How Can I Regain My Depleted Motivation?
Even the most determined people sometimes fizzle out. You may be drained or feel like your creativity is depleted, but for some reason you cannot act together. Here are some strategies to recharge your motivation.
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Dear Lifehacker, Lately, I am not at all interested in any action. Getting things done at work is not an easy task, and at home is even worse. My apartment is a mess, I no longer cook and cannot maintain a healthy diet. I don’t feel depressed or so unhappy – just very unmotivated. Is there anything I can do to recharge?
Regards, dangerously demotivated
Dear DD,
Lack of motivation is a tricky issue because there are probably many factors contributing to it, but the easiest way to get motivated back is to do what you want to do. The problem is that when you are low on the energy and willpower needed to complete a specific task, your motivation tends to be redirected to do something easy, like eating or playing. As you’ve probably noticed, over-infatuation only makes the problem worse. So what are you doing? First, we need to pinpoint exactly what is causing your lack of motivation, and then we need to find ways in which you can fool yourself to get it back.
Social rejection can kill your motivation.
Motivation can be depleted from a number of sources. A 2012 publication by David McRainey, author of the Human Behavior Blog and You Are Not So Smart , discusses many of them. In one study, a group of students were asked to meet each other and then write down on a piece of paper who they would like to work with. The researchers who conducted the study ignored their choices and told some that they were chosen and others that no one needed them. Unsurprisingly, the rejected were unhappy, but here’s how it changed their behavior and why:
Researchers in the No One Chose You Study suggested that because self-regulation must be prosocial, you expect some reward for regulating your behavior. People in the unwanted group felt a stab of ostracism, and this made their self-regulation wasteful. They seemed to be thinking, “Why play by the rules if no one cares?” It made a hole in their willpower fuel tanks, and when they sat in front of the cookie, they couldn’t control their impulses as well as others. Other research shows that when you feel ostracized and reluctant, you also cannot solve puzzles, you are less likely to cooperate, you are less motivated to work, you are more likely to drink, smoke, and do other self-destructive things. Rejection destroys self-control, and therefore it seems that this is one of many paths to a state of ego depletion.
When you are rejected, you lose the desire to try because no one seems to care. It is unlikely that this is the case, since one instance of abandonment by one or more people does not capture the opinion of every person in every situation, but it is, and you react that way.
Neglecting your physical needs makes things difficult
Getting rejected, even in the simplest way, is not the only way to destroy your motivation to do something. Similar effects are possible when you are not eating. A 2010 study by Jonathan Leval, Shai Danziger and Liora Avniam-Pesso of Columbia and Ben Huron Universities looked at 1,112 court orders issued over 10 months regarding prisoners’ parole:
They found that right after breakfast and lunch, your chances of being released on parole were highest. On average, judges released about 60 percent of prisoners on parole immediately after the judge had eaten. After that, the number of approvals went down. Just before the meal, the judges released about 20 percent of those who appeared before them on parole. The less glucose the judges had in their bodies, the less they were willing to make an active choice – to free the person and accept the consequences, and the more likely they would go with a passive choice in order to postpone the fate of the prisoner for the future. Date.
In a busy lifestyle, it’s very easy to skip breakfast and / or late lunch and then find yourself in a position where it’s hard to get a lot done because we don’t have enough glucose to think properly. Even after you’ve finally finished eating, you might get headaches from neglecting it most of the day, which doesn’t really motivate you to do anything other than lie down.
Neglecting our physical needs can drain our motivation to do a lot, so it’s important to keep track of that neglect so that it can be corrected. One way to do this is to fill out this daily personal inventory form and see if there are any general trends in your days. If so, you can simply eat breakfast and get enough water to recharge your motivation.
Making too many decisions drains your brain
As much as we love having opportunities, having too many options and therefore solutions can be detrimental to our motivation. John Tierney, in an article for the New York Times, discusses this problem:
Decision fatigue helps explain why normally sane people get angry with colleagues and families, spend money on clothes, buy unhealthy food at the supermarket, and can’t resist a dealer’s offer to protect their new car from rust. However rational and sublime you try to be, you cannot make decision after decision without paying a biological cost. This is different from normal physical fatigue — you don’t realize that you’re tired — but you have little mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the more difficult each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts.
It doesn’t just boil down to big decisions at work. If you have a few small decisions to make, you can gradually induce the same fatigue. If you don’t control the number of choices you make each day, be it small or large, you will find yourself indulging in all the time.
How to restore motivation
To restore motivation, you need to combine the struggle with the sources of its depletion and force yourself to take the first step. In the event of social rejection, you will feel bad and will not want to do much at all, but you need to confront the problem. Perhaps you are doing something that causes rejection, or perhaps you are just hanging out with unpleasant people. Talk to the person (or people) who rejected you and find out why. See how you can fix the problem if you are causing it, or try to work it out with another person, if any. If this cannot be resolved, think about how you can get out of the situation, because constant unreasonable social rejection is not good for anyone.
If you just don’t care about your body, the solution to this problem is pretty obvious. As mentioned earlier, you first need to pinpoint the problem, and you can easily do this with your daily personal inventory . Find out what you are neglecting in your physical needs and make it your number one task to change that.
When it comes to making decisions,it is often difficult to manage every choice you have to make because you don’t always know when you’ll have to make them. One way to get around this problem is to create a list of current solutions, not tasks, so you know what needs to be done and when. Separate them, make sure you don’t have to solve too many in one day, and leave room for unknown solutions that you may encounter throughout the day. Remember to include little things like grocery shopping as you can still get nervous trying to figure out what should and shouldn’t be in your refrigerator.
Finally, decide what you really want to do. It might sound boring and mean you want to clean your apartment, or something more exciting like making a game. Be that as it may, take the tiny first step, which will only take you about five minutes. Take a slightly smaller step the next day. Work your way up, doing a little more each time. When you begin to see your accomplishments and how little effort they require, it will be easier for you to make progress. After all, just getting started is everything .
Hope these tips will help you regain your motivation. If you are struggling with the reasons and doing it slowly, you should be back in shape in no time.
Love, life hacker
This story was originally published in 2012 and was updated on December 12, 19 to provide more complete and up-to-date information.