AI Can Make Things Easier for You, but Should It?

Researchers recently reviewed 170 studies across nearly 5,000 participants and confirmed a clear finding: Mental effort is unpleasant. In these studies, when people rated tasks as more effortful (they had to think harder or struggle with it), they also rated them as more unpleasant. The harder they had to think, the more negative it was.

This finding held across different types of activities and across university- and non-university-educated samples in 29 countries. The conclusion is simple and well-supported: Cognitive effort usually feels bad.

That Discomfort Might Be a Good Sign

Decades of research in cognitive psychology indicate that learning is hard: It can be frustrating, unpleasant, and discouraging. But that effort and discomfort lead to growth—acquiring new knowledge, mastering a new skill. Improving your capabilities seems to require that unpleasant experience.

And so, the feeling of unpleasantness might actually be telling us something useful. It could be a signal that you’re growing and improving. If it feels easy, you might not be gaining much from it.

Where AI Comes In: Avoiding Discomfort

One of the promises of AI is to offload the more unpleasant tasks we have to do. AI can easily do many of the tasks that people find hard or frustrating—drafting reports, building slide decks, and many other tasks.

If we have tools that can make hard thinking unnecessary, and if thinking feels unpleasant, it seems obvious what most people will choose. Why not reduce the unpleasantness if you can?

Avoiding Effort May Mean Avoiding Growth

The answer is that avoiding mental effort also means avoiding the opportunity to grow. If you let tools do all the thinking for you, you may end up with good outputs, but not better skills. You won’t build new knowledge, sharpen your reasoning, or learn how to tell good evidence from persuasive but empty fluff.

This is important when professional environments call for growth and adaptability, and critical thinking is a competitive advantage. If you don’t stretch and grow your abilities, you risk being left behind.

Source: Vlada Karpovich/Pexels

We Still Choose Effort

Even though effort can feel bad, people still willingly do hard things all the time. Nobody has to run marathons, but millions do. We read long novels, play difficult games, and take on challenging jobs. Why?

Because when the payoff is meaningful—progress, mastery, pride—we choose effort over comfort. Research suggests that people even prefer cognitive effort to doing nothing at all. It can feel better to struggle through something purposeful than to be idle.

Before Offloading to AI, Think of the Value of Effort

When you feel the discomfort or frustration of working hard on something, see it as a sign that you’re growing. You’re building a skill or competency that others won’t have in the future.

That should give you a short-term payoff—the pride of working through adversity or expanding yourself—as well as long-term advantages.

Using AI to do the things you already know how to do, or the things that are boring but not challenging, might be a smart use of your time. But if you’re using it to avoid the discomfort of thinking, you might be giving up a chance to grow.

Yes, thinking hard might be unpleasant. But that doesn’t mean you should stop doing it.

It might mean you’re doing something right.