If You Are Losing Motivation, Read This
We all have goals and dreams. Things we want to achieve, places we want to go, skills we want to develop, money we want to make, problems we want to solve etc.
When that goal or dream enters our mind, we are hit with a sensation of warmth radiating from the heart. Ideas start fusing in our head and we are filled with excitement. Our heart rate speeds-up and we feel an urge to make it happen. The goal or dream seems achievable and we can’t wait to get there. We are MOTIVATED.
We start working on the goal or dream with an effortless vigour and intensity.
A few weeks go by and we start to realise it won’t be as easy as we thought. But that’s fine, we think, Rome was not built in one day and we know we are capable of achieving our goal. Yes we are, but will we?
The weeks turn into months. Other opportunities show up, life simply happens, and the fire that emerged from that initial spark starts to decline. We become less consistent, we find excuses and we might even abandon the goal or dream.
We have all experienced that decline in MOTIVATION after a while. At some point at least. It doesn’t mean that it won’t come back, but the void left when it goes is quite painful. And this is completely normal.
The problem is we easily (or conveniently) forget there is a straightforward way of filling that void: DISCIPLINE.
In this article, I’ll discuss the relationship between motivation and discipline.
If your exciting but flaky friend MOTIVATION is currently not around for you, this article will remind you to not forget your boring but loyal friend, DISCIPLINE.
Motivation is just chemicals in your brain
Have you ever wondered why you feel low and depressed after a party? Are you currently struggling with procrastination? Have you lost your ability to focus over time?
All of these are related to dopamine, a critical neurotransmitter for motivation, desire and willingness to make efforts.
The best resource I have found on the topic is a podcast from Andrew Huberman (renown neuroscientist at Stanford University):
I highly recommend you watch this. But if you don’t have the time, I’ll cover the key takeaways.
Basically, all of us have different baseline levels of dopamine. This is partially genetic.
Dopamine makes an activity more pleasurable and it drives you to look out for things. The feeling of excitement that you have when you are motivated comes from there.
Once you get what you wanted, the dopamine levels go up, and then they go back down without stopping at baseline. They go even below. The extent to which it goes below baseline is proportional to how high the peak was.
If you spike your dopamine levels too much through the week with a wide variety of dopamine inducing activities, your baseline will progressively lower. It can be very subtle.
To recover, the best way is to stop engaging in the activity/substance.
For me the key insights from the podcast are the following:
- if you are no longer motivated, chill out. It’s not a big deal. These are just chemicals in your brain. Just keep doing what you are doing even though it’s painful. It will eventually come back.
- you can “hack” these chemicals in your brain to feel more motivation with the right lifestyle, the right foods and the right behaviour (you get plenty of examples if you listen to the podcast).
- if you want to maintain motivation for school, exercise, relationships and pursuit of goals, make sure the peak in dopamine, if it’s very high, does not occur too often.
Motivation can help you start but you need discipline to finish
You don’t need to look very far to realise nobody has achieved anything of significance without the use of discipline at some point in their journey.
If you pay attention to most of the high achievers you know (entrepreneurs, athletes, actors, singers etc.), they all talk about how hard they had to work to get to where they have arrived.
Of course, it is not about working hard for the sake of working hard. You need a vision that deeply resonates with you and that triggers motivation within you. That motivation is only the spark that creates the fire. Discipline is there to sustain the fire until the end, especially when you are running out of motivation and the intensity of the fire starts declining.
This video illustrates that perfectly:
Motivation is not reliable, discipline is reliable
People with a military background are particularly suited to discuss the topic of this article. They are trained to be disciplined.
Former Navy SEALs Jocko Willink is known for his book “Discipline Equals Freedom“ where he explains, paradoxically, the constraints of discipline will actually make your life easier and lead to more freedom.
As you can see in the short video below, to him discipline is superior to motivation when it comes to achieving your dreams or goals.
Motivation is a feeling that comes and goes. It doesn’t matter whether it is there or not, discipline is infinitely more important. So no matter how you feel, get up and do what you are supposed to do.
Conclusion
I can’t think of a better way to conclude the article than this quote:
We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.
