Healthy Living

Breaking the Bad Habit of Not Having Enough Motivation

 

Finding the thing that motivates you is one thing, it is quite another to stick with it. And even while you have already succeeded in identifying what motivates you, the temptation to give in to more convenient, easier things like procrastination are much more powerful than getting yourself up and going.

Identify that lacking motivation or deliberately making yourself feel demotivated is a bad habit. Something isn’t quite right when you refuse to wake up on time to get to your office. Or, when you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the power of procrastination when you have deadlines to beat. You know that something is going wrong inside you when the task you have to finish several days ago sits idly on your desk, untouched. And something is not right when you can’t even force yourself to confront a problem that has been gnawing your will to live fully. You lack even the motivation to accept that you are not motivated. So how do you build your motivation from the ground up? Start with…

Identifying the things that sap out your motivation. It always starts with very simple things in a very natural manner. Then it starts to affect the other aspects of your life, which are not entirely connected with the thing that triggered your lack of motivation. Maybe you just didn’t feel like getting up after your alarm rung off one morning. The next day, you did the same thing and on and on until you developed the bad habit of not feeling motivated to do anything.

The first effective step to gaining back your sense of motivation is to figure out the thing or things that sap the energy out of you. It could be a small thing like not waking up in time or a really serious thing like hating everything about your job.

No matter what the form, you can identify the things that sap out your energy by their power to make you feel discouraged. Start with the sample exercise of listing down the areas in your life where you find no motivation to pursue at all and the particular things which you think makes you feel disheartened. This will help you gain some perspective on the entire issue. You can even derive solutions in simply knowing the cause. This will shed clarity on your issues with motivation.

Then you can move on to evaluating the risks and benefits of not feeling motivated. Believe us, there are benefits to having no motivation – immediate self-gratification in the form of rest for one. And there are risks, for sure. Plenty of them. And the risks oftentimes outweigh the benefits. Discovering the risks and benefits of not feeling motivated could be very enlightening. In general, you would realize that it is never worth it to procrastinate, to give in to the temptation of hating to move a finger to finish your tasks, or to deliberately believe that it is much more gratifying to lie around and do nothing.

Finally, commit yourself to change. This is not easy, it never was. But try to set the date for mustering your sense of motivation.

Karla Urwitz
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