Behavioral Psychology

If Your Motivation Has Started To Flag

By  | 

If you’ve been pursuing some endeavor and your motivation has started to flag behavioral psychology tells us that what’s really going on has little to do with a change in your inner sense of drive but instead with a change in your relationship to the reinforcements in the controlling environment.

When starting out, most of us feel reinforced by the novelty of what we’re doing and by the naive hope that we’ll be able to quickly achieve a successful outcome. These reinforcements drive our continued behavior in the endeavor in question for a few weeks or a few months but sooner or later they tend to disappear. The endeavor stops feeling novel and it becomes obvious that the hoped for outcome isn’t going to show up any time soon.

In the absence of reinforcements behavior tends to die out which is why it’s really not a surprise that people who rely exclusively on the reinforcements outlined above don’t make it very far. If you were feeling gung ho a few weeks or a few months ago but your motivation around an endeavor has started to flag ask yourself if 1) the novelty has started to wear off and 2) you aren’t getting results as quickly as you were hoping for.

Related posts:

  1. Know When To Take Breaks No one can decide except for you whether you’re just being lazy and should keep pushing forward or whether you really do need to back off to recharge your psychic batteries. One thing’s for sure though, if you override the authentic voice telling you to take breaks and instead just keep going pedal to the […]...
  2. Think Of A Small Change You Can Make Today Many of us are entrenched in a way of thinking where if it’s not epic then it’s not worthy of remark. We’re drawn to the game winning touchdown, the brilliantly colored sunset, the knight in shining armor. In the context of making life changes this attitude causes real problems because we tend to think that […]...
  3. Procrastination “Procrastination is the thief of time.” – Edward Young People who have a problem with procrastination are well aware of the fact, they understand their lives would be better if they didn’t keep putting things off until the last moment, but they don’t know why they procrastinate. That’s because the forces impelling them are unconscious, […]...
  4. Increasing Skills The Right Way Hopefully if you have decided to pursue an endeavor your ultimate goal is to reach mastery in it, which we define as the highest level you are capable of reaching, not the highest level someone else is capable of reaching. If the goal is mastery, there will be many stages you must pass through on […]...
  5. Considering Quitting If you’re considering quitting an endeavor that you’ve already put a lot of time and effort into then it’s likely you’ll try to rationalize giving up on the grounds that what you’ve been doing is a waste of time, pointless, not really worth it. What we suggest you do is think back to the original […]...
  6. Determine Your Destiny Who is going to determine your destiny, you or the controlling environment? If you’ve been working towards a goal and have reached the point where you’re seriously considering giving up the likely reason why is the absence of reinforcements in the controlling environment that would pull out your continued behavior. You’re not receiving support, encouragement, […]...
  7. Let Intentions Carry More Weight Than Feelings When making important life changes we can think of our underlying intentions as the foundation upon which the house of change is built. Just as a house will collapse without a solid foundation the process of change will collapse without solid intentions. Those intentions emanate from increased conscious awareness around why, how, and what. Why […]...
  8. Keeping At A Pursuit Most people who embark upon a pursuit are like shooting stars, burning brightly across the sky for a very short time before fizzling out. They have the best of intentions, they really do convince themselves that an unrelentingly high output can and will last. In fact they think going at it full throttle is the […]...
  9. Uncover The Embers To Stay Motivated If you do anything for long enough you’re going to experience lulls in motivation levels, and anything worth doing is going to take a long time, so you’ve got to figure out ways to stay motivated during those lulls if you want to keep walking your path of self-actualization. Otherwise you’ll find a plausible excuse […]...
  10. Running Away From Your Problems People say you can’t run away from your problems but that’s not precisely true. It depends on what kind of problems we’re talking about. When they’re external to you and outside of your control, meaning when their source emanates from some variable in the environment and you have have little or no influence over this […]...
  11. Staying With Your Partner Out Of Fear Or Out Of Love There is an uncomfortable truth that many rarely admit to themselves, let alone anyone else, which is that they continue to stay in their romantic relationships not out of love but out of fear. We don’t mean fear in the abusive sense, but rather fear of what life would be like without their accustomed anchors. […]...
  12. Reasonable Anxiety In an existential context no anxiety at all or very high levels of it are bad while reasonable, bearable levels are good. We will get into what reasonable is. The idea of anxiety being a good thing comes as a shock to a lot of us and the simple act of processing the ramifications is […]...
  13. Doing Something For Yourself And Motivation A common sentiment is “I want to do something for myself.” From working a job whose main purpose is to help the bottom line of someone else to parenting whose main purpose is to raise someone else, you may have come to feel like your existential needs have taken a back seat. Even when these […]...
  14. Keep Your Motivation Up When we start out with lifestyle changes our motivation levels are usually pretty high, we feel ready to take on the world, confident that we’ll be able to follow through with whatever it is we’re trying to do. But these motivation levels almost invariably taper off, leaving us with the usually unconscious question of whether […]...
  15. Ebb And Flow Of Your Motivation Levels If you’re in it for the long haul, you’re going to notice an ebb and flow of your motivation levels. You’ll probably go through periods of high energy where productivity comes effortlessly, as well as periods of lethargy where your work doesn’t come so easily, and the thought of quitting might even sneak its way […]...
  16. Self-Imposed Breaks And Motivation Motivators will often talk about ways to power through when you aren’t feeling it but we want to flip the script and discuss the value of holding back when you are feeling it. This might sound like nonsense. If you’re feeling motivated you should just go for it right? The problem is that powering through […]...
  17. Motivation When Striking Out On Your Own If you’re thinking about striking out on your own in some endeavor and are hoping for the same sort of support, encouragement, and structure that you got at school or even at work you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Very few people will try to help you or hurt you, motivate you or discourage you, […]...
  18. Motivation And All Or Nothing Thinking When your motivation levels are flagging you might see the task in front of you as too daunting and therefore decide to not even try, to save it for another day when you’re better equipped to handle the challenge. This is a pretty good example of the cognitive distortion called all or nothing thinking. As […]...
  19. What To Do If Life Has Started To Seem Pointless “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” – Frederick Nietzsche Human beings can be meaning makers but more often than not they’re meaning accepters. In their short lives they grasp onto various given sources of meaning, meaning handed down to them by anonymous cultural authority as well as by specific […]...
  20. What To Do If You Have Started To Feel Lonely Loneliness fluctuates because life circumstances are always changing. Change is a welcome friend when circumstances are aversive, but the other side of the coin is that sometimes things are exactly the way you want them to be yet they can’t stay that way forever. In the context of starting to feel lonely maybe you recently […]...
Related Items