🧩 Motivation (and Discipline and Routine) are Not Achieved by Willpower
Also, Motivation is Not a Behaviour
I'm still proud of my article on How I Committed To Writing Everyday - which I recommend also reading after this, as it breaks down the specific steps of how I achieved this motivation and "disciplined routine" - but establishing healthy my daily routines as I set about re-building my life after my crash is far from over.
I still want to integrate physical exercise into it, some kind of meditation/mindfulness/thought-processing exercise and household maintenance routines.
And hopefully, by that time, I'll have started getting a glimmer of what kind of career path I want to and am able to take.
Yesterday, I discovered this video which I think may really be helpful, where Dr K talks about "what is motivation".
Dr K's video on Motivation (CW: His video does talk about suicidal ideation as an example).
Your Focus needs to be Internal (Cognitive) rather than External (Behavioural)
Motivation is often chalked up to simply "wanting it more" - "it" being whatever the goal is you are seeking, and "more" being relative to everyone else, or relying on sheer willpower to enforce the pattern of routine without understanding what's going on inside the head of a person who manifests that "discipline", or understanding what motivation is from their point of view and how they achieve this discipline.
Dr K highlights this focus on the external as what he considers a shortfall in Western medicine, and explains that when it comes to motivation, the focused point of change needs to be internal (cognitive) rather than external (i.e behavioural).
Dr K gains this dual perspective from first studying to become a monk and studying yoga, meditation, and Reiki before he then studied psychiatry, and he considers Western science/medicine to have a heavy focus on "the external" in general.
Western Cargo-Culting Attempts at "Achieving" Motivation
In psychiatry this results in trying to simply examining the behaviours of people we see as disciplined and assuming that from replicating someone's routine/good habits we can derive their motivation or means of achieving discipline.
This is basically what the business and tech industry calls "cargo cuting".
If you are unfamiliar with the term, cargo-culting, this is when a person attempts to reproduce someone else's results by copying their external methods without understanding the problem itself and why these methods were implemented in the first place.
You can see why this is a problem when you look at the historical origins of the phrase. One can end up engineering an entirely worthless and unrelated solution for one's problem, or even assuming an effect's correlating factors to be their cause.
I think this is why people talk about building a routine, or a habit they're trying to generate that cognitive shift through external behaviour - these are all external attempts to reproduce "motivation" behaviours, believing the mindset will follow with enough willpower, with the belief that repetition of the action enough times will cement the habit. In reality, they are putting the cart before the horse and confusing cause and effect.
Motivation is "The Ability to Hold a Thought in Your Mind"
So what is motivation?
Dr K emphasizes the importance of looking not at the external behaviours, but at the mindset of these highly motivated individuals who are committed to a routine.
In his research and clinical experience, as an addiction psychiatrist, the one thing the people he observed to be highly motivated individuals had in common in fulfilling their routine was that they would have the thought persistent in their mind that they needed to do the task.
Dr K defines motivation as "The ability to hold a thought in your mind for a long time".
His video also talks about specific types of meditation that helps with building this type of focused thought.
He also draws on examples of addiction and obsessions in some of his examples of how persistent thoughts like this affect behaviours.
Being Consumed by "Long-Term" will Destroy Your Motivation!
Dr K also talks about how focusing on a long-term goal is counterproductive - motivation involves thinking of the task itself. Dwelling on the consequences actually undermines that as a distraction, and can also cause anxiety, making the problem worse.
I think this was actually exactly my problem, with my struggles with perfectionism and the resulting analysis paralysis that my efforts would never achieve my (or others') lofty goals for myself.
To Commit To A Routine: Be in the Now
Removing that pressure entirely, is actually how I managed to achieve that goal of writing every day as a routine.
I can confirm that this description of motivation is how my brain thinks about writing now: as a thought that doesn't go away until I have completed my daily writing.
You can see how I achieved that routine and motivation in the first link at the start of this article.
Writing has thus successfully become a priority for my brain, which is now imprinted as a routine I must do, and it has done this so successfully, in fact, that I am starting to think that I can start adding new routines!
Remove Perfectionism! Imperfect Something is Better than Perfect Nothing!
I know that the key lies in not becoming obsessed with outcomes, which has historically, been tricky for me, but since my commitment to blog and to following those steps in my article, I have already found myself fairly naturally being able to append to my routine in also getting back into reading.
So I reckon now looking into further routines I can add is certainly becoming more and more attainable... I believe that I will get there!
My brain has been becoming more and more comfortable taking things in stride, as the article explains, without giving into perfectionistic thinking or preoccupation regarding the future!
For more of the "how" I do recommend the article in my first link, as this is basically an extension of that! But it basically comes down to this solid principle:
No, Really, Remove Perfectionism!
Yes, this is really all it boils down to! Motivation is a symptom, an effect of removing that perfectionistic thinking, which itelf is an anxiety-based obsession with future events which paralyses us from taking action!
Motivation comes from facilitating being and doing to rediscover the joy of the moment, a celebration of what is and the exploration of it, rather than the fear-based analysis of what needs to become. Figuring out what is making you feel overwhelmed, and removing that pressure, which is often rooted in perfectionism!
Remove that "need to" from your mind! Put a pin in it, pin it on a wall, so your mind can focus on the moment, and on what you are currently doing - even celebrating the day-by-day joy in the routine without the pressure of how perfect things need to be! There is wisdom in the old adage "the perfect [or the great] is the enemy of the good".
I hope that this information from Dr K is similarly helpful to others as it has been to me! If anyone has feedback or other tips they'd like to share in how they've internally managed their own motivation and disciplined routines, please feel free to comment them!
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