How to feel self-motivated?

Hello readers

Do you find it difficult to find the motivation to do your important tasks? Do you always think of a master plan for your tasks but never execute it and always end up wasting your time?

That is exactly the problem we are going to address today: self-motivation. We will try to analyze possible reasons for lack of motivation and try to come up with solutions that can be applicable in real life.

Source: Lifehack

What is motivation?

Simply put, motivation is the drive that makes you do a certain action to achieve a goal. Let’s take a very basic example. Let’s say there is a burger in front of you. Now if you are hungry, then your mind gives you that sensation of feeling hungry and makes you grab and eat that burger. This drive that made you want to pick up that burger is motivation. Obviously, this is a very basic biological example of motivation and that’s not what we are dealing with here.

Our concern is self-motivation, so what is it? Extending on the meaning of motivation from above, if we place ourselves at the goal end, then what we get is self-motivation. What this means is, self-motivation is the drive to do actions that can help ourselves grow and become better versions of ourselves. Now this goal can be anything like getting that job, losing 10 kgs, winning a marathon, getting good marks in a test etc.

The problem

So, we understand that we need self-motivation to do those things in life that can bring positive changes. But the problem is that most of those actions are such that we know we need to do them but we don’t want to do them. Why? Because they are painful!

All the actions that will bring positive changes in life are painful. But we don’t like pain, do we?
And so we constantly try to avoid that pain by escaping into other activities like scrolling through social media or playing games because these actions not only help us avoid the pain, but also give us a temporary sense of happiness (this is what gets you addicted to it, since the happiness (dopamine) that we get is short lived, we keep on engaging in that activity to keep getting that sense of pleasure).

Even when we are not escaping from our reality, we just don’t feel like doing that required activity, we lack the self-motivation. Another reason for this is delayed gratification. The problem with these painful activities, apart from being painful, is that it usually doesn’t give us the reward instantly. Most of these activities give us rewards at a later stage. You won’t lose 10 kgs by doing 10 push-ups right now! Or you won’t win the marathon by going and running in it straight away without any training!
And that is another reason why we like to choose activities like scrolling through social media over these activities. Scrolling through social media or watching a funny video is instantly rewarding (instant gratification), it makes you laugh or makes you happy instantly, not after a month or so!

The solution

The basic rule on which motivation works is evidence. If you want to get your task done, you need to start doing it. This is where our understanding of motivation is flawed.
We think that we need motivation to start doing a task, but we never feel motivated to do that painful task which takes a lot of energy from the mind and the body, so we never do the task.

Actually motivation works the other way around. We need to first just start doing the task, then seeing that we are actually doing the task that we were supposed to do, our mind feels a sense of achievement, hence releasing dopamine (the happiness hormone), hence giving you the motivation to keep doing the task so that we can get more dopamine.

Ok, so we need to do start doing the task first, but how can I motivate myself everyday to start doing it? Doing the things listed below will help with just that.

1. Stimulate your brain: When you wake up in the morning, first thing you can do is search for videos like: manager interview, money, CEO interview etc. The point of this exercise is not to gather information from those videos, but rather stimulate your brain, set your mindset for the day so that you can get that initial focus and determination required to start your task.

2. Make a to-do list: Next what you could do is make a list of the things you plan on doing today, it can involve simple tasks like replying to an email, picking up a relative from the airport etc. But make sure you prioritize your main tasks (i.e., the tasks that can help achieve your long-term goal) over the others. Keep crossing off the tasks as you do them as this can give you a sense of achievement and hence the self-motivation.

Tip: You can try to complete your most important tasks first thing in the morning, this can give you a massive boost of motivation to go through your tasks for the entire day.

3. Modified Pomodoro technique: Though this technique is majorly for students, this can be used for other things as well like building a habit of reading.
According to the pomodoro technique, you should study for 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes and repeat this cycle. But since it takes us around 10 minutes to reach an optimum level of attention, we feel that 25 minutes is too short to get maximum output and hence we feel you should adopt the modified pomodoro technique. This involves 50 to 60-minute period of studying followed by a 10-minute break. This gives you a sufficient time to reach your optimum level of attention and hence get the maximum output.

4. Discipline and Consistency: Lastly, what you need is consistent daily effort and believe me, once you get that rhythm going, it will be a lot easier to repeat it every day. To remain consistent, make sure you don’t overwork yourself in one day. For example, if you start studying at 10 a.m, make sure you stop studying at 5 or 6 p.m. You don’t want to get into that initial excitement and overwork yourself because this will lead to burn-out, after which you will rest for 3-4 days and then will find it difficult to start over because you lost that rhythm.
That’s why work for a limited number of hours every day and don’t forget to take day-offs in between so that you don’t exhaust yourself.

Apart from the things above, it is extremely important to keep your mind and body healthy. Hence, activities like exercise, playing a sport, meditating etc. can help a lot in keeping you motivated to do your tasks.

Lastly, always remember that you will fail multiple times, no one can just start off and keep doing it for a long time. It takes multiple failures to get into a good work-ethic. So acknowledge that your failure is natural, and try to get back to doing your thing as soon as possible.

Written and Edited by: Yash Jayesh Doshi