How to motivate yourself when you have no motivation

Motivation usually shows up second

The way most of us picture it, motivation comes first. You feel like doing the thing, and then you do it. So on a flat day you wait for the feeling, and it doesn't come, and the day goes.

For most ordinary tasks it runs the other way round. You start, something small moves, and the feeling turns up afterward, on the back of the movement. Anyone who has dragged themselves to a run they didn't want and felt fine by the second mile knows this already. They just forget it every single time.

Motivation often comes after starting, not before. Action produces momentum.

James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter

This isn't only folk wisdom. One of the better-tested treatments for depression, called behavioral activation, is built on the same idea: you schedule small, doable things before your mood agrees to them, because waiting for the mood is part of what keeps people stuck. If it works when the flatness is clinical, it's worth trying on an ordinary Tuesday.

So the useful question is not how do I feel motivated? It's what is the smallest thing I'd be willing to do while feeling exactly like this?

Make the first step almost embarrassingly small

When you look at a task, part of your brain is running a quick sum: how unpleasant is this going to be right now, against how good will it be later. "Clean the kitchen" loses that sum easily. It's vague, it has no end, and the reward is a long way off. "Put the pan in the sink to soak" costs almost nothing, so it wins.

Some first steps that are small enough to work on a bad day:

• Open the document and write one sentence. It's allowed to be a bad sentence.
• Put your running shoes on. That is the whole task. If you end up back on the couch wearing them, fine.
• Answer the easiest email in the pile, not the important one.
• Set a timer for ten minutes and let yourself stop when it rings.

The permission to stop is the part that makes it work, and it has to be real. Most of the time you won't stop, because the hard bit was the beginning and you're past it. On the days you do stop, you still did ten minutes more than you were going to.

James Clear calls a version of this the two-minute rule: scale any new habit down until it takes two minutes. "Read before bed" becomes "read one page." It sounds too small to matter. The point is that you become someone who does the thing, and making it bigger later is the easy part.

Take the friction out before you need the willpower

There's a well-known study that pinged people on their phones through the day and asked what they were being tempted by and whether they were resisting. The people who scored highest on self-control weren't fighting more temptations and winning. They reported running into fewer temptations in the first place.

That is a much more achievable kind of discipline. It mostly comes down to arranging things so the good option is easy and the drift option is annoying:

• Leave the laptop open on the document you need, not on your inbox.
• Pack the gym bag the night before and put it by the door, where you'll trip over it.
• Charge your phone in another room while you work. Not face down on the desk. Another room.
• Keep the guitar on a stand instead of in its case.

None of this feels like motivation. It is, though. It's motivation you had on a good day, set up so it still works on a bad one.

Find a reason that's actually yours

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan spent decades on a question that sounds simple: what kind of motivation lasts? Their answer, known as self-determination theory, is that drive holds up best when three things are there. You feel you chose it. You feel yourself getting better at it. And it connects you to other people.

Motivation built on should tends to be missing all three, which is why it evaporates so fast. If you can't get going on something, try asking what would actually be better by Friday if you did it. Answer honestly. Sometimes the answer is specific and good, and it helps. Sometimes the answer is "nothing, I just feel I ought to," and that is useful information too. Not every task on the list deserves to be there.

The third one, other people, is the most underrated. Working next to someone, even silently, even on a video call, makes it easier to keep going. So does a class, a running club, or a friend who will ask how it went.

The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own effort.

William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology

Let yourself see the progress

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer at Harvard collected close to twelve thousand daily diary entries from people at seven companies, looking for what made a good workday. What stood out most was not praise or pay. It was making progress on work that mattered to them, even a small amount of it. They called it the progress principle.

The trouble is that small progress is easy to miss. You remember the thing you didn't finish. So make it visible. At the end of the day, write down what you did do. Three lines in a notebook is plenty. A "done" list is a strange thing to recommend to someone who feels they did nothing, but that is exactly who it's for.

The feeling of progress is one of the best feelings of all. This is true even when progress is small.

James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter

Go easy on yourself, for practical reasons

It's tempting to think that being hard on yourself is what keeps you in line. The evidence mostly says the opposite. In a study at Carleton University, students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before their first exam procrastinated less before the next one. The ones who stayed angry at themselves didn't improve.

This makes sense once you notice that self-criticism makes a task feel worse, and a task that feels worse is one you'll avoid harder. Being kind to yourself takes one reason for avoiding the thing off the table. That's all, and it's enough.

The desire to improve does not have to come from a place of self-loathing.

James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter

When it's more than a slump

Everything above is for ordinary low motivation: the tired week, the dull project, the goal that lost its shine. It is not a fix for depression, and it's worth knowing the difference.

If the flatness has lasted more than a couple of weeks, if you've lost interest in things you used to enjoy, if your sleep or appetite has changed, or if things feel hopeless rather than just boring, talk to a doctor or a therapist. Plenty of physical things can flatten your drive too, from poor sleep to an underactive thyroid, and a doctor can check for those.

If you're having thoughts of hurting yourself, please reach out now. In the US you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time of day. Elsewhere, your local emergency number will get you to someone.

For today

Pick one thing. Make it small enough that it's a little silly. Do it for ten minutes, with permission to stop. Write down that you did it.

I make Dailies, an app that sends you a quote at moments you don't choose, so take this with the appropriate pinch of salt. A quote will not do the dishes. What a good line can do is catch you at the exact moment you're about to write off the afternoon, and every so often that's enough to get the shoes on. If that sounds useful, the topics Just start and Push through the dull bit are the ones written for days like this.

Questions

Keep reading

• Motivation vs discipline: what actually keeps you going
• How to stop procrastinating
• Quotes for when you feel stuck