How I Learned To Give A F*ck
Let’s be real, motivation is hard. Really hard. It’s something that everyone struggles with at some point or another. In my experience, there are three categories of demotivation. First of all, there’s total apathy. You know it matters, but you can’t bring yourself to care about it, and so deadlines pass you by whilst you ignore them all. Next, is the stressed kind. You get yourself so worked up over whatever it is you have to do that the mere thought of starting it is overwhelming, and when these deadlines arrive, you greet them with tears and no small amount of anger. Finally, there’s the self-perpetuating cycle, and that’s the kind that I fall victim to most often. It starts simple, maybe your review wasn’t quite as good as you’d hoped, or you didn’t get the mark you were hoping for on an important test. It knocks the wind out of your sails, you begin to resent doing the work, so you put less effort in. The grades get worse, so you try less, and so on, and so on, over and over again. Eventually, this leads to one of the other two types, and the cycle continues.
The truth is, if I’d been asked to write a blog three years ago, the answer would have been a resounding “No!”. Approaching my 18th birthday, I felt completely lost in life, directionless and empty. The thought of being an adult terrified me, and that fear paralysed me. I went through the motions of school and college, but when I got home I would sit alone in my room, staring into a screen and distancing myself from the real world as much as possible. I had no motivation for anything. I didn’t care enough, not when it all seemed pointless. Every day felt like the one before, an endless stream of pointless activities that would land me in a future I couldn’t begin to imagine without feeling a crushing weight on my chest. Seventeen years old, and the world had defeated me. I certainly wasn’t the only teenager to ever feel that way, in fact, a national study in the USA revealed that over 40% of high school students feel disengaged and unmotivated in school. It isn’t just teenagers who feel like that either; according to Eden Springs, almost half of UK adults feel unmotivated in their day to day lives, and a similar study by Bupa found that under 10% of workers feel they are reaching their full potential. That’s hardly a promising statistic, and truthfully I’m very glad I didn’t see that three years ago, in the midst of my cynical disconnection with the world.
As you may have guessed from the fact that you are reading this blog, I did find my motivation again. Maybe found is the wrong word, as if it had been hiding from me and I could have regained it had I only tried harder to look for it. The fact is, when you’re completely burned out, no amount of hard work is going to fix it. That’s a hard thing to accept, especially for people like me who tie their worth as a person to how well they perform academically. It sounds counter-intuitive, in order to work better you need to stop working so much, but it’s true. I’m not talking about complete distraction either, that’s a little too extreme. Besides, I tried that with the whole “6 hours a day on my laptop” thing, and it didn’t help me. No, my saving grace was a £6.99 notebook and my old fountain pen. I started keeping a diary. 10 minutes here, another five there, and before I knew it, I’d filled half the book with my rambling thoughts. It took a while for me to reach a flow, I admit. I clung too tightly to the idea that I had to follow a “Dear Diary,” structure, and I felt a little silly writing all my worries in one place for anybody who might stumble upon in to see. Still, I kept writing, determined to see it through to the end of the year at least, and slowly I learned how I liked to write. Some people make lists in their diary, others try to faithfully recount the events of the day, but I just throw my train of thought at the page and make sense of it afterwards. My diary isn’t organised, I doodle in the margins and I’m probably far too liberal with the stickers, but it makes me happy, and without even realising it, my motivation crept back. I was excited to complete my work so that I’d have something to write about.
I’m not a fluke, either. A study published by the American Psychological Association asserts that keeping a journal helps with managing stress, and even has beneficial effects on working memory (a type of memory that includes short term memory), and apps like Journey, Daybook, and Daylio are bringing the practice into the 21st Century by allowing you to keep a diary on your phone. With over 454,000 downloads between them on Google Play alone, it seems that keeping a diary is truly en vogue right now.
So why not try it out for yourself? If your motivation has deserted you, a few minutes a day might just bring it back, and who knows, you might just end up as the next Samuel Pepys! OK, maybe that’s unlikely, but even if I never reach his fame, I’ll know that keeping a diary made me a better person and a better student. And really, that’s enough for me.
Sources:
Carpenter, S., 2018. A new reason for keeping a diary. [online] American Psychological Association. Available at: <https://www.apa.org/monitor/sep01/keepdiary> [Accessed 4 October 2021].
Crotty, J., 2013. Motivation Matters: 40% Of High School Students Chronically Disengaged From School. [online] Forbes. Available at: <https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/03/13/motivation-matters-40-of-high-school-students-chronically-disengaged-from-school/?sh=2fb38d7b6594> [Accessed 4 October 2021].
Education Technology. 2020. Student motivation for remote learning took a significant hit throughout lockdown. [online] Available at: <https://edtechnology.co.uk/covid-19/student-motivation-learn-remotely-covid19-study/> [Accessed 4 October 2021].
Lill, D., 2015. Over half of UK workers lack motivation | Talk Business. [online] Entrepreneur & Business Website | Talk Business | Small, Medium Business Advice, Tips | SME | Success. Available at: <https://www.talk-business.co.uk/2015/11/05/over-half-of-uk-workers-lack-motivation/> [Accessed 4 October 2021].
TeamStage. 2021. 23+ Monumental Motivation Statistics for 2021 | TeamStage. [online] Available at: <https://teamstage.io/motivation-statistics/> [Accessed 4 October 2021].
