What rats can teach us about self care. (Yep, 🐀 rats.)

Stay with me on this one, because it starts with rats and ends with your evenings on the couch. (It will make sense, I promise.)

Dr Kelly Lambert is a Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience who has spent years studying the experiences and environments that optimise our brain health. A lot of her work involves laboratory and field studies of rats, primates and raccoons to explore the complexity of the mammalian brain.

My favourite experiment of hers involved rats and Froot Loops.

She divided rats into two groups.

The first group had to work for their reward. They dug through mounds of bedding to find their Froot Loops. They had to put in effort, use their bodies, and earn the outcome. She called these the "worker rats."

The second group got their Froot Loops handed to them for free. No effort required. Lambert calls them the "trust fund rats".

You'd think the trust fund rats had it made. But here's what happened.

The worker rats developed healthier stress hormone profiles. When they were later faced with a difficult challenge, they were more persistent and had more effective ways of coping. They didn't give up as easily. The effort itself had made them more resilient.

The trust fund rats, on the other hand, were more likely to throw in the towel when things got hard.

Through this work Lambert showed that working towards a tangible result isn't just satisfying. It physically changes your brain in ways that build resilience against stress and low mood.

She coined a term for this: effort-driven rewards. When you put in effort and see a real result, your brain's reward circuit lights up in a way it simply doesn't when the reward comes for free and without any challenge or friction.

(As an aside, Lambert also famously taught rats to drive tiny cars, actual little Rodent Operated Vehicles, to reach their Froot Loops. The rats loved it so much they'd rev the engine before setting off. When she later gave them the choice of a quick walk to their reward or a longer detour to drive there themselves, most chose to drive! Turns out the effort was the fun part. But I digress.)

Here's why this matters for you and me.

We are living the trust fund rat lifestyle these days. Everything is designed to remove effort. Food arrives at the door. Entertainment is one tap away. We can go entire evenings without our hands making anything more demanding than a scrolling motion.

Our brains are getting the rewards without the effort. And just like those trust fund rats, it's leaving us less resilient and more stressed.

This is the science that sits underneath everything Kate and I believe about creative hobbies. When you make something with your hands, when you work through the small challenge of a project and end up with something real, you're giving your brain exactly the kind of effort-driven reward it has been starved of.

So the next time you feel guilty for spending an hour on a creative project instead of something "productive", remember the rats! (Not a sentence I ever thought I'd say.) The effort is the point.