make heavy weather of

• make heavy going of

make heavy weather of (third-person singular simple present makes heavy weather of, present participle making heavy weather of, simple past and past participle made heavy weather of)

1. (idiomatic) To overcomplicate things, to make things appear worse than they are.
   • Philosophers, possibly with justification, make heavy weather of the concept of causation, but to a working biologist causation is a rather simple statistical concept. − Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, 1982, Oxford University Press