What People Don't Get About Motivation.

what gives me anxiety is if i go to the gym this is the anxious thought because it's not holding the thoughts here comes the anxiety the anxiety bumps out people will think i'm out of shape then you're no longer focused on going to the gym you're focused on what people think this is the anxiety anxiety is a really powerful thing to bump motivation out of your mind so let's talk a little bit about motivation chat the first thing to understand is like when i ask y'all you know how do you get motivated or when i ask you like what is motivation what do most people say right so what most people will do is they'll like look at someone who they perceive as motivated and they'll be like oh that person is motivated and if i ask them like you know what does that mean to be motivated it means and then you'll get some kind of answer like they get up and they do it every day you know they they get up they they'll use some kind of like they'll say like okay they get up they do it every day they're dedicated they're disciplined they have dharma have a goal and work towards it right like that's beautiful examples like they have a goal and they actually get up and they work towards it so it's kind of interesting because if you think about it what that really is is like you looking from the outside and observing the behavior right and you say that oh motivation is a behavior because if we're observing from the outside and this is sort of how western science works this is actually like a really interesting bias that our entire society has is that when we look for answers to questions we look from the outside and look in so this is like in medicine you know we'll do an x-ray to figure out what's going on in the lungs we'll do a biopsy we'll do a blood test we'll try to get some sort of scientific external perspective this is exactly what freud did as well right so when he was developing his psychological theories what he did is talk to other human beings from the outside listen to their words and make implications about what is going on on the inside so when we talk about motivation and we sort of start to think a little bit about what is motivation the perspective that we take is from the outside looking at behavior so therein lies like one of the biggest problems and why motivation is a huge challenge and so if i ask people what is motivation i'm going to get 100 questions because it's like 100 people looking at the out from the outside and then when you try to duplicate a behavior it falls apart and why does it fall apart is because motivation is nothing about your behavior it has everything to do with about the mind so if we really think about what is motivation it's an internal thing okay so like if i say like i'm motivated i don't like i'm saying things that are very simple but motivation exists within the mind it's not it has nothing to do with behavior it sounds crazy it may result in behavior but if we look at actually what is motivation it is purely mental it is like within the mind and so this is where i think a lot of people fall short because when they try to figure out how to get motivated what they end up looking at is like people who are motivated and they try to like see their behaviors and duplicate their behaviors and this is where we get to the just do it kind of stuff right just study just go to the library just go to the gym just take a shower just start using deodorant just clean your room right because like and this is the problem is like that's all external stuff it's all like behavioral stuff it's not actually motivational stuff and since our society is so good at looking from the outside in that's what science basically is we've sort of missed understanding what motivation is and so then what we end up doing is like mimicking the we try to mimic like the outside behavior right so they look you look at someone like oh that dude is motivated they go to the gym every day so let me go to the gym every day and they just mimic the behavior but this is where like if you just mimic the behavior without the internal component you're destined to fail and this is something that i see a lot in the spiritual community right you'll have someone who's like very spiritually detached and and like you know like a a monk or something like that and like that person is relatively like not materialistic like they don't care what they wear they're never wearing jewelry they don't wear watches they don't care about what they drive and things like that and then someone will look at that person they'll say like oh if i want to be spiritual i need to be non-material and so they'll impose non-materialism on themselves but they're completely missing the point because the spiritual person isn't trying to be non-materialistic they're just genuinely detached they don't care if they wear a watch or they don't wear watch but you're trying to impose non-materialism from the outside is like an example of mimicking a behavior instead of understanding what's inside the mind of the monk and so the more that we try to copy what motivated people do without understanding what's on the inside the more destined we are to fail which is why we have a society of people who's struggling with motivation i read an article recently about like young people in china who are doing something called laying flat which means that they're just kind of chilling like they're not engaging in sort of like the rat race of society and and so it's like they're sort of like embracing laziness and they sort of seem kind of unmotivated or something like that and it's kind of like it's this thing where there's something going on inside that person's mind that is resulting in a particular behavior and the biggest mistake that we make is we try to duplicate the behavior instead of understanding what is in the mind of a motiva motivated person and so luckily enough i've had you know some degree of personal experience in sort of discovering how to become motivated and i've also worked with a lot of like very successful motivated people right so i've worked with um you know we do consulting for a lot of major tech companies um i've done a lot of like consulting and worked with like uh you know mental health startups tech startups out of mit and like harvard incubators things like that i've worked with a couple of billionaires who have started successful companies and sort of here's what i've discovered when i ask them i don't observe from the outside what they've done when i ask them like what does it mean to be motivated what is actually going on inside your head then like the answer that i get is like really really interesting okay and so if you ask people like and let's before we get to that answer like i'll ask other people like what do you think is in the mind of a motivated person and so the common answer that we get is actually um that you know so we'll say people will say things like they want it more right so if i like ask like let's say i just asked a random person on the street why is one person successful and one person not successful a common answer that i get is because people want it more and and so this just simply isn't true so i know it sounds kind of crazy but like you know as an addiction psychiatrist like i work with people who are sober hopefully and i work with people who are not sober and what i can tell you with a lot of confidence is that if you take someone who's one week sober versus someone who's not sober at all the person who's one week sober wants the marijuana or alcohol way more than the person who's actively using that though how much they want it is actually like so much stronger in acute one week into sobriety than like the person who's using it every day so it isn't that some people want it more and we sort of see this sometimes within our community as well right like if i'm like lonely i want companionship and friends so much more than someone who like has friends like we see this sometimes like in places like the incel community but let's just talk about our community as a whole like there's an epidemic of loneliness and everyone wants connection more than anything else right so wanting it more is not motivation that's the first thing to understand okay and then sometimes we'll also get these answers like they're disciplined but then if i ask someone what does it mean to be disciplined in someone's mind what does the mind of a disciplined person look like okay and then they'll be like they just get up and do it every day just there's the just again so when you ask people like what is the origin of motivation like they'll give you these answers like oh they want it more their discipline but that's all like one is an external observation of behavior which is not what motivation is because motivation is within our mind we can see the outcomes of motivation right but we don't see the inside of it we can see the effect of it but we still don't know what it is and then the problem is if you chase the effect and you don't understand like the equation then you're gonna get stuck because you can't mimic it because you don't actually know what it is so i would argue that motivation is actually something that's very simple it is the ability to hold a thought steady in your mind for a prolonged period of time that's all motivation is so i would say with all of my experience the one conclusion i've come to about what motivation is is literally holding a thought in your mind for an extended period of time okay so let's think about like a new year's resolution for a second when someone starts with a new year's resolution you ask them on day one they're like i'm going to lose 50 pounds this year and i ask you on a scale of one to ten how motivated are you and they're like i'm 11 out of 10. i want it i'm motivated i'm gonna do it it's gonna be good and if you actually like you know assess them their motivation is super high and then two weeks later like their motivation is still like pretty good and then a month and two months go by and three months go by like what changes in their mind like what what actually where does the motivation go and what happens is they have a thought over here that gets bumped by another thought right it's like oh i need to go to the gym but i want to stay in bed and there's almost this like thought bumping process that destroys motivation and i know it sounds kind of weird but like we can also understand this actually there's a great example of this which is sort of bizarre which is procrastination so if we think about procrastination procrastination is your mind's ability to try to motivate you okay so it's like let's say i'm going about my day like i'm going to chill today i must do some streaming and then procrastination comes in it's like but hey we've got a test and then i'm like oh screw that forget about the test and then here comes the thought again oh we've got a test oh no forget about that let's play some legal legends oh we've got a test no screw you we don't have a test let me distract myself so if you think about literally what procrastination is it is your mind trying to put a particular thought to be steady in your mind and so one week away you know you kind of get bumped a little bit like here comes the thought we just push it away forget you we don't want to think about the test we actively try to not think about the test that's why we distract ourselves when we procrastinate and there's that voice again here comes the thought here's the test here's the test no no screw you go away okay fine and then what happens is the day before the test here it comes and then we can't push it away the ability to push the thought out of our head disappears and then our mind is dominated by the thought of the test and then we start studying in last minute panic right it's kind of fascinating because if you look at procrastination it's like your mind's ability to try to motivate you and get you to study and we actively try to push it away and what i find from people who are you know very very actively motivated is that they're literally they don't feel like they're disciplined they don't feel like they're amazing they don't wake up every day with like a fire in their belly and like it's not like these montages from movies it's just they wake up like if you ask someone who goes to the gym every day you just ask them like what's in your head they're like i'm gonna go to the gym gotta go to the gym let's go to the gym that's it they just hold that thought steady and it doesn't get bumped by anything else so motivation is simply the ability to put something in the center of your mind and keep it there right and if you guys look at your cases of motivation like some of y'all may have tried to go like pro in an esport or you tried to climb the ladder or something like that right or you decided like and like what was in your head when you were like grinding out whatever thing it's holding that thought steady and so then y'all may say like okay this is kind of interesting like you know but is there any science to back this up and the answer is like overwhelmingly yes okay so let's like take a quick look at the science that supports this theory the first is that like let's take a disease like adhd so in adhd what someone's mind is is like incredibly flighty and incredibly fast why on earth would we give a stimulant medication to someone whose mind is moving way too fast because when you give a stimulant medication literally what it does in the mind of someone with adhd is it allows them to hold a thought a single thought in their head for a long period of time if we look at like adhd and why these people struggle to be motivated even though they want it a ton they want so bad to be a good student they try so hard but their mind literally cannot hold one thought in their head when i open my book with adhd and i try to put my mind on one place it literally does not stay there and it goes somewhere else and therefore i feel like i can't actually like read something right so it's kind of bizarre because it's like there's a really interesting test of this hypothesis is that we actually have a medication that causes people's minds to sit in one place we also see this not just in adhd but if you think about caffeine and like when you caffeine when you drink caffeine and it allows you to focus what does that mean allow you to focus it means it allows your mind to sit on one thought and then you get done we also see holding a thought steady in the mind in other unfortunate cases in mental health like in depression and suicidality right so when i think about a patient who's highly suicidal and i ask them and they're like motivated when i ask them what is going on in their mind they have one thought that dominates their mind which is that i don't want to be alive anymore i don't deserve to be alive anymore it's kind of bizarre but when you think about people like the people that i'll actually hospitalize it's that their mind is dominated by one thought which leads to a high amount of motivation right so it's interesting because we don't think about someone who's depressed and suicidal is motivated but if you really want to be scientific about it you know making a suicide attempt requires a huge amount of like direction and motivation is it in the wrong direction absolutely is it a problem absolutely should you go get mental health treatment or an evaluation if that's happening in your mind absolutely and at the same time the mechanism in your mind that leads to a behavior can be understood through procrastination through adhd through addiction and through depression even and so the next question that we would ask ourselves is okay dr k like if this is true is there data to support this outside of clinical experience and psychiatry and stuff like that like on a more basic science level is there science to support this idea and the absolute the truth is the answer is absolutely yes and that is because if if there were a practice so you could make a hypothesis that if there was a practice that you could do to keep a thought steady in your mind for a prolonged period of time would that result in an increased amount of motivation and the answer is yes there have been thousands of studies on meditation that show exactly that so if we look at meditation what meditation is is it's the ability to like tell your mind to do a particular thing and have it listen right so we'll concentrate on the breath we'll concentrate on a yantra we'll concentrate on a mantra we'll concentrate on you know sight or sound or touch and you tell your mind to do something and this is what's really fascinating is is that when you train people to meditate what happens is their adhd clinically gets better even without adhd what you find so this is why you know i teach meditation at like corporations and stuff and what i find is that people's like motivation and focus and their output improves when i teach them to meditate you also see this in very rare cases of like people whose motivational circuitry is actually like compromise so if you look at the brain of some someone who has schizophrenia they actually have a lot of motivational problems which seem to be very neuroscientifically grounded and the really fascinating thing is that we don't really have any medications that will affect their motivation circuitry we have medications that will do things like reduce hallucinations but we don't have medications that will help those people get out of bed in the morning but what is really interesting is there are studies on schizophrenia and meditation that show that meditation is actually effective at reducing what we call negative symptoms which is problems like anhedonia and a motivation and so it's super fascinating but i would pause it to you all that you know the biggest mistake that people make about motivation is that when you're trying to motivate yourself what you're doing is looking outside you're making an observation of behavior instead of understanding my like what's going on in the inside of the mind and i want you all to understand that you can never learn about motivation from like looking at someone's behavior motivation if you really want to understand motivation you need to look inside the mind because that's what it comes that's what it comes down to right whether i go to the gym or i don't go to the gym the action is rooted in what is in my mind and furthermore if you really look very carefully across a lot of different situations like people addictions mental health you know studies on meditation what the conclusion that i've come to is motivation is simple motivation is simply the ability to hold a thought in your head for a prolonged period of time and what i'll say to you guys is like you know when i wake up and like i have a thought it's like i need to stream today like that's a thought and the thought is held in my head and that's how i end up streaming right because there have been times today where you may say but but you need to isn't that a need no because there have also been times in my life where it's like i wake up i have a spanish final today i need to go to the spanish final otherwise i will fail spanish class and then it's like okay let me load up war three right so the need is separate the motivation it's in in that moment what does my mind do it here's the spanish final here comes warcraft three bump oh now we're playing war three for eight hours where did the thought of the spanish final go it didn't go anywhere it just disappeared right so i would pause it to you all that motivation is the ability to hold a thought steady in your mind for a prolonged period of time and that like once you understand this thing and as you cultivate the ability to hold one thought steady in your mind for a prolonged period of time that's all it is you can like literally practice that as you practice that you will become more productive you will become more motivated because that's what motivation is it's not like some special you know fire like sure you can say dharma and all that kind of stuff but even if you talk about dharma and other things what that all results in the common element to need and should and duty and responsibility and passion and wanting and desire all of those words through the mechanism of holding a thought in your mind when all of that crap holds a thought in your mind is when you act and that's that's it can you be motivated and actively not look forward to the work you have to carry out absolutely absolutely right because motivation is simply holding thought in my mind so i can like hold the thought in my mind that i have to do something today and as long as i don't displace the thought i don't have to enjoy it but it'll get done okay so people are asking holding multiple thoughts you can't hold multiple thoughts in your head you can only hold one thought how can i practice holding a thought in my mind yeah so one meditation that i think is really really good for that is thrataka or fixed point gazing so dharana techniques which are focusing techniques will be good for that so you don't want to do mindfulness here although mindfulness is effective but in my experience there's some techniques that are more effective which is dharma and so someone's asking about obsessions so could obsession be a part of it absolutely right let's think about that for a second so if i'm obsessed with something i'm thinking about it all the time so if you look at like ocd right what is ocd like i cannot shake the thought so if you guys i don't know if you'll know this but in in ocd it's obsessive compulsive disorder so a compulsion is a behavior an obsession is a thought so what happens in ocd is that people discover that there is a thought that is lodged in their head that they can't get out and the only way to dislodge it is to engage in a compulsion or a behavior oh my god my my hands are unclean and the only way i can dislodge that thought is by washing them 13 times and what people sort of figure out what ocd really is is the compulsions the behaviors are solutions to let go of the obsession so ocd is actually the best example of this principle and if you think about people who are like obsessed with stuff that's all they think about and that's all they're motivated towards right like you can see it in video game addiction too desires also focus on one thought no desire is something else a desire is a want right it's not a focus on one thought like i desire a yacht but i'm not focused on it 24 7. so a desire is born of the indriyas or the sense organs so if we think about where our wants truly come from they come from our sense organs right i can't want a yacht until i see one and i see like people parting on a yacht i'm like wow that looks like a lot of fun i want that if you're walking down the street and you smell someone like you know frying food it's like wow i want that where did that want come from it came from a sensory stimulus so how do you navigate life if you have good motivation but no desires that's the best way to navigate it right so like motivation is about holding particular thoughts and and here's the thing desires are the thing that bump the thought right if i want to eat healthy and then i smell fried chicken that bumps so if we think about what are the things that bump the thought that i want to be motivated towards desires bump so if you as you become free from desires you will actually become more motivated okay how do you balance holding a single thought in your mind and bouncing between activities or being vata inclined so like it's actually quite easy because when you are doing one thing that is the thought that you have in your mind so here's what i'd say as a vata okay so this morning for example like i did some writing i did some stream prep i saw a client and now i'm streaming and so if we think about like what happened is when i sit with a client that is what my mind is focused on and then when i'm done sitting with a client my mind shifts to something else and that's what i hold and i work on that and then like now that i'm streaming this is what my mind is on so i'm like this is the thought that's in my mind it's like now it's time to stream so you can rotate between things in your mind that's okay and then you're going to be motivated to the for those for that period of time what if focusing on the thought of what i need to do gives me anxiety yeah so that's a good question but that's where focusing on the thing that you need to do does not give you anxiety i know this is gonna sound weird so the question was what if focusing on the thing that i need to do gives me anxiety that is incorrect that is not what is giving you anxiety what is giving you anxiety is the consequences of doing it or not doing it it's not focusing on the thing it's the outcome of the thing that leads to anxiety so this is the other thing remember it's holding a thought steady so if the thought that i'm holding is go to the gym what gives me anxiety is if i go to the gym this is the anxious thought because it's not holding the thoughts of here comes the anxiety the anxiety bumps out people will think i'm out of shape then you're no longer focused on going to the gym you're focused on what people think this is the anxiety anxiety is a really powerful thing to bump motivation out of your mind do you all get that it's it's critical to understand this because it's so damn subtle but it's huge to understand this focusing on the task is not what gives you anxiety in fact anxiety is what keeps you from focusing on the task the nature of anxiety is the consequence of doing the task or or not doing the task if i don't go to the gym people will think i'm fat if i go to the gym people will think i'm fat that's not focusing on going to the gym it's focusing on people thinking you're fat do you all understand that this is critical do you guys get that anxiety is the biggest hammer that knocks crap out of your mind this is crucial to understand it doesn't actually keep the thought it keeps the consequences of the thought okay what if nothing but the that hedonistic dopamine can't think of any goal like for my life outside of the next dopamine thing also worrisome since i'm almost 40. so this is another good example of like a question that gets at the general topic but is missing the general point so goals have nothing to do with motivation okay another weird thing right so if you like really talk to people who are highly motivated they're usually not motivated towards a goal they can be but like you know people who are motivated tend to focus on the action not the goal so if you think about like you know the best students some of them may really want to like get a 4.0 gpa and that's what they're thinking about but what they're really thinking about is like the task if we think about things like flow states and optimal productivity and motivation it's like devoting yourself to the task at hand not the goal and so if you're motivated like if your motivations are based on hedonistic dopamine like that's absolutely why you're not going to get anywhere right because let's think about hedonistic dopamine for a second so what is the relationship between hedonistic dopaminergic stuff and like this model of motivation so what that means is that i am highly motivated towards something like oh i wanna smoke pot and then i smoke the pot and then what happens to the thought it disappears i'm good and then another thought comes in oh now i wanna eat cheetos and then i satisfy that thought in my mind and then i get a dopamine hit and then it's like okay let's play some games and then you get that dopamine hit and so if you really think about it what what's happening is you have tiny amounts of motivation towards individual tasks which is why you call yourself unmotivated in life because there's no central thought that you hold on to literally dopamine hedonistic indulgence and dopamine reinforcement doesn't lead to what we call motivation on the outside because you're not actually holding a thought in the middle of your mind for a long period of time dopaministic hedonistic like dopamine satisfaction is actually like just cycling like random thoughts and being motivated towards them right and that's what it means it's like okay now i'm going to eat this thing and then i'm going to do this and then i'm going to do this and then i'm going to do this so this is why i think like this once you understand the principle that all motivation is is holding one thought in your mind a lot of these questions will start to make sense and this is the problem is that everyone has these questions what about dopamine what about anxiety what about this what about that e equals m c squared once you understand it equals mc squared you can take any number of test cases revolving involving this crap and it can all be reduced down to the equation and the problem with motivation right now is that everyone is looking at all of these random things like oh there's research on dopamine so let me go read about that and what about dopamine what about anxiety what about this what about that all that crap can be reduced down to holding a thought steadily in your head that's it how do i get self-discipline to achieve long-term goals you don't this is the problem that kind of thinking is the problem because that is a thinking of from that comes from looking from the outside right you like where do you get the idea that there is a thing called self-discipline and where do you get the idea that there is a long-term goal like what is that based on it's based on observing other people and concluding oh that person has self-discipline because they're able to move towards a long-term goal but if you actually ask that person are you disciplined they will they may say yes and they may say no discipline is not a thing in your mind discipline is an emergent property it's like flight but it's not a feather it's not a wing it's not a bird it's not a muscle discipline is not something that you can create it's an emergent property from other things and so this is the problem is like if you set out trying to create flight you will never be able to create it what you have to do is create the components of flight and then flight will emerge a feather is not flight a muscle is not flight a bone is not flight in that same way discipline is an emergent property that you can see from the outside but how you make it and what you observe are fundamentally different do you guys get that the question is rooted in a false understanding of the thing and it's it's simply like you guys get this the reason no one finds self-discipline is because it's not a real thing and everyone's constantly asking themselves how do i get self-discipline to achieve long-term goals and you're setting yourself up for a standard that when you don't get you feel like you beat yourself up and you feel like a dumb ass and it's like impossible to begin with which is why a thousand people are asking the question and a thousand people are failing and then once you're dealing with that negative emotion of like oh look at all these disciplined people out there and like i suck that makes things even worse because then anytime you try to do something guess what's coming let me go to the gym i suck i suck i suck i suck and then you sit there at home and you never go to the gym it's tough this is the problem is people don't understand the root of what motivation is and once you understand what it is on the inside and you start to cultivate it then long-term goals will start to get achieved it's like i know this sounds kind of weird but do you guys think i have long-term goals i do not have long-term goals would you describe me as motivated if i accomplished a lot sure do i have long-term goals no it's bizarre right like what do i do like i wake up and it's like what do i need to do today so when i ask y'all like you know why why we're doing this why are we doing this instead of talking to someone because i we ask ourselves the questions is like the mission of the organization it's like what do these people need it's not about the law it's not like i know this sounds kind of weird but i want you to just think about this for a second right we don't wake up at healthy gamer and think to ourselves a decade from now where do we want gamers to be that is not the question we ask ourselves the question that we ask ourselves is what do you all need now who the i don't know where you all are going to be in 10 years how on earth what is it like i don't know but what i know is y'all need something today and so it's like we sit there and we ask ourselves okay what do gamers need all right they don't understand motivation let's do a bit about motivation okay people have questions on the subreddit let's answer those questions and this is what a present focused mindset means right it's like focusing on like like what is your long-term goal to lose 50 pounds like that's not that doesn't get you to go to the gym or it can sometimes but what gets you to go to the gym is to hold that thought centrally in your mind and for some people it doesn't sort of matter what thought as long as it gets you to go to the gym if the thought that you're holding centrally is i need to lose 50 pounds and you hold it in your mind constantly you'll be motivated if the thought is i need to go to the gym today you'll be motivated you'll go so the goal itself is not as important is the mechanism through which the goal acts in your mind does that make sense and this is the problem is everyone is out there looking for the right goal like you're thinking if you find the magical formula then it'll sit in your mind automatically right you're trying to but you just need to get it to sit in your mind like practice that that's what that is yeah this is a good question so revelation be asked what does need to mean exactly what does that even mean

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 257,698

Rating: 4.9803247 out of 5

Keywords: mental health, drk, dr kanojia, healthygamergg, healthy gamer gg, twitch, psychiatrist

Id: 3QWIxElEnc8

Length: 33min 24sec (2004 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/IntimidatingBlackGuy]

I love HealthyGamer!

[u/lasosis013]

Dr K has a lot more videos about motivation and studying, I recommend checking him out. If you don't have time, you can also look at the HealthyGamer Wiki.

[u/blacksnake245]

If this is true then it is epic. Has anyone tried this out and found themselves motivated ?