Little steps, big leaps

Why it’s better to take little steps, rather than do everything at once.

Tidying the house, sorting through our wardrobe, putting photos in an album: These are all time-consuming tasks we often postpone, but they keep nagging at the back of our minds anyway. And that’s a shame, feels US-based Loretta Graziano Breuning, author and founder of the Inner Mammal Institute. In her book Meet Your Happy Chemicals, Breuning advises us to divide an unpleasant task into smaller parts. ‘You don’t need to have a solution when you start, just the willingness to take many small steps,’ she writes.

Pleasure Hormone
One advantage is that each time we finish a task we are rewarded by 
a dose of dopamine. Each step we complete feels like a triumph and will trigger this ‘pleasure hormone’. This has an important evolutionary purpose: It gives us energy and the motivation to keep going. When our ancestors, for example, went looking for a water source, the success of their quest would give them successive hits of dopamine—one for each clue they found pointing to a water source, 
for detecting the sound of water streaming, and so on.