What is laziness and where does it come from?

Who has not experienced it at some point? That feeling that makes you feel twice as tired, that directs your thinking to make what you have to do seem much more difficult or boring. It is disguised behind many names, such as laziness, laziness, laziness, laziness… that’s why laziness doesn’t seem to have laziness.

She is so human that she stars in anecdotes. The discoverer of the tuberculosis bacillus, R. Koch, was forced as punishment for his bad behavior to write a short essay on “What is laziness?” Koch got to work and in just two minutes he delivered the accomplished essay to his teacher. The teacher, surprised, asked him: “Has it occupied you a lot?” and Koch responded: “Three pages.” The genius had written on the first page: “This”, on the second “It is” and on the third “Sloth”.

Being a little more scientific (but only a little), Peter Axt (health sciences specialist at the University of Fulda) and his daughter wrote a book titled “The Pleasure of Laziness.” The hypothesis they use is that we are born with a limited amount of “vital energy”. If we deplete it quickly—by exercising and stressing—we will die prematurely. If we do almost nothing, we can stretch it and live much longer. The authors illustrate their ideas about “life energy” by noting that wild animals live longer in captivity.

On the opposite side we find an interesting research co-directed by scientist Gregory Steinberg (Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, McMaster University, Canada), which hypothesizes that laziness has to do with the loss of two genes. They worked with mice (then the conclusions must be taken with a certain distance) that did not have two of the genes that controlled the activity of the AMPK protein.

The AMPK protein acts when we exercise and has the function of contributing to the supply of nutrients and oxygen to muscle cells. In the study they found that normal mice (that did have these genes) spontaneously ran a large number of kilometers while the “mice without genes” only ran a few meters. Lacking these genes, these animals will have a lower level of mitochondria (the energy center of cells) and this makes it more difficult for their muscles to absorb glucose while they exercise.

Extending the study to people: when we do some aerobic activity, the levels of mitochondria in the muscles increase significantly and if we stop exercising for a while, the opposite happens, and the concentration of this component is reduced. Thus, the conclusion that the researchers reached was that: if we reduce physical activity, we will reduce the levels of mitochondria in our muscles and make it increasingly difficult for us to exercise. That is to say, laziness would be nothing more than the progenitor of laziness itself.

This is consistent with what many people have experienced in their own lives: By stopping doing things out of laziness it seems that it begins to reproduce itself and affect actions in which it did not act before. Furthermore, it agrees with the thought that we work in circles of inertia or spirals, which states that An event or action of one nature increases the chances of another event or action of the same nature as the first occurring.