No motivation to do anything: why it happens, and what brings it back

Am I just lazy?

Lazy is usually the first explanation to show up, and it has a weak spot. Lazy describes a character, and a character doesn’t change in a few weeks.

If you were keeping up with the dishes, the messages and the workouts a couple of months ago, you’re still the same person. Something else changed.

Still, lazy can feel true, and what usually makes it feel true is a contrast. On an evening when ten minutes of dishes felt impossible, hours went by easily on a series, on your phone or in a video game. If you’ve noticed that about yourself, it’s hard not to think: so I do have the energy. I just don’t spend it on anything that matters.

That contrast is worth a closer look, because it explains more than it seems to. Video games make the best example, whether or not you play them: few activities ask so much of a person and are still so easy to keep doing.

Look at what a game asks of the person playing it. Full concentration, often for hours. Dozens of small decisions a minute. A boss fight or a ranked match they lose over and over, and they go straight back in. Written down as a job description, that would sound like hard work.

It doesn’t feel like hard work, though. It feels like fun. Nobody has ever had to talk themselves into one more round.

So how much an activity demands and how hard it feels are two separate things. One reason they come apart is interest. In a set of four studies, people who liked math took on more of it than people who didn’t: they picked harder problems over easy ones, or kept working on math problems when a game of Tetris or a video was one click away. In the studies that asked, they also reported feeling less tired, not more. The effects were small, but they match what most of us know from our own hobbies.

The other reason is where the reward sits. People don’t play games in order to have played them. The playing is the point: the reward arrives while you’re doing it, minute by minute. The researchers who study games say the same. Players aren’t paid or praised for playing, most of them pay to do it, and what they’re after is the fun of the thing itself.

The dishes are the opposite kind of task. They ask almost nothing of you: no skill, ten minutes, warm water. But nobody does the dishes for the pleasure of doing them. The only reward is the result, and it comes afterwards.

That’s why being able to lose an evening to a game, a series or a good book, while the dishes sit there, says very little about your character. An enjoyable activity carries itself. A task you do only to have it done has to be carried, and those are the tasks that have stalled: the dishes, the message, the workout, the thing at work.

If that isn’t how it is for you, and even the things you normally enjoy have done nothing for you most of the day, every day, for more than two weeks, that’s one to take to a doctor rather than to an article.

Otherwise, the useful question isn’t what’s wrong with your character. It’s what a task like the dishes needs in order to get started, and why it has stopped getting it.

How your brain decides what’s worth doing

Every time you think about doing something, your brain runs a quick, mostly silent check. What will this cost me? What do I get for it? How soon, and how sure is that?

When the answer comes out ahead, you feel it as wanting to. When it doesn’t, you feel it as “I can’t be bothered”. That feeling is what we call motivation. It’s the result of the check, not a fuel you either have or don’t.

An enjoyable activity passes the check almost before it’s run. The payoff is immediate and it’s certain, because the payoff is the activity.

Games pay out while you play in more ways than most activities, which is part of why they’re so easy to come back to. A game sets you a challenge at about your level, tells you within seconds how you’re doing, and often puts other people in it with you.

When researchers studied players, the experiences that went with enjoying a game and wanting to keep playing it were close to that list: a sense of getting better at something, a sense that the choices were their own, and, in multiplayer games, a sense of connection with the other players.

Now run the check on the dishes. The cost comes first. The reward is a clean sink that will be full again tomorrow. Nobody is in it with you, and nothing tells you that you’re getting anywhere.

The task at work does even worse. The payoff is weeks away, and you’re not sure it’s coming at all.

None of that makes those tasks impossible. In a good week they pass the check without any fuss: the cost is small, and a clean kitchen or a finished report is worth it. Having no motivation to do anything is what it feels like when ordinary tasks like these stop passing.

There are two ways that can happen, and in a bad stretch they tend to arrive together. Everything starts to cost more, and everything starts to pay less.

Why everything costs more when you’re worn down

Start with the cost. In a sleep lab in Singapore, young adults were given the same choices on two mornings: once after a normal night, and once after a night with no sleep at all.

Each choice was money for work. They could earn 20 dollars by typing out a list of words backwards, or take a smaller amount and type nothing.

After the night without sleep, they settled for the smaller, easier money more readily. Their patience hadn’t changed: offered a small payout soon or a bigger one months later, they chose the same way as when they were rested. The one thing that had changed was how much the work seemed worth doing.

One detail makes the finding more useful. The typing wasn’t due that morning. It was booked for a later visit, after a proper night’s sleep. They were tired now, and they judged that later effort as if they would still be tired then.

Remember that the next time you’re exhausted and your whole to-do list looks impossible. You’re judging next week’s tasks by how you feel tonight.

It was a small study, and a whole night without sleep is more extreme than a run of short nights. But other labs have found the same pattern with other kinds of wear.

People squeezing a hand grip for rewards turned down more of the work as they tired, and short rests brought back only part of their willingness. People put under stress picked the easier of two mental tasks more often, even though they did the harder one as well as ever when they took it on.

That last result is the one to hold on to. Stress didn’t make those people worse at the hard task. It made them choose it less. Being worn down doesn’t take away your ability. It raises the price of using it.

So before you decide anything about your character, look at your last few weeks. How have you slept? How much have you been carrying, at work or at home? If the honest answers are “badly” and “a lot”, then part of what feels like a motivation problem is a price problem. Everything on your list got more expensive.

Why nothing feels worth it after weeks without a win

The other half of the check is what you expect to get back. Your brain doesn’t guess at that. It goes by recent results.

When researchers pooled the studies that follow the same people through repeated attempts at a task, a clear pattern came out. How well someone had just done predicted how confident they felt about the next attempt. How confident they felt going in said much less about how they would actually do.

Confidence mostly follows results. It doesn’t create them nearly as much as we assume.

Now think about what a bad stretch does to a brain that works this way. Work where nothing is ever finished, only handed on. A gym routine that hasn’t shown up in the mirror yet. A home that’s a mess again by Thursday. Week after week of effort, with nothing you can point to.

Your brain keeps score of all of it and draws the obvious conclusion: effort doesn’t pay around here. So the next task looks like a worse deal. You start less, so you finish less, so there’s even less to point to, and the task after that looks worse still.

From the inside, that loop feels like having no motivation. From the outside, it’s your brain estimating the payoff from a few bad weeks of data.

Whose goal it is matters too. Across several studies, people made more progress on goals they were chasing because they wanted the result themselves. Goals chased out of guilt, or because someone else expected it, got no such lift.

And in a later study, what went with that progress wasn’t extra effort. The goals people wanted for themselves simply felt easier to pursue. A list made only of things you “should” do is a list of bad deals.

What actually brings motivation back

If the check runs on evidence, then waiting is the one approach that can’t work. A week on the sofa gives your brain nothing new to go on.

It’s why we tell the people we coach that waiting for motivation to show up is a bad strategy. If you wait for motivation to show up, you will never show up.

What works is changing what goes into the check. Each half has its own fix, and the order matters.

1. Bring the cost down first

If the part about being worn down sounded like your month, this comes before anything clever. Give yourself a week of full nights before you judge your motivation at all, and take one thing off this week’s list that doesn’t truly have to happen.

It won’t feel like progress. But everything below works better on a brain that has stopped pricing every task at exhausted rates.

2. Finish one small thing today

Not the most important thing on your list. When someone comes to us stuck on every front at once, the advice is to start with the one that will give you the biggest momentum, not necessarily the hardest or the biggest one.

For momentum, a task needs three things: it takes about ten minutes, it has a clear finish, and it leaves a result you can see. That makes the dishes, of all things, a strong candidate. Ten minutes from now there’s an empty sink where the pile was, and your brain has one fresh piece of evidence that effort still pays.

That’s how motivation gets going again: off the back of something finished.

In trials where people were asked to plan enjoyable or meaningful activities into their week and then do them, their well-being improved, and that held for people who weren’t depressed to begin with. They didn’t wait to feel better and then act. They acted, and then felt better.

If even a ten-minute task feels impossible to begin, that’s a starting problem more than a motivation problem. How to stop procrastinating covers how to make a start small enough to take in a bad mood.

3. Put your progress where you can see it

Part of what makes a game satisfying is that it shows you getting somewhere: a bar fills up, a level goes up. The dishes and the inbox never do that, so you have to keep the score yourself. At the end of the day, write down what you finished. Not a to-do list: a done list. “Dishes. Answered Sam. Twenty-minute walk.”

It sounds too simple to matter. But across 138 experiments with about 20,000 people, those who were prompted to keep track of their progress did better at reaching their goals than those who weren’t. The effect was larger when the progress was physically written down, and larger when it was reported to someone else.

Think back to the loop. Your brain estimates the payoff from the results it can see, and a done list puts the results where it can see them.

4. Let someone expect you

Games often have one more thing going for them: other people. On their worst day, plenty of players who can’t get themselves to the gym will still turn up for a raid, a group event in an online game that can’t start until everyone is there. Nobody calls that discipline. Someone is expecting them, and that settles it.

I know this one from my own training. When I trained with Mike, who later started Gains For Gamers with me, there were days I wanted to go home after school and play World of Warcraft instead. I went anyway, because Mike always showed up. And I know I had the same effect on him.

The research says the same. In one weight-loss trial, some people signed up alone, and others signed up with three friends or family members and went through it as a team.

Of those who came alone, 76 percent finished the program, and 24 percent had kept all of their weight off six months after it ended. Of those who came with their people, 95 percent finished and 66 percent kept it off.

It doesn’t take a team. One person who expects a message from you on Friday, saying whether you did what you said, changes the check. Skipping now costs something too.

What to do on the days it doesn’t come

All of that brings motivation back. None of it makes motivation permanent. We say it to everyone we coach: there are 100 percent going to be days when your motivation will dip; that’s just a part of the game.

So the goal isn’t to feel motivated every day. Nobody does, including the people who look like they do.

The usual assumption about people with strong self-control is that they’re good at forcing themselves. Across six studies, that isn’t what showed up. They had habits. Exercise, study and bedtime were routines for them, so on most days the question of whether they felt like it never came up.

A habit is a way of skipping the check. The dishes get done straight after dinner because that’s when the dishes get done. Nothing gets weighed, and no feeling is required. In our coaching we put it like this: a good system requires low willpower.

Two things keep a routine alive through a bad week.

The first is a low bar. On a motivated day, people plan five or six workouts a week. Plan for the week you’ll actually have: two or three sessions, and a plan B for low-energy days, like a walk when the gym is too much. Doing a little consistently beats doing a lot now and then.

The second is what you do after a miss. In a study that followed people for twelve weeks while they built a new daily habit, missing a single day made no real difference to how the habit formed. One missed day costs you nothing. It only matters if it becomes the reason you stop.

Helping people build that kind of routine around the life they actually have is what we do at Gains For Gamers.

None of this will turn the dishes into a game, and it doesn’t need to. The dishes only have to pass the check again: cost a little less, pay back a little sooner, and sometimes happen without the question being asked at all.