How to Find and Maintain Motivation Amid Challenging Times

How to Find and Maintain Motivation Amid Challenging Times  

We’ve all had those days, weeks, or dare say, months where motivation simply seems to evade us. We suddenly find it hard to believe we were once successfully multi-tasking, maintaining a balance between work, family, social and romantic relationships, self-care and health, and our personal interests. Those days where you had clarity, drive, focus, optimism, and passion start to seem like maybe they belonged to someone else. 

“What happened to me,” you think to yourself? “Why can’t I seem to get anything done?” “Why do I feel so lackluster?” 

Finding and maintaining motivation amid challenging times can be downright, well, challenging. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be. When you understand what causes a loss of motivation and simple ways to find it again, you’ll be better equipped for the next time challenging times show up on your doorstep.   

Why Do We Lose Motivation? 

First of all, you can’t really lose or, for that matter, find motivation; this is a bit of a mischaracterization. 

As you’ll soon learn, though, maintaining or reigniting your spark and enthusiasm for life, work, goals, or anything else that requires zest and zeal are inextricably linked to your ability to set the biological stage for motivation. One of the leading forces responsible for extinguishing our life energy is stress. Stress thrives in challenging times, so it is only natural that motivation is directly affected. The problem really takes root, though, when acute stress becomes chronic stress. 

Modern society is ripe with stressors—both locally and globally. The rampant waves of political and social polarization, ongoing and new global conflicts, and the increasingly frequent major climate and natural disasters certainly don’t contribute in a positive way to keeping your spark burning bright. Mental health conditions are on the rise, digital addiction is a real thing, and most of us spend way too much time indoors (on average 90% of our time). Our relationships with food and work can turn out to be make-or-break stressors too. There are things we can control and others we cannot, but how we manage both the controllable and uncontrollable stressors, both physical and emotional, will directly affect our biological stage for motivation. 

How Prolonged Stress Affects the Endocrine System

Stress is a natural physical and emotional response to life experiences. An acute stress response is designed to protect your body from potentially dangerous or life-threatening situations. The objective of such a response is to prepare the body to respond quickly—it’s fight or flight time. When you remain in this state of fight or flight, serious health repercussions can ensue. Chronic stress, as you know, can wreak havoc on your health. 

Your endocrine system is responsible for producing, restoring, and releasing hormones that are necessary for metabolism, heart rate, blood pressure, appetite, body temperature, sleep and wake cycles, sexual performance, reproduction, growth, and development functions. Hormones, such as adrenaline, cortisol, melatonin, and oxytocin, are used to send messages to organs and tissues throughout your body; this is how the endocrine system communicates. The hypothalamus is charged with releasing stress hormones, which then travel down the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis to orchestrate the necessary stress response. 

Because we are bombarded with so many modern stressors, many of us have become locked in a loop of fight-or-flight. Our endocrine systems are working overtime, and communication has become impaired. This impairment has been linked to mental health conditions, chronic fatigue, metabolic dysfunction, and immune disorders. If you consider the other functions that the endocrine system is responsible for, it becomes crystal clear why motivation suffers when endocrine function isn’t optimal—who can be their best self when their sleep cycle is off, metabolism is faulty, blood pressure is too high or low, and hormones necessary for energy production aren’t firing? 

So, you didn’t just suddenly “lose” motivation; it’s deeper than that. 

5 Ways to Set the Stage for Motivation 

Instead of dwelling in “loss” or fighting against frustration because you can’t “find” motivation, try these five simple ways to help naturally set your biological stage. 

Change Environment

Even if you are feeling emotionally stuck, you are not physically glued down. Whether you realize it or not, your environment influences you—for better or worse. If you want to incite positive mindsets (ambition, clarity, focus, happiness, optimism), you need to be in an environment that inspires those states of being. This can be as simple as upgrading your workspace to include more natural light, plants, and art or photographs that elicit positivity. Or, for a short-term fix, changing your environment can be as literal as physically going somewhere else (a park, the beach, an outdoor café). 

Factors such as clutter, noise, and temperature can affect your mood and productivity too. Just the physical act of getting up and removing yourself from the place where you feel stuck can be psychologically beneficial. 

Positive Expectancy

Author Elizabeth Gilbert believes that sometimes you’ve got to dress to impress Inspiration—put on a little lipstick—even if you are working from home. When you personify inspiration or motivation, it becomes a relationship instead of just an entity. A healthy relationship is about give and take, showing up and making an effort, and sometimes, spicing things up. 

During challenging times, it can be easy to neglect our personal appearance (have you been wearing the same sweatpants all week?) But sometimes, that little extra effort can translate into a significant motivation boost—slip on your favorite pair of jeans; put on those earrings that your best friend gave you for your birthday; or, for all the guys out there, a clean shave can do wonders. 

A little self-care and self-love can go a long way. Set the stage for positive expectancy, and you may be surprised by the results. 

Break Routine

Routines are beneficial, but monotony can murder motivation. Shaking things up sometimes is good for the soul! Even just little breaks in your daily routine from time to time can be enough to reignite your spark. For example, maybe you always read the news with your first cup of coffee. To break the routine, even just a few times a week, try enjoying that first brew on your patio with no digital device distractions. Or perhaps you always exercise at the end of the day; to break the routine, try a mid-day yoga class. 

When times are tough, little changes to your daily routine can provide a welcomed distraction, redirect your energy, and, who knows, offer a boost of enthusiasm for the new day. 

Stretch Beyond Your Comfort Zone

Dave Asprey explains that “getting out of your comfort zone from time to time creates just enough good stress to ramp up your focus, creativity, pace, and drive, and it helps you respond to life stress when unexpected things happen.” Challenging your brain actually alters your brain’s tolerance to change. Aside from making you more resilient, stretching beyond your comfort zone is necessary to avoid stagnation.  

Find Flow 

Doing without doing. Trying without trying. Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher, understood this to be flow or our mental sweet spot. It is an effortless state where we are at ease, free of anxiety, and when our best work transpires. Finding your flow can take some practice but can be achieved when you set your mind to it. To get in the zone, you can begin by clearing away distractions and clutter, picking a peak time (do you work better early in the morning or late at night?), setting realistic goals and expectations, and focusing on the enjoyable parts of the task or tasks at hand. 

Take the Stage and Shine 

While we’ve been led to believe that we must seek and find motivation, the truth is, as you’ve just learned, it comes from within. In the same way that health is reliant on an environment conducive to self-healing, motivation is dependent on having the right biological stage for it to show up and shine on.