WHAT DOES "LACK OF MOTIVATION" REALLY MEAN?

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Lacking motivation is the most commonly cited barrier when it comes to being consistent with physical activity, alongside lack of time. This might show up as a total lack of desire for the activity, or it might be that conflicted “I want to logically but I just don’t feel like doing it”. Either way, it seems that sense of energy towards being active is just absent.

So we cite this lack of motivation as the reason for or root cause of our participation struggles. We ask “how can I feel more motivated?” and try to manually increase the feeling of motivation itself by perhaps focusing our minds on the benefits of the activity.

But there are a couple of problems with this: a) motivation isn’t just a logical conclusion we come to through analysing the benefits of an activity, and b) how motivated we feel isn’t the core reason for our participation or lack thereof in physical activity - it is in fact an end symptom.

If we want to influence our motivation, and hence how energised we feel towards participating, we need to understand what results in that feeling of lacking motivation. Otherwise we’re not targeting the root cause, just the consequence of the cause.

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What is underneath lack of motivation?

Motivation - the desire or impetus to pursue something - emerges from the activation of what my favourite neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp aptly named the seeking system. The seeking system is a brain network that drives us to pursue things, underpinned predominantly by dopaminergic activity. When active, it creates the sense of wanting something, energising us to explore and seek it out. It contributes to feelings of positive anticipation, curiosity and determination that we might experience when we are going after something we want.

The seeking system is activated by things that signal the potential for a reward or opportunity - in other words, things that might be beneficial to us. These might be physical things we need, social interactions, opportunities for learning and development or things that we perceive to be pleasurable in some way. These signals can come from within, such as cues for hunger (and hence the resulting drive to seek out food), or from without, such as receiving a text from your friend asking you to join them at the pub or coming across an advert for an interesting-looking obstacle race.

But the active pursuit and exploration of things requires energy, so evolution has shaped us to be a little judicious about what is “worth” pursuing. This means if something doesn’t appear to hold significant potential benefits, or there are plenty of anticipated down-sides around pursuing it, then the seeking system won’t come online in the same way.

So lacking motivation signals that at the current time, the activity in question is deemed insufficiently rewarding to be worth pursuing. In other words, the benefits aren’t considered to exceed the costs, meaning the seeking system is not currently supporting participation in the activity.

Let’s break this down a bit more because it’s helpful to understand. This state of lacking motivation can be a consequence of a few scenarios:

• The anticipated effort involved in the activity is deemed excessive of resources (physical or mental)

• The perceived threats or down-sides in participating eclipse or outweigh the benefits (e.g. embarrassment, judgment from others, self-criticism, discomfort)

• There is an absence of perceived benefits in participating, regardless of down-sides

• The perceived benefits in abstaining (e.g. by staying home in the warm) or the down-sides of necessarily sacrificing other activities (e.g. getting work done instead) are greater than the benefits of participating in the activity.

So, to understand why we lack motivation we need to understand how the activity and its alternative (i.e. what you would have to sacrifice for it) are perceived and valued. That is the real cause of why we end up participating, struggling to participate or not participating.

In the following section I will explore a few areas of enquiry that we can pursue to understand what feeds into our motivation. It may seem like we’re risking getting too deep into the details here, but it pays to bear in mind that motivation is more complex than it seems - if we leave that complexity out we set ourselves up for failure because we think it’s simpler than it is and overlook key factors impacting our motivation.

Understanding costs and benefits

Following on from the point I just made, it is also useful to acknowledge that the perceived costs and benefits of participating or abstaining in physical activity exist at different levels of awareness. To add to that, sometimes the true impact of a cost or benefit is on a different level of awareness to the cost or benefit itself. For example, we may explicitly recognise that we dread XYZ, but perhaps we underestimate how much it really deters us. In reality we aren’t party to most of what goes on in our brains - our conscious mind has an extremely limited view, and accepting this is important for cultivating the patience to persist with exploring your own motivation.

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Some of the perceived costs and benefits of your activities will be explicitly conscious, staring you in the face as soon as you think about your activity, and I would always recommend starting with these. Thinking of examples of costs or deterrents, you might be able to easily identify that you…

• Get self-critical whenever you feel you’re not doing too well

• Feel unpleasantly competitive with certain classmates

• Feel self-conscious

• Dread the discomfort or fatigue involved in something

• Think constantly about what else you “should” be doing at home or work while you’re in the gym

• Feel under time pressure

• Don’t feel you’re making the progress you want to make

  
  

Even just one of these can be enough to dwarf the benefits and deter you from participating if they’re potent enough. Some useful questions to start with are:

• What makes my activity seem unappealing, overly effortful or costly? It is likely not the entire activity in itself but just aspects of it, so try to get specific.

• What puts me off, what don’t I like about it, what triggers any negative feelings?

• Bear in mind too that these answers will likely change depending on your circumstances: emotions, fatigue, distraction, priorities, health status, etcetera. Look at your patterns - when am I more likely to be deterred OR to feel like doing it, are there commonalities?

• We often forget that everything we do means sacrificing doing something else too. What are the costs of stopping what I’m doing to do the activity? What are the benefits of abstaining, of doing what I would do instead?

Likewise you can reflect on the perceived benefits of your activities in the same way. But bear in mind the most motivating benefits are not just logical (i.e. “I know this is good for my health so I should do it”) but benefits you actually experience at a deeper level than the intellectual. You need to feel good in some way doing the activity. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all fun and games (which many activities definitely aren’t!) - feeling good doesn’t just refer to pleasure but also things like a sense of meaning, focus, engagement, curiosity, pride, adventure, satisfaction or determination, to name a few. And the good news is we needn’t experience an absence of difficulty or negative emotions to experience these positive feelings, they are available alongside the challenging experiences.

So I would encourage you to really reflect on whether those benefits you can consciously recognise actually deliver an experiential sense of promise when you think about pursuing them - that’s the kind of benefit that activates the seeking system.

Sometimes though our experiences are a bit more nebulous and semi-conscious. For example, you might find that you just feel a bit out of place when you go to do your activity, or you feel the urge to give up quite quickly for no real reason and you’re not sure what it’s about. This might be for example because you have a negative view of yourself that gets activated by the situation, leaving you with a general, free-floating sense of inadequacy that is hard to articulate yet makes the experience less enjoyable. These need more exploration - often with a third party - and this is something that will be included in our upcoming short course which is about understanding your motivation (subscribe or keep an eye on future posts to be notified of its release).

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This haziness or semi-consciousness is just as commonly the case for perceived benefits, because as implied above there is often a disparity between intellectually recognised benefits and the actual experienced benefits - the benefits we claim we experience may not be felt as strongly as we think they are when reflecting outside of the activity. For instance you might really love the idea of a workout, but the reality is different or the positive aspect is actually dwarfed by other less pleasant ones when you do it. Or maybe the activity doesn’t play out like that at all - the mental idea is not the same as reality, and in fact reflects more of a fantasy or ideal. You can also reflect on whether you are taking into account how those benefits are experienced when experienced WITH any inevitable down-sides.

A few questions to ponder, because if you struggle consistently with motivation it may be that your benefits are less potent than you realise and a reshaping of your goals and approach is necessary:

• Are there really lots of benefits, or potent ones? Is that my direct experience of the activity?

• Are they consistently experienced?

• Are there situations or emotional states I get into that make these benefits seem weaker?

• If these are just anticipated benefits rather than actually experienced benefits, where do those ideas come from? What am I basing those anticipations on?

Finally, there can be aspects to your experience that are totally out of awareness. At the deepest and most automatic level our brains are constantly assessing the anticipated costs of literally everything we do and comparing them to our assessed resources (a whole host of factors, most we aren’t aware of). If the costs are deemed high given perceived resources and the anticipated benefits of doing the activity, you’ll be left with an almost visceral sense that the activity feels like too much effort. A lot of this is based on physiological factors as well as psychological.

But of course there are also more purely psychological dynamics going on deep beneath the surface. For example, consciously you may love the idea of getting into a regular strength training routine but every time you consider doing it you somehow get distracted, procrastinate and find yourself automatically thinking “I’ll deal with that later.” It’s as if something invisible gently guides your attention away, creating a haze and disconnecting you from the idea. So you may feel that spark of motivation but it never turns into action and you push it down the road every time, all the while convincing yourself you’ll get round to it. In this instance you can tell something is going on, but you’ve absolutely no idea what, and that’s why you continue to repeat the pattern. Perhaps it’s that the reality of organising and doing this routine is too overwhelming, and the idea of it not being realistic is too disappointing to acknowledge. It could be that at a deeper level your brain is assessing the energy and effort costs to be too high, or maybe you’re carrying around a hidden idea based on past experiences that you’re simply not the type of person who could achieve something like that.

In these circumstances you really have to dig into the weeds and keep reflecting over time to figure out what’s going on, I’m afraid (again, this is where an external party such as a psychologist is helpful). And this might test your patience, but if you really want to get motivated and consistent it’s necessary to understand these things because without addressing them they’ll continue.

For instance the aspects of your activities that serve as deterrents aren’t going to change unless you actively work to change them, or unless by sheer fluke something environmental happens that does. The good news though is that in really getting to know our deterrents we can actually do something about them or make them more manageable. And that initiative in itself often provides extra motivation for people to engage in the activity because it’s another goal, another target to hit. That promise of personal development adds an extra layer of meaning to physical activities beyond their physical outcomes.

Photo by Marcel Ardivan on Unsplash

Finally, I want to highlight that there can be other factors totally unrelated to physical activity that impact your ongoing motivation. For example, not only can physical health and even things like diet have an impact on brain function and moods, but they also contribute to those crude cost-benefit analyses that are constantly going on and hence to how hard things feel or how hard they actually are. So health status is an important one to consider.

Equally, our life experiences and psychological responses to them can contribute to muted seeking system activity over time, as seen in conditions like depression (which is literally experienced as the pressing down, de-pression, of drive and energy). That’s a discussion for a future post, but what it means is the seeking system is chronically underactive, in which case you’d benefit from more general psychological support. Furthermore, personality comes into it too - the trait of conscientiousness for example means you’re naturally more interested in pursuing challenges and goals. If you aren’t conscientious it’s a little harder, although that’s not to say you can’t become more conscientious in that area. Often people low in conscientiousness benefit from activities that are more play- or socially oriented, even better if organised by someone else to take that aspect out. So there are also practical things you can do to reduce resistance and amp up motivation.

If you are interesting in understanding your motivation at a deeper level, we will be releasing a short course in the coming months that is all about just that. It will guide you in exploring the factors that have an impact on your motivation in more detail, and support you in identifying how to amp up the benefits and reduce the costs in meaningful ways.

In the meantime drop us a comment or e-mail if you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

Chloe Psychology of Movement