a simple act clearly says something negative about them as a person. The things that clients struggle with are numerous and varied, so I won’t be able to make a comprehensive list here, but common examples include performing the work tasks, doing household chores, organising aspects of their lives, managing their emotions, performing in some social setting, and many many more.

We see ourselves failing to perform these seemingly easy tasks and then feel like failures, because we feel that we ‘SHOULD’ be able to do this. After all, this task is so easy.

But the reality is that the tasks we label as easy are often nothing of the sort. They are not easy... they are simple.

To explain the difference let’s take the example of losing weight. According to the doctors and fitness gurus, losing weight is very simple. One must simply move more and eat less. More precisely one must consume fewer calories than one burns in a given period of time.

This is very simple. So simple that it seems incredible. That’s all you have to do, just that!

But what this simple little explanation fails to account for is that these 2 things are often extremely difficult to do. Moving more (exercise) is often experienced as intensely unpleasant or boring. People who are not used to exercise often overdo it and injure themselves. Lifting weights for the purpose of muscle gain is literally painful, both in the gym and the next few days due to DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness).

Eating less often comes with a host of significant side effects, including social isolation (you can’t eat the cake at the party), mood disturbance (being hangry), and intrusive thoughts (We have all craved food when we’re hungry).

These factors mean that this extremely simple instruction is actually extremely difficult to perform. But by failing to acknowledge that, and looking at the simplicity of the instruction, we delude ourselves into thinking that we are failures because we are unable to perform up to the standard we set ourselves.

Why does this matter so much?

First of all I have found in my experience that the frustration and self judgement that comes with failing to do something that one deems to be easy causes not only significant distress and negative self judgement, it also actually hinders ones ability to actually perform the task.

We get so wrapped up in our own performance and our judgement about our apparent failure, that we actually perform worse. Someone who thinks that losing weight is easy is highly likely to become discouraged once they are faced with the challenges that the task involves. This leads to the person having much less resilience and staying power in the task itself, and makes them more likely to fail.

This is why when I work with clients who want to achieve a certain goal, I paradoxically spend a lot of time on all the costs and pains that will be associated with that task. All the costs they will incur, the inconveniences they will suffer, and the length of time it will take to achieve their goal.

Interestingly once we have a clear picture on the costs that doing something will involve, the client is often much more motivated because they can understand what they need to do, and they can more accurately appraise whether this is something they are capable of. When the challenges arrive, they are prepared, and they have steeled themselves for it. This makes them much more likely to succeed in their task.

This same misjudgement that makes us quit early has a much more insidious effect. From the point of view of a therapist, the worst part of this mistake that we make is not what it does to our performance, it’s what it does to our perceptions of ourselves.

Humans have a troubling habit of taking their experiences and past performances and using them as a way to judge who they are as people.

If someone fails their driving test three times in a row, they don’t simply say that they have failed at these tests. Instead they will say that they’re stupid, or lazy, or a failure as a person.

This is a huge problem because more often than we assume, success and failure are domain specific. Failing a driving test does not make you a failure as a person, it simply makes you unable to drive. Not losing weight doesn’t make you lazy, it simply means you weigh a certain amount. But this problem of generalising specific performance to general personal qualities makes us feel that somehow this specific performance is somehow indicative of our entire character.

What’s worse is that in my experience this is at its strongest when a person has failed at something that they think ‘should’ be easy. This should is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and often exists because the person believed that the simplicity of the task means that it would be easy. This ‘should’ is where the self judgement arrives. We make assumptions about ourselves and the world not as they are, but as we believe they ‘should’ be. But the simple/easy mistake means that we often significantly misjudge this, and so we bring in the ‘should’ as a way to punish ourselves when our reality doesn’t match our imagination.

When we fail in ‘easy’ tasks, the judgements we bring on ourselves are at their most brutal and punishing. This is unfortunate because the mistake I explained above often makes us blind to the real difficulties that a task involves. And so we inaccurately and painfully judge ourselves.

I have found throughout my practice that when a person is able to understand the difference between something being simple and easy, they are much more likely to be nonjudgmental of their performance, leading to better performance and most importantly, a healthier self image.

The next time you catch yourself thinking that ‘this should be easy’, try replacing it with ‘this is simple, but it’s not easy’, and notice what changes. If you’re stuck in that gap between simple and easy and want help closing it, that’s exactly the kind of work I do in the room.