Activation Energy and Effective Catalysts

Do you ever find it hard to get out of bed in the morning, even when you had a hard time getting yourself to go to bed the night before? A hard time putting down your book when hours before you had to be forced to pick it up? Or running 17 miles when you had to drag yourself out the door to do 12? (Maybe that last one’s just me).

What’s common in all of these situations is that even if the end state is desirable (getting out of bed to have breakfast, stopping the mental effort of reading, or ending the run), there is still resistance to the state change. You have to deliberately engage System 2, your conscious will, your ego, whatever you call it, to make the switch.

This reminds me of the idea of an activation energy that was discussed in my highschool and college chemistry classes. The jist of it is basically this: chemical reactions convert a group of molecules into a different arrangement of molecules. Sometimes these reactions are thermodynamically favourable: the end result of the reaction is more stable or increases the entropy of the universe than the starting chemicals. Sometimes the reverse is true. However, pretty much all of these reactions, even those that are thermodynamically favourable (i.e. the ones that release energy), some initial input of energy, the activation energy, is required. Even the gasoline in your car requires a spark to start burning.

Sometimes you can reduce this required input of energy through the addition of a third chemical called the catalyst. The…