A lot of students come to me saying that they are unable to cope with academic workload. It was also a common complaint from my colleages and juniors while I was in the industry. My take on it is that each individual must learn why their work is causing effort, and to learn to cope with it in a positive manner. I will explain my view of work and effort in some simple terms.
Work: The physical or mental activity that is expended by your body while doing a task. This task could be reading a paper, studying, cooking, playing etc. Even listening to music requires your ears and brain to do some work.
Tiredness: After performing a certain amount of work, there are some changes to physical or mental capacities. The muscles become sore after playing, reading, writing, cooking, washing or cleaning. The brain similarly loses focus, feels sleepy, or starts to make errors. In extreme cases the body just fails resulting in sever pain, dizziness, dehydration, health problems etc.
Effort: As a person is working and slowly getting tired, there are two effects: (i) If a person DOES NOT love the work, the person feels more and more tired. This also turns into other physical/mental manifestations like irritation, anger, resentment etc. Under this situation, the work and tiredness turns into EFFORT. (ii) If the person loves the work, or the result of work, the person keeps recovering from tiredness very quickly, or does not get tired very soon. And even if they physically or mentally get tired, they continue the work on hand. This feels effortless and one gets positive feelings like satisfaction, joy, and pleasure.
The key to success in most aspects of life – work, study, family life or career is to determine which work is effortless for you and focus on that. If some work makes you put in too much effort, it is better you stop doing that work, at least temporarily. At first sight one may think what will others say, maybe my teacher/boss/partner will be annoyed. But in the long term, it is better to focus more strongly on work that is effortless.
In some situations like school, this may not be possible. In a standard education system, you have to pass several subjects to graduate. In this case, find which subjects you can do effortlessly and become BRILLIANT at those. For the other subjects, use any of the following strategies: (i) Take tutions from an expert and interesting teacher for the difficult subject, (ii) Study with a friend who is good at that topic, (iii) Do the minimum possible work in that subject so you may still get reasonably good grades. Remember that the professional world requires you to be good and passionate about a few topics. Everything in the world cannot be studied by everyone.
The same goes true for relationships. You prefer working in an office, but do not like housework. You do not like dogs, but your partner likes them. You like watching action movies, your other family members do not like them. Your passion is to hit the gym and maintain a ripped body, your friends think otherwise. You want to be a sportsman, but your family forces you to stick to books. First learn what your mind/body prefers. And then focus on that. Doing anything out of external compulsion will lead to too much effort on your part, and eventually irritation, anger, resentment and even failure. Lying to your partner, friends, family about your preferences is even worse. At some time the truth will come out. But it will come out with bad results.
However, doing only what you like is not possible in all relationships also. You sometimes have to do an activity or work that you do not like. You do not like paying electricity, phone, gas, water bill etc. You do not like cooking, cleaning, getting kids ready to school. But because you are in a relationship you have to do it or share these tasks with your partner. To deal with this, focus on the positive aspects of your relationship. Remember that if you want those positive aspects, it is your responsibility to do these apparently boring activities as well.
Meditation can also help you deal with the negative aspects of effort. But that is a discussion for a different day.
It is difficult to identify your effort. And it is even more difficult to convince someone else and reduce that work. If you get cannot get out of work that causes you effort, the second best approach is to tell yourself that this work is inevitable. Use meditatation or any other tool you favor to tell yourself that becoming negative about the work will not help change the condition, or help you in the long term. But at the end, do not lie to yourself and hold the negative feelings inside of you. Recognize and eliminate them if possible. If not possible, keep looking at the negative feelings when you meditate; you will soon realize that you are stronger than those -ve feelings.