Why Trying Too Hard Backfires: Maltz, James and the Law of Reversed Effort

The law of reversed effort is Émile Coué’s name for a familiar trap: when your will and your imagination pull in opposite directions, imagination wins, so the harder you push the worse it goes. Maxwell Maltz built a chapter of Psycho-Cybernetics (1960) around it, drawing on William James, and argued that conscious straining jams the goal-seeking machinery that performs skills for you. Research on choking under pressure has since confirmed the core of his claim.

This page explains what Maltz, James and Coué argued, how Vadim Zeland reached the same point by another route, and where the research agrees with them and where it doesn’t. It explains the ideas and leaves the practice to coaching.

What is the law of reversed effort?

Coué was a French pharmacist whose clinics drew crowds in the 1920s. His law rests on ordinary experience. Try to fall asleep and you lie awake. Try not to blush and you blush. Try hard to remember a name and it hides until you give up and make tea.

Maltz used Coué in his chapter on false beliefs to explain why willpower can’t overturn a belief about yourself. In the chapter that follows he widened the claim to performance of every kind. In his model the success mechanism is a goal-seeking system that steers you toward a target once you have given it one. The conscious mind chooses the target and feeds it information. Once it tries to steer each step itself, Maltz argued, it jams the system.

Why does trying too hard make you worse?

Maltz’s answer was that effort puts the wrong part of you in charge. A pianist who has learned a piece plays it well until she starts thinking about which finger comes next. A speaker who knows his material loses it when he starts monitoring his voice. The skill lives below conscious control, and conscious control interferes with it.

This is the best-supported claim in the chapter. Roy Baumeister’s 1984 studies found that raising the pressure on people made them attend to their own movements, and their performance dropped. Sian Beilock and her colleagues found the same pattern in golfers in studies published in 2001 and 2002: pressure hurt practised putters, and so did asking them to attend to the mechanics of their stroke. Gabriele Wulf’s research on attentional focus adds a practical detail. Attention on the effect of a movement (where the ball goes) tends to beat attention on the body making it (what your wrists do).

The chapter on inhibition applies the same logic to personality. Maltz described the over-careful, self-watching person as a machine with too much negative feedback, shaking like a hand trying to thread a needle.

What did William James mean by the gospel of relaxation?

Maltz took his framing from William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, and James’s version is more precise than the slogan it became. In an 1899 lecture, The Gospel of Relaxation, James gave care a specific job. Prudence and anxiety belong in the decision: weighing the options and settling on a plan. Once the decision is made, James argued, you should drop concern for the outcome and let yourself act.

Maltz turned that into his first rule: do your worrying before you place your bet, and stop once the wheel is spinning. He added James’s later writing on people who fought their anxieties and guilt for years and found relief only when they gave up the struggle. James collected those accounts as testimony about religious experience. Maltz treated them as evidence, and they are better read as a pattern worth noticing than as a finding.

Does “sleep on it” work?

Maltz’s second argument concerned creative problems. He gathered stories of scientists and writers whose answers came after they stopped working: Kekulé’s benzene ring, Otto Loewi’s dream of the experiment that won him a Nobel Prize, Bertrand Russell’s habit of setting a hard problem aside for months and letting his mind work on it unseen. His rule was to start the mental wheels turning and then leave them alone overnight.

The detail people drop when they repeat this is his precondition. The answer only arrives, Maltz said, for someone who has defined the problem, gathered the facts and wants it solved. Incubation follows the work.

The research supports him on both points. Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod’s 2009 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin found a reliable incubation effect, larger for open-ended problems and after longer preparation. Ullrich Wagner and colleagues (2004, Nature) gave people a number task with a hidden shortcut. Those who slept between sessions were more than twice as likely to find it as those who stayed awake. Of Maltz’s five rules for relaxed effort, sleeping on it has the strongest evidence.

Why does doing everything at once feel impossible?

Maltz quoted the minister James Gordon Gilkey, who compared a crowded day to an hourglass. Thousands of grains sit in the top, and they pass through the neck one at a time. Gilkey’s point, which Maltz adopted, was that the frantic feeling comes from the picture of doing everything together. The workload itself arrives in single tasks.

Two related rules come from the same chapter. Respond to what is in front of you now, which Maltz tied to William Osler’s advice to live in “day-tight compartments”. And when you feel geared up for an action you can’t take here, ask what you can do here. That question needs no theory behind it, and cognitive therapists ask a version of it about worry every day.

Task-switching research backs the hourglass. Studies since Robert Rogers and Stephen Monsell’s (1995) find a measurable cost each time you switch between tasks, and Eyal Ophir and colleagues (2009) found that heavy media multitaskers were worse at filtering distraction.

How does Zeland describe the same problem?

Vadim Zeland, writing decades later with different vocabulary, lands in the same place. In his account of importance, the more meaning you load onto an outcome, the more pressure builds and the more your own grip spoils the action. He argues that you can’t force confidence into being, and that trying to relax the grip while fighting it only tightens it. The grip loosens when the importance behind it drops.

He adds a useful twist. When you can’t drop the importance, he says, don’t waste energy trying to relax. Let yourself be nervous and act anyway. That matches research on thought suppression, where Daniel Wegner found that fighting a thought brings it back, and on accepting rather than suppressing anxiety. The page on performing under pressure covers the related finding that calling your nerves excitement tends to help.

The two men wrote in different decades, countries and vocabularies. Maltz worked from plastic surgery and the new science of cybernetics, Zeland from what he describes as a background in physics, and they described the same effect.

What does the research say?

Claim	Who made it	What research shows
Conscious attention to a practised skill makes it worse	Maltz, after James	Supported. Baumeister 1984; Beilock and Carr 2001 on choking; Wulf on external focus
Straining against a thought or feeling strengthens it	Coué; Zeland	Supported. Wegner’s suppression studies find the thought returns, more so under stress
Answers come after you stop working, if you did the work first	Maltz	Supported and modest. Sio and Ormerod 2009 found a reliable effect, larger after preparation
Sleep helps solve problems	Maltz	Supported. Wagner et al. 2004; Walker and Stickgold on sleep and memory
Doing one thing at a time reduces strain	Gilkey, Maltz	Supported. Task-switching costs are well documented
Relaxation training helps anxiety	Maltz	Supported on average. Manzoni et al. 2008 meta-analysis
Fear is impossible while your muscles are relaxed	Maltz	Not supported. Relaxation lowers arousal; relaxation-induced anxiety is documented (Heide and Borkovec 1983)
The conscious mind is not built to solve problems	Maltz	Too strong. Deliberate reasoning solves many problems; it performs worse on practised skills

Who should take care with this idea?

“Stop trying so hard” can turn into “stop planning”, and neither James nor Maltz meant that. Both put careful thinking before the action. Maltz’s own chapter on inhibition lists the opposite problem: people who act too fast, speak without thinking and ignore feedback. For them, and for many people with ADHD, more deliberation helps and relaxed spontaneity can do harm.

Relaxation isn’t a cure-all either. Maltz claimed that nobody can feel fear or anger with their muscles fully relaxed. Relaxation reduces arousal, and it helps anxiety on average, but it doesn’t abolish emotion. Some people feel more anxious when they try to relax, and people who have panic attacks are more prone to it. If anxiety is frequent, intense or getting in the way of your life, a licensed professional is the right first step, because treatments for anxiety disorders work well.

The stories in this chapter also carry a caution. Maltz leaned on magazine anecdotes and second-hand testimonials, and he cited J. B. Rhine, whose parapsychology research has not held up. The pattern the stories point to is real. The stories themselves aren’t evidence.

Where does relaxed effort fit in changing who you are?

Maltz spent his book on one question: how do you change the self-image your behaviour follows? Effort can’t do it by force, which is why this chapter sits between his work on beliefs and his work on imagined practice. The identity pillar shows how the pieces fit, and the Psycho-Cybernetics overview covers the whole system.

Learning to decide carefully and then let go is a skill, and people build it through practice with feedback. That practice happens in coaching.

Frequently asked questions

What is the law of reversed effort?

It is Émile Coué's principle that when your will and your imagination pull in opposite directions, imagination wins, so the harder you try the worse it goes. Trying hard to fall asleep is the classic example.

Why does trying too hard make you perform worse?

Research on choking finds that paying conscious attention to the steps of a skill you already know breaks up the automatic control that runs it. Maxwell Maltz made the same argument in 1960 and called it jamming the success mechanism.

Does sleeping on a problem really help?

The evidence is good. A 2004 study in Nature found that people who slept after working on a problem were more than twice as likely to discover a hidden shortcut, and a 2009 meta-analysis found a reliable incubation effect, strongest after real preparation.

What did William James mean by the gospel of relaxation?

In an 1899 lecture James argued that anxiety and care belong in deciding what to do, and that once you have decided, you should drop concern for the outcome and let yourself act. Maltz built his five rules for relaxed effort on that division.

Is it possible to feel anxious when your muscles are completely relaxed?

Yes. Maltz claimed it was impossible, but relaxation lowers arousal without switching emotion off, and a minority of people feel more anxious when they try to relax, a documented effect called relaxation-induced anxiety.

Does this mean I should stop planning?

No. James and Maltz both put careful thinking before the action and relaxation during it. People whose difficulty is acting too fast or without a plan need more deliberation, not less.

This article is educational and is not medical, psychological or financial advice. Talk to a qualified professional before making major changes, especially if you live with a mental health condition. Read the full disclaimer.