In my line of work as a therapist one of the most common presenting issues clients want to work on is lack of motivation. Clients feel stuck, having no want or desire to do anything, loss of interest in work and relationships; ‘I don’t have the motivation to do anything’ is what they mostly start with.
So what is motivation and how does it work? Simply put, motivation is the driving force that keeps pushing us to reach certain goals through the actions we take. For example, motivation to lose weight would include actions around eating healthy and exercising. The driving force involves biological, social and cognitive reasons that drives various behaviours and explains why a person does something,
There are various factors that keep us motivated; some extrinsic and some intrinsic. Extrinsic primarily means getting motivation from outside of us for some external reward. For example, money, fame, validation, grades etc. Intrinsic motivation comes from within where we do things because it makes us happy rather than any incentive from the external world. For example, reading a book because you enjoy it and not because it’s for some school report etc.
Eventually as we progress in our life and we head towards self-actualisation, which is the ultimate need of human beings as described by Abraham Maslow, intrinsic motivation is what facilitates self-actualisation and a sense of fulfilment.
The hierarchy of needs, proposed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow is very helpful in understanding motivation. According to him, humans are inherently motivated to work towards fulfilling various needs they have, from basic ones like food and safety, to higher order needs for love, belonging and self-esteem.
So if motivation is an organic driving force of life, let’s explore what disrupts it to debilitate a person from basic to higher life goals.
Depression or dysthymia is one of the most common reasons that reduces motivation. In these cases, lack of motivation is a symptom of low mood. The anhedonia linked with depression presents itself in an inability to sustain interest in anything over a period of time. So if you slowly notice yourself losing interest and motivation over a period of time or even if you are someone who never had any motivation towards achieving life goals most likely you are suffering from undiagnosed depression.
If it’s not depression, then your cognitive process might be working against you and preventing you from being motivated. Overthinking in certain directions can become a barrier in putting brakes to motivation. For example, someone who suffers from perfectionist thoughts will most likely stay stuck in thinking about the perfect way of doing something but not actually doing it. A simple example would be a perfectionist wanting to write a simple email; but not being able to believe that he can fulfil the fantasy of that perfect way of writing an email and then giving up and telling himself ‘I can’t do it’ and so he stops even wanting to try.
Another malfunctioning thought process could be of someone with low self-esteem that would drive an irrational fear of failure. The person inherently doubts his ability to accomplish any task and may feel anxiously motivated but incapable of taking action. Thus the person would even try strongly believing it won’t work, masking it in ‘I don’t have the motivation to do anything.’
With this kind of debilitating thought process, I always say ‘what’s the worst that can happen’ and encourage clients to take small steps so they feel the risk factor is less and through those small experiences they start having confidence in themselves.
It is in the gap between motivation and implementation that the individual self-sabotages himself and experiences self-doubt and so these thought processes have to be understood as mostly lying deep rooted in primary years through family and school interactions. A simple statement given by a parent, ‘be perfect’ that might seem very encouraging can affect the motivation of that person throughout his life as he strives through perfection and having not achieved it gives up altogether.
Seek help if you experience lack of motivation. Stop judging yourself for it and reject when people call you lazy, a loser etc. shaming you for it. Being unmotivated isn’t something that you consciously do but something that is rooted in your unconscious that needs to be processed and changed with empathy and acceptance.
Zara Maqbool
The writer is a UK-CPCAB (Counselling and Psycho therapy Awarding Body) registered individual and couple psycho therapist based in Islamabad. She can be reached at zaramaqbool
@yahoo.com