You Don’t Have to Be Miserable to Be Motivated

“I need someone to light a fire under my butt.”

“I have an accountability buddy, but I wish she was harder on me.”

“I want to feel better about myself, but not too much. If I were really happy with myself, I might not get ANYTHING done!”

Do these beliefs sound familiar? I often hear them from people who are looking to improve their productivity. They believe that in order to break through procrastination, they need to feel:

• anxious about losing their job
• afraid that someone will be mad at them
• embarrassed that they look irresponsible
• guilty for waiting so long
• or panicked about a deadline

It makes sense. All around us, there are messages reinforcing this view. We assume kids won’t do their homework unless they’re threatened with a bad grade, and that adults won’t do their jobs unless they’re threatened with getting fired. 

Why would anyone do anything if they weren’t afraid of the consequences of sitting around eating bonbons instead?

The Myth of Motivation

That’s the big myth of motivation: that your natural state is to sit around doing nothing, and external motivation has to be applied to change that and get you into action. My clients often find that they subconsciously believe that if they weren’t scared of consequences, they would never do anything again and their whole life would fall apart.

Is that true? Well, think about it. If your friend told you she hadn’t gotten out of bed in days, would you say “wow, you must be feeling really relaxed and happy with yourself!” No, you would probably worry that she was depressed. 

When people aren’t feeling afraid, and their self-worth isn’t in jeopardy, sure, they get enough rest, but they also get active. They find life interesting, and want to get involved in it. They’re playful, adventurous, and inspired. They want to help other people and make a difference in the world. They feel a sense of purpose and meaning. They’re engaged and passionate.

People who love themselves love life.

That may sound like a pipe dream to you right now, and I get that. But the important thing is that this is what humans are like when nothing is twisting them in knots. You don’t have to do anything to make someone feel that way, and in fact, you can’t. You can’t force a person to have a sense of passion and purpose any more than you can make a plant grow by tugging on its leaves. All you can do is meet their basic needs and get out of the way so it can happen naturally.

Then why do we procrastinate?

Okay, so bed-rotting is not your natural state. But you sure do remember times when you felt completely unmotivated and wasted a ton of time. So why does that happen? 

Well, just as the threat of pain can make you work really hard to get your project done before the deadline, it can also make you avoid thinking about your project at all. If thinking about your project makes you worry about failing, feeling stupid, or getting judged, you can feel the pain of that imagined future, even before it arrives. And so your pain-avoidance system can leap into action right then and there. It might make you:

• Reach for a distraction, like social media or video games
• Reach for un-threatening busywork, like reorganizing your desk or checking your email
• Reach for something soothing, like a sugary snack or a drink
• Dampen your ability to feel pain by getting foggy-headed, distractible, or sleepy

In fact, your parasympathetic nervous system can put you in a shutdown response, which happens to not only dull your ability to feel physical and emotional pain, but also turn off your motivation. This response evolved to kick in when you have no way out of a threatening situation, and so playing dead is your best option. Losing motivation was part of the strategy. When a milder version of that response kicks in during your workday, the loss of motivation is no longer helpful, but your body doesn’t know that.

So why do you sometimes go into potato mode? Because your body kills your motivation as a side effect of killing pain.

So how do we stop procrastinating?

All this means that threatening yourself with lots of pain is not required for productivity – in fact, it can actively hurt your productivity!

You might wonder if you can use the kind of pain that motivates you and not the kind of pain that demotivates you. But here’s the thing: they’re the same kind of pain. Specifically, they’re threats to your self-worth.

Deep down, we all have a sense of self-worth, and for most of us, it feels kinda shaky. It seems to depend an awful lot on what happened today – did we make progress? Did we make a mistake? Did we realize that our coworker is better at this than us? DID WE HAVE A GOOD HAIR DAY?

As long as your sense of self-worth is flapping in the breeze like that, threats like missing out on a promotion, having a presentation flop, or getting fired are going to hurt – even before they happen.

Sometimes, you’ll respond to that pain by saying “I better keep that from happening!” and knuckling down. Other times, you’ll respond to that pain by saying “I need to stop feeling this ASAP!” and bouncing off your project.

So you can’t really pick and choose what effect your shaky sense of self-worth has on your productivity. The true solution is to discover your unconditional self-worth so that you can sense that regardless of which way the wind is blowing.

You don’t have to fake it till you make it or say affirmations into the mirror. That unconditional self-worth is already there deep down – it’s just covered up by a bunch of beliefs and fears. 

In Painless Productivity, I help people gently pull back those layers of fears and beliefs so they can find the solid self-worth underneath, and re-learn how to act out of joy and purpose instead of out of the fear of feeling ashamed.

What fear is driving your procrastination? Take my What’s Your Procrastination Type? quiz to find out.