“I Am Not Motivated to Improve My Health”

The scenario typically goes something like this. We know what we want to do. We’ve done it before and it’s worked. But something holds us back from doing it. The bottom line? We’re lacking motivation. 

Before we can proceed, we need to talk about what’s going on and what thoughts are coming up. Often, based on past experience, we draw an over-generalized conclusion on how it’s going to go.

Let’s say to get healthier, your goal is to lose weight. If you’ve lost weight in the past and it wasn’t super pleasant, you probably won’t be too excited to do it again. That’s why if you’re a person who’s done several diets in their lifetime, whenever there’s a new fad diet, it’s exciting. We think it might be different since we haven’t tried it, that this might be the missing piece. So we go ahead and try it and, often, it doesn’t work like we want, and that’s how cyclical, yo-yo dieting comes in.

The Process of Change

To understand motivation, you have to understand how change happens. That way, you can apply it.

Stage One: Pre-Contemplation

Pre-contemplation is when you recognize that there’s a problem. Maybe you have a patient who is a lifelong smoker with high blood pressure. They say their mother smoked for 80 years and lived to be 105, so smoking doesn’t affect their family and they’re not worried. Your strategy as a clinician is to help them see how things could affect their health. In the pre-contemplation phase, the patient would say, “I know smoking is bad.” 

If your goal is to gain muscle, your pre-contemplation phase may be realizing that you can’t carry your groceries into the house and you want to be stronger. It’s recognizing there is a perceived problem.

Stage Two: Contemplation

Contemplation is when we are considering doing something about it. We haven’t committed yet but we’re considering it. For me, this happens all the time. I proceed from pre-contemplation to contemplation pretty quickly. This phase is all about collecting data and seeing what options are out there. Maybe it’s Googling or speaking to a coach about what needs to happen for you to get stronger.

Stage Three: Planning

Planning is putting the plan into place. It’s saying that based on the studies, it looks like if you do strength training and hit the big muscle groups three times a week and fuel your body properly, you can gain muscle. Ideally, we’ll be very careful to create a realistic plan.

Stage Four: Take Action

The next step is taking action and executing your plan. Note that if we pick something that’s more than we can handle, we’re likely to lose motivation right away. Not being able to stick to your plan can create feelings of failure that crush our motivation. We have thoughts of, “I can’t do this. Why did I think I could do this?”, which makes it hard to stay motivated.

Stage Five: Maintenance 

When it comes to goals and health, sustainability is my favorite word. Anybody can try something and get results and move on, but we want to sustain our results forever. Many of us think it’s too late for us, that we’re past our prime. But I think we’re just getting started. 

This fifth stage is why creating a realistic plan that we can put into action and that we enjoy is so important. If we enjoy the journey, we’ll want to keep doing it, and we’ll be able to sustain it. 

When we make a habit change, it’ll take about six months to solidify. We have to set things up for success so that we can become motivated. The alternative of committing to an intense, complicated plan will make it much harder to make it through the action step to maintenance. We feel discouraged, not motivated.

Taking the Action

I have a client, Andrea, who successfully maintained a 55 pound weight loss for two years. One time, she told me about an article she read about motivation. The article said we sometimes hesitate to take an action because we’re afraid to fail. 

But in terms of habit creation, if we can show up every day and commit to the action that gets us to the end result, we’ll find the positives in showing up. By taking the action, we create new thoughts. Those new thoughts create feelings that drive the action even more. Ultimately, we’ll get the result we want. 

If we can have a very simple plan, if we just start and do something, even ten minutes once a week, we start to feel better and do it more and more. Committing to a baseline minimum, the smallest amount you’re willing to commit to, just doing it, may be the key to unlocking motivation. 

If you have limiting beliefs from past experiences in which you haven’t succeeded, it’s time to say, “That was then; this is now.” You can go through the change model and add the bonus feature of going right to the action, focusing on the beauty of the moment of action. 

The action can be fun! It makes you feel good and strong. It gives you thoughts of, “I’m worth it. This is worth it. This is working. I feel good,” thoughts that create motivation and drive you to continue taking action to get you to the result that you want.

I believe you can get any result that you want in your life. It just takes a bit of time, organization, and setting yourself up for success.