Why Being Less Motivated Leads To More Results

Today, I'm going to teach you why you should be less motivated and how to achieve less motivation. Now this may sound insane because you're sitting there telling me but hey, Dr. K. I'm actually not motivated enough. My life suffers from a lack of motivation. All I do is sit at home all day or I want to go to the gym or I want to eat healthy or I want to work harder at work. I wish I could study harder, but I'm just not motivated enough to do it and I would actually argue that the problem isn't that you're not motivated enough. The problem is that you are too motivated in the wrong direction. So let's take the case of you sitting at home and doing nothing. So if you sort of think about it as you try to go and do something there are very powerful forces for you to overcome for you to do something right. You really have to try hard to extract yourself from the computer or TV or whatever. You have to really try extra hard to go to this extra study session or go to office hours with your professor. So if we really look at it doing things in life requires extra effort and now you may think that's because I'm not motivated. But if you really pause and think about it, you're highly motivated to continue doing what you're doing. There's a part of your brain that is telling you hey, we don't want to do that. We actually really want to stay here and watch one more episode of whatever we happen to be binging at the time or queue up for one more video game or as you struggle to find the motivation to stop using social media. There's a part of your brain that's like no, no, no, no, no, my friend. We are not going to stop. We are actually highly motivated to continue doing what we're doing. Let's take a quick look at the neuroscience and see if this kind of pans out because it absolutely does. In order to understand how to become less motivated and these are the bad motivations that we have we've got to start by understanding the neuroscience and motivation. Motivation comes from the nucleus accumbens of our brain. The nucleus accumbens governs reward, behavioral reinforcement, and motivation. So basically the way this works is I try something and depending on how pleasurable it is, I get a spurt of dopamine in my nucleus accumbens. If my nucleus accumbens get some dopamine, it says, okay, this thing feels good. It feels pleasurable. Therefore, let us reinforce the behavior. And if we stop and think about what is behavioral reinforcement mean, it basically means motivate to do it again, right? So if I play a particular video game and I have lots of fun, I will get a lot of dopamine and then I will be motivated to play it again. The other important part of the nucleus accumbens is that it is also very sensitive to pain. So not only does it help us seek pleasure, it also is very, very sensitive to avoiding pain. And this is exactly why we're highly motivated to do nothing, right? So if there's a task that you're procrastinating on, like, hey, I need to email my professor for an extension, you're concerned that the professor may think something bad about you, may say no, that you may really be screwed, and in the avoidance of that pain, your nucleus accumbens is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy. Why would you engage in that conversation that could end badly when we can queue up for another game, right? And then we can get that dopamine and it's totally fine. And so if we think about our internal struggle to do the things that you should do instead of doing the things that you're motivated to do, what we find is that it comes down to the nucleus accumbens. Now, how do we break free of this? How do we actually decrease our motivation? Now, this is what's really cool. There's another source of happiness in our brain that's referred to by the term eudaimonics. So when you kind of think about happiness, there's two terms that kind of come up and they come from different parts of the brain. The first is hedonics. So this is pleasure. This comes from the nucleus accumbens, and this is like, you know, pleasure-seeking, like games are fun, booze is fun, pot is fun, dancing is fun, sex is fun, like all this stuff is fun, right? It's pleasurable. But then if we look at happiness and contentment, this is actually governed by a completely different part of the brain. This is what we call eudaimonics, and it's governed by this part called the insula. And the primary neurotransmitter involved is also serotonin. So we've got kind of the dopamine system and we've got the serotonin system. Now the interesting thing about eudaimonics is the subjective experience of eudaimonics is that you're kind of chill, you're vibing, you're content, you feel generally happy with life. Now the really interesting thing is that these two things are antagonistic. So if you look at someone who's highly dopaminergic and their life is governed by the nucleus accumbens, they have very powerful motivations. Oh my god, I need to get up and I need to hop on the computer. I need to hop on my phone. I need to use technology. I need to do this thing a lot. And then generally speaking, if you ask them, how content are you in life? How happy are you in life? They will say low. Now if we flip it around and we take someone who is highly eudaimonic and we ask them, what's your life like? They kind of wake up and they're sort of chill and they're kind of vibing. They're like, life is good. And then if you ask them, what do you want to do today? They'll be like, whatever you want to do is fine. Their brain is not sort of honing in on, I need this pleasure. I need to avoid this pain. People who are highly eudaimonic are also more resilient. Like we said, it kind of relates somewhat to serotonin and what we understand is that boosting serotonin signals in the brain will improve things like depression and anxiety. So if we sort of think about someone who's eudaimonic and kind of chilling and content, they're less depressed. They're less anxious. They're kind of going about living their day. And so now what we really need to do is understand, okay, how do we make this shift from hedonics in the nucleus accumbens to eudaimonics and sort of being generally content? Now this is where thankfully we've got a really, really, really good technique that comes from yoga. So a couple thousand years ago, you had a group of yogis and monks and people like that, right? And you have all these people like, you know, who will talk about how meditation makes them happier and more content and boost willpower. How does that work? What the yogis basically figured out is that the attachment to pleasure and the avoidance of pain come hand in hand. If I'm going to get a lot of pride from a success, I'm also opening myself up to devastation from failure. And so what the yogis decided that we're going to do is we're going to detach from all of that crap. We're going to separate ourselves from the hedonics. And then what happened when they started doing these yogic practices? They became more eudaimonic. They started to become more content and as they got better and better than that at that, they even attain states called enlightenment, which is a period of sort of persistent happiness and contentment. And you may sort of wonder like, how is that possible? It's because their eudaimonics are through the roof. They're kind of chilling, vibing with whatever happens. So how do we make this shift? So the yogis give us a couple of good tips. The first is that they used to do practices like fasting or the deprivation of positive stimuli. Now, this is where we misunderstand really what the benefit of this is. When people do things like fasting, we think it's about willpower. It's not actually about willpower. It's about observing your life in the absence of a pleasurable thing. So let me give you all an example. So when I was in an ashram, right? So when I first went to study yoga, the food there sucked, right? So it's like ashram food. It's like monastery food. It's the same kind of gruel. I was actually nauseous. I could barely choke it down and I longed for the foods that I wanted. The nucleus accumbens of my brain that wants that dopamine from that double fisting of a beer in one hand and a coke in the other and a slab of pizza in front of me is like, oh my god, I don't want to eat this rice gruel day after day after day after day. This sucks so much. And then as I continued with the deprivation, I wasn't starving myself or anything. I started to realize, oh, actually like I can actually find happiness despite the fact that I don't get my material desires fulfilled. After a week goes by, after two weeks go by, I'm kind of like this is okay. So one thing that you can do is abstain from some kind of pleasurable thing. Now the goal of this abstinence isn't to actually boost your willpower, although that can happen. The goal of this abstinence is for you to pay attention to what happens to your sense of contentment. Is your life absolutely miserable without a slice of pizza or without beer or without marijuana? You may experience all kinds of negative things, but really pay attention to that and start to see what happens to your life when you deprive yourself of this thing. Now, what's going on in the brain when you do this? What's going on is that we are not feeding the nucleus accumbens. Because remember, when the nucleus accumbens get something pleasurable, spurt of dopamine, behavioral reinforcement, stronger motivation the next day. So we're sort of quieting down the nucleus accumbens. Now the problem with that technique is that it's pretty tough, but I would recommend, you know, giving something up that you find somewhat pleasurable, but like is not going to be life-changing. So in my case, I gave up ice cream for 10 years and that worked really, really well. It was awesome. Really helped me a lot. Next thing, I know 10 years, right? Honestly, it's not that bad. That's the whole fucking point of the exercise. You do it for a while. You're like, hey, this ain't so bad. I can live totally fine and I can be completely happy. Some of the best years of my life were outside of one of my favorite things. Second thing that we can do is dissect pleasure. Now, this is the key thing that they sort of understood that we miss out a lot in life. So right now everyone is all for avoiding pain, right? Because pain sucks and that's bad and we don't want to embrace pain. We don't want to fast. We don't want to deprive ourselves of anything. You see your nucleus accumbens? It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're highly motivated to not give up ice cream. Don't take that pleasure away from me and it's going to drive you. You see that motivational pull? It's happening right now. I don't want to give anything up, which is fine. You don't have to. So this is the cool thing. You can not only embrace the negative, but you can also detach from the positive. Now this may be where once again, your nucleus accumbens is freaking out. Does this mean he's going to tell me like I shouldn't do fun things? No, no, no. I said detach from not abstain from so what does it mean to detach from the positive? What this means is to dissect your pleasure, right? Observe your pleasure from the outside. So as you eat a slice of pizza or have some ice cream, take a look at what's going on inside you where in my body. Does this pleasure come from now? What you'll find is that as you start to observe and dissect your pleasure, the thing will become less pleasurable. So I'll give you all just a simple example back in the day before I went on my monk training. I was 19 years old. I was in my college dorm and I was living a hedonistic glorious lifestyle. I would order fried rice two pounds at a time to save on delivery charges and I would just gorge myself on soda and fried rice for 24-hour gaming binges while I was playing Diablo and man, I was completely unconscious, but it was just some sort of orgasmic gaming degenerate experience. No awareness and so hedonic and it ruined my life. Instead, what I want you all to do is just dissect it, right? So just pay attention to what about this is fun and what you'll discover is that the less aware you are, the more lost you are in the stuff, the more hedonic reinforcement you'll get. So as you observe pleasurable things instead of get lost in them, the pleasure you receive from them will start to decrease a little bit, but the cool thing is that as you decrease that pleasure, your eudaimonics will actually increase. So we know from studies of mindfulness is that when we do any activity mindfully, our nucleus accumbens gets less activity. It's less painful, right? So we'll use this for mindfulness for things like cancer-related pain. So it reduces the pain we experience and it even reduces the hedonic pleasure we experienced. But what it does is it boosts our contentment. So this is exactly what we want to do and the yogis have given us an answer which is to dissect the pleasure. Just observe it. As much pleasure you want to engage in, go for it, but just observe where the pleasure comes from and it'll blunt that nucleus accumbens response. The last thing that I want to leave you all with is sort of this core understanding that the yogis came to that motivation is a bad thing. So I want you all to think about this for a second. The more motivated you are, the harder it is to make a choice because if we think about what is motivation, I'm motivated. I'm driven, right? So we'll even use the word I'm driven to whatever because I'm highly motivated. So if you sort of think about it, who's in control when you're highly motivated. I've worked with CEOs who are so motivated to work really hard. They've gotten married and divorced three separate times. I've literally had to take patients who had eating disorders who were so motivated to avoid food that they had to be strapped into a hospital bed and hooked up with IVs so they don't have heart arrhythmias and die. This is the power of motivation. But when we get highly motivated, we lose all control. So the crazy thing is that as you move away from motivation, what you start to get in return is choice. And now I want you all to think back to a time where you just had a good day where you woke up in the morning and you weren't particularly motivated. Now, we're not talking about motivated to sit down and start playing games like the first thing when you wake up. We're talking about truly content and then you can kind of do whatever you want to that day. If someone suggests, hey, do you want to go for a hike? And you're like, yeah, that's fine. I can do that or you can wake up and you're feeling relatively content. You're like, let me just go ahead and take care of this work and there isn't this internal struggle. So the crazy thing that the Yogi's ended up discovering is that motivation and choice are also antagonistic. And the more that you boost your insula, the more that your serotonin signal increases, the more eudaimonic you become, the more freedom you have in life, that contentment and freedom actually come hand in hand. So I know it sounds bizarre and I know that you all think you struggle with motivation and you do struggle with motivation, but the problem isn't that you have too little, it's that you have too much and it's in the wrong direction. So free yourself of that motivation and start to make the right choices in life. One last thing that I want to share with you all is how we leverage this principle of eudaimonics in our coaching program. When I was designing the program, I started to look into research about what helped people feel content and what allowed them to flourish. And it turns out that this experience of flourishing and contentment and also motivation, not really motivation, but freedom of choice, really comes to things like discovering a life purpose. If you look at the science of what activates the insulin and what boosts that serotonin, it is things like discovering a purpose in life. And the cool thing is that's what our coaching program really tries to focus on. It helps you sort of understand yourself, understand your direction, and help you go there. And the really cool thing is that what we find is that as we increase that purpose, depression and anxiety start to come down. The hedonistic dependence neuroscientifically starts to kind of come down as we start to build on that purpose. Now, the reason I built this is because what I noticed as a psychiatrist is that we were focused so much on the depression and anxiety that we were completely ignoring the eudaimonic side of things. And it turns out that leaning into that substantially improves people's lives. So if y'all are interested, check it out. If you're not, by all means, do the practices that we shared with y'all today around dissecting pleasure and avoiding some amount of pleasure as well. Hey y'all. If you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose your own adventure format. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today.