Today, I met with a couple of women whose central concern was the fact that they felt a complete loss of motivation. One of these women is finishing graduate school. Only a few weeks away from graduating, she has found that she is not completing the assignments that she needs to in order to graduate. She knows that she can do them, but all that she seems to be spending her time on is reading romance novels and watching TV. She has also been avoiding contact with people; so much that her mother almost called the police to do a welfare check to make sure that she was alright.
The other woman has had her own big challenges to deal with. She discovered that she has rheumatoid arthritis. In the same year the diagnosis was made, she also needed to get a hip replacement. She’s always been incredibly hardworking, successful, very healthy, and energetic. However, she came to me reporting that she was feeling unmotivated and that she found her lack of motivation to do anything very disturbing as well as frustrating. She said she’s never had this experience before. Both of these bright and confident women found themselves wrestling with a problem that made no sense to their thinking minds.
I began by trying to assess with both of them whether they were really ready to make a change. Often, being unmotivated has its own motivations. Finding that you can’t do something may be a good way of dealing with anxiety about how well you would accomplish the task if you really tried. So, a good first start is trying to figure out whether or not the person is really ready to make a change. It seems that they both were, but the key question was, would trying to change this problem be successful?
With one of the two, it became clear after a half an hour conversation, that one of the major contributors to her lack of motivation was the fact that she was, as she put it, “having a tantrum.” She was not actually all that excited anymore about the subject of her graduate thesis, and recognized that her behavior was, in some ways, similar to behavior that she had as a child when she was told she had to finish work at school that she didn’t want to do. Just identifying the sullen child within her was quite helpful. The other woman was a bit more complicated. We needed to find things that could enhance her sense of energy. That energy that she had always had as a healthy person was really important in terms of her past high motivation. We focused on trying to improve her sleep, but also trying to improve how she woke up in the morning. We discovered that one of the things that had in the past made a big difference in terms of optimism was starting the morning out in the sun, having breakfast out on her patio. We also worked to improve the way she was taking her pain medications, so that her sleep would be less disrupted.
Losing motivation is a complicated problem. Looking for missing energy, whether from depression or from a loss of physical energy, and being very attentive for a sullen child lurking within, are a couple of ways that you might be able to turn things around when dealing with this problem.