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November 20th, 2025
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

🏔️ How to Love Learning Again

I still remember an assignment where our history teacher asked us to create an ‘artifact’ about a historical figure of our choice. I chose Jesus and spent hours at the school library, asking the librarian for every book that mentioned him, and made a mini book with hand-drawn illustrations.

I was completely absorbed in the process and it remains one of my favorite school projects. (although I did a terrible job separating historical fact from later additions and got a bad grade!)

Around the same time, I also remember sitting in my bedroom for hours trying to solve math equations, hating every second of it.

Same brain, same time investment, completely different experience.

Why do we sometimes love learning while other times we can’t wait to escape and something else? How does this affect how well we actually learn? And what can we do about it?

When Your Brain Says “Yes!”

When we’re genuinely curious about something, our brains release dopamine – the same neurotransmitter involved in other rewarding experiences. This creates a positive cycle: curiosity leads to exploration, which leads to discovery, which triggers more dopamine and makes us want to keep going.

But this system only works when we feel safe to explore. When learning feels threatening – i.e. when we’re worried about failing or being judged – our brains shift into survival mode.

The prefrontal cortex, responsible for complex thinking, becomes less effective under stress. That math problem stops being a puzzle to solve and becomes something to endure.

The ingredient that transforms learning from threat to opportunity is agency: when we have confidence and some autonomy over what we learn and how we learn it, and understand why we’re learning it.

But what shapes our sense of agency in the first place? Understanding this can help us create better conditions for loving learning. Three key forces influence our learning experience:

• Biological factors. Your body affects your learning capacity more than you might think. Sleep, nutrition, and your physical environment all influence how you feel about learning. Stress hormones can impair memory formation, but the right level of alertness primes your brain for learning.
• Psychological factors. The difference between being curious about mistakes versus fearing them determines whether you see setbacks as learning opportunities. Past negative experiences can also create fear of failure that makes you avoid challenges.
• Social factors. Learning rarely happens in isolation. The expectations and feedback you receive (whether from teachers, managers, peers, or family) shape your relationship with learning. Cultural attitudes about intelligence also influence whether you see learning as natural human behavior or something reserved for “smart people.”

When those factors align positively, learning becomes more fun. You retain information better, think more creatively, and persist through challenges. But when they work against you, you tend toward surface-level processing and giving up quickly.

And these compound over time. Early positive experiences build confidence, while negative experiences can create the opposite trajectory, leading to avoidance and deepening this belief that you don’t like learning.

5 Steps to Love Learning Again

Your relationship with learning isn’t fixed. Neural plasticity research shows we can rewire how we respond to learning. The key is starting small. Here are five practical steps you can try:

1. Decouple the topic. Recognize that hating math doesn’t mean you hate learning – you might just hate how you’ve been taught math. Focus on how you’re learning, not just what you’re learning.

2. Run tiny experiments. Try different approaches to discover what works for you: visual diagrams, talking through problems aloud, or working with others. Mix up your environment, timings and methods.

3. Practice metacognition. Pay attention to how you feel. Track what energizes you and what drains you. Notice when you feel engaged or bored. Identify your optimal learning zone – not so easy that you’re bored but not so hard that you’re overwhelmed.

4. Learn with others. Find a learning community, a study group, or opportunities to teach others. Share your struggles, ask questions and celebrate discoveries together, including what you learn about yourself.

5. Focus on growth. This is about embracing mistakes as data, focusing on what you learned rather than how you performed. An easy way to focus on growth is to track your progress with the PACT framework instead of measuring your success with SMART goals.

Your relationship with learning is shaped by biological, psychological, and social factors that you can influence. Just choose one tiny learning experiment to try this week, notice how it feels, and adjust as you go.

By understanding what makes learning feel good and experimenting with different approaches, you can rebuild a positive relationship with learning.

🔬 Tiny Experiment of the Week

Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this tiny experiment to help you fall back in love with learning:

Make it fun by exploring topics outside your usual interests or what you do for work. Want to dig deeper into designing your own tiny experiments? Get your copy of the book​.

🥖 French Launch of Tiny Experiments My friend Jem is a talented videographer, and they followed me to capture this very special day in Paris. Watch the video to see what my parents, my friends, and my editor had to say :) ​

🛠️ Tool of the Week

​Popt is a mobile notes app built for seamlessly connecting ideas, contacts, places and time.​ In this interview with its founder Gregorio Zanon, we discussed the nature of mobile note-taking, developing a product culture of digital privacy, why it makes sense to navigate our notes as an interconnected map, and much more.

Many thanks to our sponsors for supporting the Ness Labs newsletter! Want to share your product with 125,000 readers? Please email support@nesslabs.com.

👀 Into the Mind of... TARA SCHUSTER Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from Tara Schuster, who spent years researching the best journaling techniques and just published This Journal F*cking Works. 1. One daily practice you can’t do without? Journaling. It’s the ritual that keeps me sane. When I skip a day I really notice and, unfortunately, so do the people in my life. 2. One idea that keeps you up at night? That life is so short and there is so much I want to learn. I’m trying to come to peace with the fact I won’t be able to sponge up everything. 3. One strategy to restart your creative engine? Stop working and travel, even if it’s just a car ride to the beach. Being in a new/novel location tends to clear the creativity decks! Get her journal

🗓️ Join the community

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Discover the science of anthropomorphism. Why do we talk to our cats, feel guilty throwing away childhood toys or bond with our robot vacuum? In this session, Justin Gregg will share how one of humanity’s oldest psychological quirks quietly shapes almost every decision we make.​
• Learn to say no with confidence. Join Gosia Fricze for a one-hour workshop where we’ll explore the power of “no,” and how to say it with clarity, confidence and care so you can say yes to what really matters.
​• Process your notes. The end of the year is a great time to clean up your note-taking system. Do it with others during the Processing Power Hour with Remy Rohan and members of the PKM Collective.
​• Make progress on your projects. Our Pomodoro-based coworking sessions are hosted twice a week by Kathryn Ruge and Joshwin Greene, covering all timezones. Then, join Benjamin Covington for a weekly review on Sunday.
​• Host your own workshop. Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.

Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.