Have you been struggling with motivation recently? If so, you may unknowingly damage your drive through your habits. If you aren’t getting enough sleep, eating poorly, and engaging in another practice we’ll discuss later, your motivation will be affected.
1. Not Getting Good Sleep
Good sleep is essential for every part of your life. If you’ve lost your motivation, look at how you’re sleeping. There’s solid evidence that poor sleep is at the root of low motivation.
Your motivation will be severely reduced if you’re consistently sleep-deprived. The reasons for this are self-evident. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re more likely to suffer from anxiety, irritability, and mood swings.
To get back your motivation, find a way to improve the quality of your sleep.
2. Constantly Checking Social Media
We all probably check social media too much. Studies have shown that over half of Americans check social media at least 10 times daily.
However, did you know that the effects it has on your motivation are also well recorded? A recent survey found some shocking data.
Researchers found that individuals who checked social media frequently were nearly 20 percent more stressed than those who did not.
Stress is the fastest way to kill your motivation. As such, define your motivation again. It might be time to go on a short digital detox.
3. Overthinking
Do you find yourself consistently thinking about what to do? Is your mind constantly asking questions that you can’t find answers to? If you struggle with these sorts of thoughts, you may be dealing with overthinking.
Overthinking is what it says on the tin—thinking too much. Overthinking has terrible effects on your motivation. Research has shown that by pondering your actions, you’ll become less capable of making good decisions.
While deliberation is vital, overthinking makes it tougher to take action. To get your motivation back, you need to take small steps in the area you’re struggling with.
4. Taking Criticism Personally
Criticism is necessary if you want to improve. After all, how can you get better if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong? However, you need to be able to separate criticism of what you did wrong from criticism of your character.
Taking criticism personally leads to overly emotional reactions such as anger, sadness, and stress. As we’ve mentioned previously, these emotions and the chemicals that underlie them have disastrous effects on your motivation.
The best way to avoid taking criticism personally is to learn how to detach. By taking in a few deep breaths and waiting to respond, you can control your emotions rather than letting them control you.
5. Unhealthy Eating
Diet is integral to how we feel and how we work. Aside from the physical effects of a poor diet, studies have shown that substandard nutrition can lead to fatigue, depression, and other mental disorders.
Look at your diet. Are you getting enough protein through meat, eggs, beans, etc.? If not, you may struggle with motivation. Why? These foods contain high amounts of dopamine, which is the chemical that makes taking action fun.
By adding a few of these foods to even one meal a day, you can experience noticeable improvements in your abilities and motivation.
6. Excessive Complaining
Do you complain frequently? Do you always have a bad word to say? While complaining in small doses can be helpful, excessive complaining can negatively affect your motivation.
Research has shown that complaining is not something you can do for free. Complaining releases cortisol, the stress hormone. While important for our survival, too much cortisol leads to exhaustion and fatigue.
If you want to improve your motivation, you need to stop complaining to prevent the release of excess cortisol.
7. Perfectionism
Perfectionism is one of the most harmful mental traits you can have. It makes it more challenging to do things you want because you constantly criticize what actions you do take.
We’ve all experienced how perfectionism has made it harder to accomplish our goals. However, the research on how perfectionism affects motivation is truly astonishing.
Perfectionism is associated with procrastination in the scientific literature. Why? According to psychologists, this association is due to “All or Nothing” thinking.
If you can only accept perfectionism from yourself, you’re significantly less likely to start a project because you know subconsciously it won’t be perfect.
Deadlines can be a great solution to overcome perfectionism. With deadlines, you’ll have to get comfortable creating work that is good enough rather than creating perfectionism.
