Are humans born lazy?

Have you ever thought, why we need to force ourselves into action? The society also want us to be active; but that also does not help much! “It is in our brains, our brains may simply be wired to prefer lying on the couch,” suggest researchers of University of British Columbia. The research insights are published in Neuropsychologia.

Researchers described the phenomena based on an "Exercise Paradox": for decades, society has encouraged people to be more physically active, yet statistics show that despite our best intentions, we are actually becoming less active.

"The failure of public policies to counteract the pandemic of physical inactivity may be due to brain processes that have been developed and reinforced across evolution," said Boisgontier, the senior author of the study.

The researchers took brain-activity readouts called electroencephalograms showed that breaking physical inertia required more brain resources. This may be justified based on the natural tendency of the human systems to conserve energy in every process they undertake.

This fact needs to be taken into account in designing of public policies, related to physical exercises.

DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.07.029