Laziness

Laziness (also called indolence) is disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to act or exert oneself. It is often used as a pejorative; terms for a person seen to be lazy include couch potato, slacker, and .

Despite Sigmund Freud's discussion of the pleasure principle, Leonard Carmichael notes that "laziness is not a word that appears in the table of contents of most technical books on psychology... It is a guilty secret of modern psychology that more is understood about the motivation of thirsty rats and hungry pecking pigeons as they press levers than about the way in which poets make themselves write poems or scientists force themselves into the laboratory when the good golfing days of spring arrive." A 1931 survey found that high school students were more likely to attribute their failing performance to laziness, while teachers ranked "lack of ability" as the major cause, with laziness coming in second. Laziness is not to be confused with avolition, a negative symptom of certain mental health issues such as depression, ADHD, sleep disorders, and schizophrenia.

Laziness is a habit rather than a mental health issue. It may reflect a lack of self-esteem, a lack of positive recognition by others, a lack of discipline stemming from low self-confidence, or a lack of interest in the activity or belief in its efficacy. Laziness may manifest as procrastination or vacillation. Studies of motivation suggest that laziness may be caused by a decreased level of motivation, which in turn can be caused by over-stimulation or excessive impulses or distractions. These increase the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for reward and pleasure. The more dopamine that is released, the greater intolerance one has for valuing and accepting productive and rewarding action. This desensitization leads to dulling of the neural patterns and affects negatively the anterior insula of the brain responsible for risk perception.ADHD specialists say being engaging in multiple activities can cause behavioral problems such as attention/focus failure or perfectionism and subsequently pessimism. In these circumstances laziness can manifest as a negative coping mechanism (aversion), the desire to avoid certain situations in the hopes of countering certain experiences and preconceived ill results.Lacanian thought says laziness is the "acting out" of archetypes from societal programming and negative child rearing practices. Boredom is sometimes conflated with laziness; one study shows that the average Briton is bored 6 hours a week. Thomas Goetz, University of Konstanz, Germany, and John Eastwood, York University, Canada, concur that aversive states such as laziness can be equally adaptive for making change and toxic if allowed to fester. An outlook found to be helpful in their studies is "being mindful and not looking for ways out of it, simultaneously to be also open to creative and active options if they should arise." They point out that a relentless engaging in activities without breaks can cause oscillations of failure, which may result in mental health issues. It has also been shown that laziness can render one with apathetic to reactant mental health issues such as anger, anxiety, freeloading,indifference, substance abuse, and depression.

...
Wikipedia