Two easy techniques which help with motivation issues
Hey tumblr! Today I share two easy techniques that might help you drastically improve your motivation and ability to do certain stuff. This can be a huge help for all the neurodiverse people out there but they work nicely for neurotypicals, too. And the best part? They actually work!
Technique number one: If - then plans ( implementation intentions)
Okay imagine the following situation: You are arriving at some place and need to go to the third floor and have the option to take the elevator or the stairs; and although you know that the stairs would be the healthier choice and you want to life healthier, you still end up every time in the elevator.
The trick to overcome this is very simple: You decide which option you take before you come into the situation where you have to make it. So instead of deciding from moment to moment, what to do, you prepare yourself in advance. You imagine yourself coming into the situation (in this case, arriving at the general elevator/staircase area) and then how you make the “right” choice (in this case, taking the stairs). (IF this happens, THEN i will do x.)
When yout then actually come into the situation; you’ll imediately notice how much easier it becomes to resist that pesky elevator, because you are not any longer required to make a choice, you just can follow the decision you already made and feel great about it. :)
Of course this will not work every time (especially if you have good reasons to use the elevator), but it still increases your likelihood to doing what you really want to do significantly.
Technique number two: Mental contrasting
Another “trick” you can apply is mental contrasting. This is for example helpful for getting yourself motivated to learn for an upcoming test.
The technique consists of two steps and it is really important to do both and in the right order:
Step one: Imagine that you did the thing you want to do; indulge yourself in the nice feelings you’ll have, when you get this finally done
Step two: Now you imagine the obstacles that may come up while you try to do this thing - and what you can or will do in return do to counter them
A few minutes of each every once in a while can really do wonders!
But what if you do just one of these?
- just imagining the outcome will lead to a decrease in motivation, because you then already got sort of your reward, without having to anything
- just imagining what could wrong and how to solve it will also lessen your motivation, because then the thing gets even more non-appealing and frigthening, you can easily trap yourself in the bad thoughts
Combining both is the key to boost your motivation; because you indulge yourself first, the obstacles part becomes less frigthening, because you have the glorious result still on your mind; because you think of the obstacles second, the pseudo reward effect of the indulging gets toned down, you’ll get a more realistic perspective of things. And this is what makes you so much more likely that you do the thing when it’s time.
The best way to use these tricks is of course to combine them; if then plans works pretty well for simple objectives and you can easily use several of these for the obstacle solving phase of your thought contrasting.
And because I’m not giving advice out without backing it up, some links:
Future thought and behaviour change
Mind wandering via mental contrasting as a tool for behavior change
Dare to Dream of Falling Short
Implementation intention Wikipedia
Implementation Intentions
You will notice repeatedly the same scientist working on this, but that’s because there actually hasn’t been much research on those topic otherwise. (Which is a shame, because these techniques work and you really only need a short amount of concentration to do these! Heck, you can grab yourself a piece of paper and write a bullet point list to stay focussed.)
So try these out - you got nothing to loose and so much more to win!
