You just came home from work or school. After a day filled with demanding tasks, meetings, or classes, you might feel satisfied and tired. Or perhaps you do not feel satisfied at all. A crisis at work or in a personal relationship may have drained you mentally and emotionally. Maybe you even got annoyed by another driver in traffic on your way home. And on top of all that, you still need to buy groceries for dinner.
None of this is speculation. These are things that can easily happen on a typical day in modern life. This is what an average day looks like. So how do you feel when you remember that you still need to practice guitar after all of this?
+1
Yes, the feeling that guitar practice gives you is probably this: +1 task.
The hardest part of practicing at the end of the day is simply sitting down to play. You may have noticed that once you start playing, the first minute or two is the real challenge. After that, it becomes hard to stop. There is a reason you have this wonderful instrument in your home. You genuinely enjoy playing and learning. But this enjoyment also needs a bit of grounding in reality.
As a full-time engineer, I experienced this problem firsthand for years. On the kinds of days I described above, which make up most of the year, I somehow managed to complete my weekly exercises. But it was mentally and physically exhausting. Getting through the day was possible, but it was definitely not sustainable. This is the point where I could give you a dramatic speech about discipline and self-actualization accompanied by emotional background music. It would probably sound cool. But instead, I prefer a realistic and neuroscience-based perspective.
On the busy days we talked about, avoiding gaps in guitar practice is extremely important, especially if you are a beginner or working on a new technique. Because the brain is competitive and metabolically expensive, it follows the principles of “use it or lose it” and “fire together, wire together.” The neural structures related to skills you are not using tend to be pruned or repurposed for something more useful. For this reason, regardless of which exercise you are working on, it is valuable to activate the related neural networks every day: The Tortoise Won The Race.
This is easy to say, but how can we make it psychologically sustainable?
The answer is to remove the +1.
On a busy day when the couch and Netflix seem far more appealing than practicing guitar, set a five-minute timer on your phone. Choose a short section from your weekly exercise that you find most difficult. Press the timer and start practicing that section at a very slow tempo. When the alarm goes off, stop immediately, no matter what you are feeling or where you are in the exercise. Your time is up. You are not allowed to spend any more time with this wonderful instrument.
The main goal here is to change your perception of accessibility. Your guitar is no longer something you can pick up and play as much as you want. The obligation you feel when sitting down to practice is now reversed. The challenge is no longer starting the session. The challenge has become walking away from the guitar. Practice is no longer an additional daily task. It becomes an opportunity.
You do not need to use this technique all the time. Only apply it on stressful and overwhelming days. If you understand the role of dopamine and how it is released, you can develop similar strategies yourself. I explained this in more detail in my article titled “Why is learning sometimes enjoyable, sometimes difficult?”
I will end with a comment from one of my students who tried this five-minute technique:
“Now I can’t get enough of practicing.
Reversed psychology turned practice into pleasure.
It feels like there is something amazing but time is limited.
I no longer see practice as a task. It feels like a reward.”
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