Motivation

I've been in ruts where I don't feel like doing what I know I should be doing. This includes the gym, or other hobbies or regular adult-ing things.

Unfortunately for you and me, the gym and your health aren't areas in our lives that we can ignore. Nothing will happen if I stop drawing, but I might have a life threatening issue if I don't care of my health.

But there's a problem:

The gym isn't easy.

No matter how you put it, you have to push it to make progress, or else it just won't happen. At a certain point, easy doesn't work.

So we try to white knuckle things and just go anyway. We get our motivational videos or speeches or playlists going to put us in the mood, my past self included.

I think a major problem we don't talk about enough is the fact that dopamine gets hijacked today all too easily. It's all around us. Modern exercise or strength training or bodybuilding started up in the early 1800s/late 1900s. Back then, people had nothing to do but go to work at the factory, read the newspaper or listen to the radio (if they had one). I remember reading in Convict Conditioning that old school bodybuilder John Grimek would work all day in a steel foundry and then come home to workout.

So if those were your alternatives, then of course working out would be appealing because there wasn't a whole lot else going on.

But how can we increase our own levels of motivation in the modern age?

You just have to set it free from everything else.

Motivation Re-Defined

I want this to be part 1 in a 3 part series of things that concern all of us when it comes to working out: motivation, discipline and willpower.

We need to make sure we're clear on the definition of all 3.

Motivation is wanting to do something. Discipline is doing something that you know you should do, when you should do it, even if you don't feel like it. Willpower is the ability to resist something that you shouldn't do.

When we think of motivation, we think about being excited to do something. We think we have to feel good in the moment.

Let's re-define it with the real reason. You're motivated on a deeper level for a lot of things, even if it doesn't seem like you're excited in the moment.

You're motivated by money, so you'll wake up early and endure high stress at a job to get it. You may even have to wake up at 3am to catch a flight because your boss said so.

You're motivated by human connection and relationships. You'll join online forums, chat with friends on Discord late into the night and do your best to impress someone that you want to date.

You're motivated by progress and achievement, so you'll dump 6k hours into a video game just to have a higher rank (that was me).

You're motivated by just pure pleasure, so you'll stay up late watching TV and scrolling even though you know you have to wake up early for work (don't do that).

Deep down, we all want the same things.

And at last, we all want to be ripped and strong, right? If I could wave a magic wand and you didn't have to put any effort in, I bet you'd take that deal.

Stolen Motivation

So if the "motivation" for getting jacked is down there, why is it so hard for us to take action on it? As I said earlier, working out is hard. It's not sitting on the couch and watching TV or anything else relaxing. It will never be able to compete with leisure. So when your brain has the option of training hard to see results 5 months from now vs sitting down to feel good within 5 minutes, which one do you think it's going to take?

Our brains are wired to take the path that will lead to pleasure in the most efficient/fastest way possible. Sadly, these easy paths are all around us. When you engage in them for too long, it will start to take away your desire to do hard things. If you binge on video games for 8 hours straight, you're not going to be as excited to go to the gym. The same goes with scrolling, TV or eating cake. If you want abs, but keep eating cake before eating the rest of your dinner, you're not going to want to eat the healthy food, even though deep down your brain knows it's better for you.

When it comes to dopamine, your mind operates with a 1 or a 0. "Does this give me pleasure or not? If so, then repeat that thing." If it finds something that's even easier, it realizes that this is the "best" path to get what you want, so it will keep doing it.

It's like the rat experiment where they were given a pleasure button that was connected to electric stuff connected to their heads. Pressing the button meant they got excitement. But they stopped wanting to do everything else, even eat. So this means that your brain has no context of what's good for you, only if something releases dopamine.

So what's the opposite of this problem and how can we reverse it? Let's go back to the food example. You're eating cake all day and you don't want healthy food. But what if you started fasting? What if you ate nothing for 1-5 days straight? At the end of it, any food would be appealing, even that broccoli you've been avoiding.

You have to starve your brain of all the cheap things holding you back.

Increasing Your Motivation

Step 1 is you have to understand that you're already motivated, meaning deep down you want certain goals in your life, even if you don't feel the urge to do them.

Step 2 is understanding that there are other things that are in the way. It's amplified even more in the modern age. Let's discover what those could be, and then you can see if they're problems for you.

Scrolling

• I think this is one of the most "evil" things out there. Not saying social media is all bad because you can connect with people. The problem comes with how constant the feed of information is. You see something new, you get a little dopamine hit. But the nature of social media (the constant, infinite scroll) means that it could go on forever.

• If seeing a post, even a positive or funny one, provides a dopamine hit. Imagine getting that non-stop for 1-2 hours on your couch. That's not even mentioning how each post is under 30 seconds long, ruining your attention span. This is why you put the phone down and don't feel like doing anything else.

Entertainment

• I love a good movie just as much as anyone else, but historically you either had to go to a movie theater (and watch it before they stopped showing it) or buy/rent the movie in physical form or wait until it came on a channel on cable. Today it goes straight to your TV with the power of the internet.

• Not only movies, but applies to shows and games. We used to have to wait to see a show once per week (remember Saturday morning cartoons?) We used to have to drive to go buy a game or rent it. Now we have a backlog of both that could go on forever.

Junk Food

• I put this in here because it's related to health. Eating sweets non-stop ruins the joy you could have for the real food that actually fills you up.

• Without going too far into the diet talk, eating well makes you feel good, which won't tire you out before going to the gym. (Imagine eating a huge pancake breakfast, would you feel energized for a workout?)

Step 3 is learning how to hack your dopamine and reward yourself properly.

Be careful with this advice, but since we're wired for rewards, put your regular entertainment things at the end of your workout (or anything else you want to do). Start easy like allowing yourself 2 hours of entertainment per day as your reward, having a healthy treat or giving yourself a 30 minute scrolling session.

From there, start to cut things down.

• Lower the entertainment to 1 hour or weekends only.

• Cut your allowed social media time down.

• Space out the days when you are less strict with your diet.

Experiment.

The purpose of this is to start to connect the work you have to do with a reward you're already getting. Once you do this enough times, your brain will get excited for doing the work task and not just for the reward. It's like training a dog to do what you want it to do.

As a bonus, start to spend more time away from your vices, especially your phone, in 10 minute blocks. Seriously. If you want to call this "meditation" go ahead. You can even amplify things and stare at a wall or close your eyes. Take naps. Do "non sleep deep rests" or NSDR, which means you just let your mind chill out for a bit. Don't allow yourself to use your phone for the first and/or last hour of the day.

This retrains your scrolling/dopamine brain that's way too overstimulated. In a world of over-stimulation, pure boredom is the way out.

When you start doing all of these things, the stuff you really want to do, that deep down you know you should do, that are good for you and lead you where you want to go will start to feel better again. This is the only way. You have to make hard things feel more enjoyable again.

Go back to the examples of 100 years ago. They did so much more (probably) because they were bored and had nothing else to do. Or even better, go back to your parents or grandparents. No matter your age, they had less technology back then than you do now. They probably had lots of mental down time where nothing was going on, so they had to do yard work, clean the house, write letters, etc. They probably read the newspaper or books or just sat around listening to the radio.

We can learn a lot from the past.

Escape the Trap, Set Your Motivation Free

After a hard day of work, the modern day has made it way too easy to burn the last 1-2 hours of the day on your couch.

You scroll or watch a show (or 2 or 3), or a movie, or "just one hour" of video games. Then you pick your head up and it's been 2-3 hours and you feel horrible that you just wasted time on nothing.

No, it's not fair.

And it's really not your fault.

There are people whose entire careers involve figuring out how to keep you addicted to things.

Food is artificially sweeter than it used to be.

Entertainment services have endless content and will auto-play the next episode.

Video games have a bigger dopamine spike than retro games did. It takes a lot longer to beat certain games and the online competitive scene doesn't help either.

Social media (and the internet in general) has an endless scroll and infinite content.

The only way to win is to stop playing the game.

You have to unplug.

There's no wonder that your motivation to workout, especially at the end of the day in your own house, gets sapped if you go on auto-pilot.

Next time, we'll talk about what to do when you don't feel like doing the thing (discipline), but this article should help you a lot because your brain will start to get so bored that you want excitement from something, so it will have no choice but to start working hard.

Train your brain to do hard things.

Thanks for reading!

As always if you have questions feel free to respond to this newsletter or you can fill out this questionnaire for more questions.