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Key points
- New research suggests that knowing when to apply effort and when to relax can be adaptive.
- Effort feels worthwhile when the expected reward or information gain outweighs the costs.
- The brain continuously calculates eight types of effort costs, both objective and subjective.
The idea that you need to keep busy permeates much of today’s culture. Tasking, and especially multitasking, seems to be the sign of being smart. By contrast, sitting idly by while others are engaged in seemingly useful work can make you look like there’s something wrong with you. But is it possible that something is wrong with those other people?
A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Effort
In a 2026 paper led by psychologist Nathalie André and colleagues at the University of Poitiers, the question of how to decide whether to exert effort gets a fresh look from the field of computational neuroscience. In general, people (and animals) behave according to the “principle of least effort,” meaning that all else being equal, they tend to seek the easiest way to gain a reward or avoid punishment
However, all effort is not the same. There are times, they note, when effort becomes an acceptable cost. If the effort produces “proportionate outcomes,” then it could be worth investing in. The brain helps us make this decision. It “weighs the costs and benefits of exerting effort in order to allocate resources efficiently and maintain allostasis,” or the optimal use of the body’s systems. People will seek challenging tasks, such as competing in extreme sports, through this allostatic principle because they regard the effort as worth the cost.
Here’s how the brain does this. “Active inference theory” says that organisms try to figure out whether it’s worth the effort to expend their energy in terms of information gain. If you believe an effort will give you valuable knowledge, you’ll exert yourself, but if you get nothing out of it, then you won’t
People want to, in this model, avoid wasting effort. Think of it this way: You are willing to spend money on a product or service you think is worth it. You don’t completely wish to avoid spending money, you just don’t want to waste it. In the same way, you’ll exert yourself if you think that the benefit is worth the cost
The 8 Costs of Effort
This new perspective on effort shows that people don’t just coast along, putting out the least amount of energy needed to get what they want. Effort itself isn’t aversive; only effort that doesn’t produce a desired outcome is
Building on prior work by Harvard psychologist Roy Baumeister, one of the co-authors of the study, the research team broke effort down into its eight main costs, which are as follows:
- Metabolic:bodily energy expended
- Cognitive control:how much thought is needed
- Time: estimated time to complete the task
- Time pressure:how difficult the task is
- Physical and mental fatigue:whether the task will be depleting
- Pain: whether it will hurt
- Frustration:opportunity cost of tackling the task
- Risks and threats:anxiety caused by the task
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Each of these costs can have objective and subjective features. You can measure such aspects of cost as time and bodily energy, but the subjective aspects rely only on your perception. Nevertheless, the brain conducts its cost estimates on a continuous basis, providing you with information about whether you should give up or keep trying
Take the example of exercise, a favorite topic within Baumeister’s ego depletion theory. This theory explains the paradoxical ways in which people who run marathons immediately go out for a beer afterwards. You’ve done something good for your body, and that uses up all your “ego” re
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However, the cost of exercise could be seen as low effort if it’s something you truly enjoy. Indeed, exercise brings about a host of positive emotional states as long as it matches the intensity that you can maintain (before pain sets in)
All of this leads to the conclusion that effort in and of itself is not aversive. As long as your brain goes through the calculus of deciding that the costs outweigh the benefits, you’ll be willing to put yourself through whatever actions are needed to get to your goal. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an Olympic athlete or a crossword puzzle fanatic—you’ll do what you need to do to get those rewards
A New View of Laziness
Returning to the opening question of whether being idle is inherently a bad sign, you can see that tasking or multitasking is the right move when the rewards outweigh the costs. But if there’s no point, either from an objective or subjective perspective, you might as well conserve your energy until something worthwhile comes along. Returning to the money metaphor, you’ll put it in the bank if there’s nothing you want at the moment, so you’ll have some to spend when you do
Some of this may seem obvious to you, but what is particularly impressive about the André et al. article is that they were able to apply their analysis to findings from a wealth of previous studies of infants and children. These studies show that even early in life, we don’t regard effort as aversive. In one of these, 6-year-old children smiled more after completing a difficult task than an easy one. They also gave off larger smiles when a task was new than when it was repeated (involving less effort). As the author team concludes: “These findings elegantly demonstrate that pleasure tracks information gain rather than effort per se.” Going further, the authors argue that play involving effort is a basic ingredient of healthy relationships.
Laziness, or the avoidance of effort, isn’t inherently bad or (based on the principle of least effort) good. It all depends on the cost-benefit analysis people perform when given a choice. It’s the optimal exertion of energy that is “highly adaptive.” Taking this too far could be a problem, of course. If you never exert yourself, then this could spell adaptive difficulties
To sum up, knowing when to be lazy and when to go all out can be an effective way to use your remoney in the bank, it will be available for pursuing what you find most fulfilling
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André, N., Baumeister, R. F., Gendolla, G. H. E., & Audiffren, M. (2026). Do people really avoid effort? A cost—Benefit perspective on the principle of least effort. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2026.106587
