2 Tools for When You Feel Unmotivated

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Full Episode Transcript:

2 Tools for When You Feel Unmotivated

Hey there, welcome to the podcast. So today I want to talk about motivation and teach you two tools for when you feel unmotivated. Unmotivated to choose the healthier food, unmotivated to exercise, unmotivated to do anything that you need to do to get the results you want. Whether that be weight loss results or specific eating habit results like break a sugar habit or stop emotionally eating.

By the way, I’m hosting a free virtual workshop on How to Break an Emotional Eating Habit. Grab your spot with the link on the episode page. It’s on Wednesday, April 26th at 12:00 PM Eastern Time, which is GMC minus four.

I am going to be breaking down the emotional eating habit cycle to make it so simple for you so that you can break this cycle yourself. I’ll also be helping you to prevent feeling worse if you do end up emotionally eating. Because feeling worse afterwards, will oftentimes lead to more emotional eating. So grab your spot with the link on the episode page or visit https://katemjohnston.com/workshop.

Now, when it comes to our goals, the truth is we can start out feeling very motivated to work toward our goals, but it’s normal to have that motivation wax and wane at times. Meaning, that motivation can decrease and increase over a period of time. It’s not a linear thing. It’s not a straight line where you are highly motivated the entire time and its unwavering.

It’s very normal and part of being a human to have changes in your level of motivation over time. There are lots of different things that cause this. There are lots of different circumstances too.

Also, a very large part which I will get into in this podcast is your thoughts. Your thoughts will highly affect if you are feeling motivated or not. This is really great news, because you have full control of your thoughts. So no matter what the circumstance is and no matter what other factors come into play, because you have control of your own thoughts, you have way more control than you think about your motivation level.

So, I’m going to expand more on this in this podcast episode. I’m also going to explain how to try to keep your motivation high, but also what to do when you feel it dip low. And there are actually several things that you can do.

Before I dive in, I just want to give an example of how anyone can feel unmotivated to do something even if their goal is something they highly desire. I’m going to share an experience of mine. This is just to let you really see that it’s not just you, if you’re feeling unmotivated. There’s nothing wrong with you. This is just a normal human thing. It does not mean that you are lazy. It does not mean that you don’t want the results enough. It does not mean anything about you. Only that you have a normal human brain.

Okay, so for my entire childhood and teenage years, I wanted to be a surgeon. More specifically, a trauma surgeon. I had this idea that this would be a very sexy career. I really had no idea what it entailed. I just knew that I loved anything related to surgery, I loved learning about Anatomy and Physiology, as much as I could before I went to college. I just really wanted to help people in a very drastic way.

I also knew that I wanted to have a family. I had this thought that you couldn’t be a trauma surgeon and have a family, which I now know is not true, but at the time I thought it was true. So, I decided to go for the happy medium and become a Physician Assistant and then just go into surgery from there.

I was excited about this goal of becoming a surgical physician assistant. I got into all of the programs that I had applied to and my excitement was very high. I did all the work during the years that I was in school for this. I studied harder than I ever had in my life. I graduated and passed my national certification exam. I accepted my first job in orthopedic surgery at a level 1 trauma center.

And then, I completely lost motivation. I had done the work to get my degree, certification, and job, and then my excitement and motivation just totally drained out of me. I had only really met part of my goal, because what I really wanted was the result of hitting that goal, which was being in the OR and doing the surgery, and then in addition, working in the career that I wanted to work in while having a family.

So, despite being really excited, motivated, and even successful on my path to my end goal of living the life of being in surgery and having a family, those good feelings just went away completely, or almost completely. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

Then I started getting down on myself, and wondering why I had worked so hard, gotten part of the result, and then just had a complete roadblock with how I was feeling. Once you start spiraling down like this, the negative thoughts just keep coming. And then the negative feelings just keep coming. It was also affecting my actions in many ways.

Was I lazy? Not at all. I didn’t have any evidence anywhere else in my life that I was lazy. In fact, quite the contrary. Did I no longer have any passion for anything? No, definitely not. I saw evidence in my life that I had passion for lots of other things. So what went wrong? The only thing that went wrong was not recognizing that I was just a human.

Instead, I got tough on myself for a few years. Which only made things worse. I had periods of time where I was excited about my job. But I felt like there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t maintain that. I wasn’t eager to go to work every day. I wasn’t eager to go to work most days. And I’m someone who really loves to work and loves to over-produce. It gives me a major dopamine hit.

So, what I ended up doing was changing the way I thought about things, so I could feel differently while at work. I noticed that because I was feeling differently, I was performing differently. Over the years, the more I did this, the better I felt. It was just an improving thing since then.

So now, some of the people in my life have wondered why I quit a career that I ended up being happy in and good at, for something that was kind of unknown. Starting your own business in coaching is very different than getting the paycheck every two weeks from your employer, along with the benefits.

But here’s one of the biggest reasons why I did it. Because I learned how to create my own motivation, i was able to keep increasing that feeling of motivation. Again, it’s not a linear thing, there’s always going to be periods where it waxes and wanes, but when you know how to create more of it, you do.

And because I’ve created so much motivation in myself, I set even bigger goals. I set exciting goals for me. And that’s the fun part. That’s why once you learn a skill like this, your life just expands in ways that you never dreamed of.

So how this relates to eating habits and weight loss, is that once you develop the skill of increasing your motivation, especially at times when you feel like it’s low, you’ll start noticing that there are other areas of your life where you will set some new goals and be motivated to reach those goals.

Also, there will be times when your motivation is low and you learn the skill of doing the actions anyway, to get the results. This skill will help you get results no matter what you’re feeling. So, these two skills combined will really increase your motivation exponentially.

Alright, so that was a really long story, but I wanted to give you sort of a substantial story because trust me there have been lots of other times where motivation was low to do things that I normally would be really excited about. But those are a little bit more on the smaller side.

So, let’s get into the two tools for when you feel unmotivated. Motivation is just a feeling in your body. You feel motivated right? You can also feel a lack of motivation. What does this feel like exactly? For some people, it feels maybe a little lazy, just low energy, maybe a little down. When you feel motivated though, you feel maybe a little excited, driven, energized. Again, all feelings in your body. So many of these feelings can all be very similar to one another as far as how they feel in your body.

There are lots of things that happen in your body to cause you to feel a feeling. There are things called neuropeptides involved. Your nerves and muscles are involved. Your brain is involved. In fact, what ultimately causes you to feel a feeling in your body is a thought in your brain.

I’ll repeat that, a thought in your brain will cause a feeling in your body. A thought is just a sentence in your brain, more specifically an opinion your brain offers you. Sometimes we are well aware of our thoughts, and other times we are not.

So many thoughts occur in our brain so quickly throughout the day, that it can be tough to be aware of them sometimes. Or to be aware of all of them, right? There’s something like 10s of thousands of thoughts that go through your head every day. Crazy right?

Now if you want to create a feeling of motivation, you can have a deliberate thought that would create that feeling of motivation. That’s the first of the two tools for when you feel unmotivated.

So, a thought is just a sentence in your head. And if you have a tough time knowing what motivation feels like in your body, maybe choose a feeling like excited or driven or energized. If those are feelings that will help you to do the actions that you need to do to create the eating habits or weight loss results that you want.

To create a feeling of motivation, what thought would you have to think, potentially a few times, to create that feeling of motivation in your body? Would you maybe have to think about how your goal would impact you for the rest of your life? Would you maybe have to think about how doing the action such as maybe making a salad for dinner will make you feel so good afterward?

You’re essentially just creating a situation in your head that will motivate you to do the actions. A big thing with motivation is the reward. So that’s why, if you’ll notice that those two examples I gave, were very reward focused.

Our human brain is motivated primarily with three different things. To increase pleasure, avoid discomfort, and conserve energy. Anything having to do with any of these three is typically seen as a reward. Which means that it is motivating.

Increasing pleasure, avoiding discomfort, and conserving energy are part of the motivational triad. You may have heard me mention this before. But these are the three things that are believed to be what motivate humans to do all the actions to survive as a species.

Therefore, when you think about motivation, think about reward. And if you can, think about the reward of how you’ll feel inside your body either during or after a certain action, or achieving a certain result.

Now to increase the likelihood that you will utilize this thought frequently to feel motivated more frequently, I would highly recommend writing this thought down. It doesn’t have to be just one thought either. It can be a couple that can be your go to thoughts for when you feel like you need a motivation boost. I would put these in a place that will serve as a visual reminder for you.

Alright, so let’s talk about second tool for when you are feeling unmotivated when it comes to weight loss and eating habits. This is especially useful for exercise if this is something that you are trying to build a habit of doing.

In fact, I use this all of the time. I love to exercise. I love to run and weight-lift. Partly because I enjoy the activities, but also partly because I enjoy the health benefits of doing these. Now, just because I enjoy doing these and enjoy the health benefits, doesn’t mean I’m always feeling particularly motivated every day to do them, especially running. I don’t always feel motivated to go for a run. Especially if it’s cold. Or early in the morning, or after an exhausting day at work.

My brain will offer up some sort of thought, or excuse really, why I shouldn’t go for a run. Maybe a thought like, “I’m going to be uncomfortable the whole time and my legs always tighten up in the cold.” That then makes me feel even less motivated.

If you have times like this, which I know you do, this will be especially useful for you. You can use this for anything, I just find it very helpful for exercise. You’ll also find it very helpful for eating habits.

So, if you’re feeling unmotivated and maybe you’ve already tried to increase your motivation with your thoughts, think about this. It’s irrelevant how you feel in the moment. If you have a goal, what matters is how committed you are to that goal. What do you really want?

If you’ve already committed to cooking dinner five nights a week, instead of getting takeout or going out to eat, it doesn’t matter how you feel in the moment. It doesn’t matter if you had an exhausting day at work. You can just do an action despite feeling unmotivated. You don’t have to feel motivated to do something. You don’t have to feel excited to cook. You don’t have to feel driven to cook. You can simply just do an action.

For all the times that you vacuumed your house, did you feel motivated or excited or driven to vacuum every single time? No. You just did it anyway. Because you’re committed to having a clean house.

For the mothers listening, did you oftentimes feel exhausted and still played with your kid anyway? Of course you did. You were committed to some connection with your child.

So, you can be committed to something and do the action no matter how you’re feeling. Like I said, this can either be seen as a tool or a skill. When you use this tool often enough, it really becomes a skill. The more you practice doing an action that moves you closer to your goals despite not feeling highly motivated, the more this becomes a skill that then is just part of who you are. It’s part of what you do. You don’t put a lot of effort in, it just is. I’ve personally experienced this with this one, like I said with exercise.