When my brain expects thought to be rewarded by social status it's happy to pour calories into thought. When I feel like I'm stupid, or that no one will listen, thinking becomes tremendously difficult.
I expect a lot of individual variation with regard to this. In particular, I don't think I do thinking for social rewards -- I chase thoughts and ideas because it's interesting and "interesting" for me is an entirely terminal value tied to curiosity and exploration.
I used to think that about myself, which is of course weak evidence about you. How do you choose what to think about, amongst all the possibilites?
One of the big variations I see between people is the amount of energy they habitually put into thinking, and I haven't seen this discussed anywhere.
General advice about improving health and lowering intellectual friction would seem to help increase the ability to think, and ideas like "take five minutes to consider the problem" adds impetus, but I'm not sure what the general difference is between me and most people, or Yvain and me.
Intellectual drive isn't an unalloyed good-- cranks have high drive combined with low self-editinig, and some types of depression include a compulsion to think about topics that cause misery and/or inertia. Part (all?) of the value of meditation is getting some time off from thinking. Still, increasing intellectual drive would probably be a good thing for a lot of people.
Has anyone found that rationality training or anything else increases the default desire to think?