How do motivation and procrastination work?

Build an algorithm to hack the brain and keep it on track.

Hypothetical problem time

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You are feeling low but at the same time willing to make a change and waiting for the right spark to come from inside to trigger you. By now you must have understood that problem is no more hypothetical, it’s something that unifies us as human beings.

Why do we need motivation?

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To answer this question, let’s understand what motivation means and how our brain interprets it. This may sound silly to ponder but there’s a lot of science going behind the scenes.

For once, our friend Wikipedia comes with a simple definition to help us with the what part.

As stated, we can simplify motivation as push, i.e, the little extra pump we need to do an action (play/pause/stop). We may wonder what’s the need after all. Well, it’s a universal concept and has nothing to do with us as humans specifically. Water needs to rise to a certain level to cause a flood, you need to chug to a certain level to puke, petrol needs some fire to burst in flames. Everything and everyone needs to get to a certain level of energy as the task requires. Some may be small and some may be too big to take a step. Here we meet our friend procrastination.

Why do we procrastinate?

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Once again, to the point.

We procrastinate because the energy gap, aka motivation, is too big a leap to dare. The solution is simple and we already discussed it, key term is Too Big A Leap. The uncertainty of happiness after the leap is what scares us in the first place. To overcome it we need to break it down and take some preparatory steps before the leap to build enough motivation. It may sound naive but it’s how our brain chemistry works.

The technical term for the same is Dopamine loop or Reward mechanism. Our brain rewards us with a sense of happiness by releasing a chemical called dopamine and a state of motivation to take more such steps producing the same results and the loop goes on and on.

Conclusion

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So, here you have the scientifically backed answer to your biggest question. The single reason why you are not getting motivated enough to do that big thing is because you are not starting with the baby steps preceding it. Motivation works on the principle of momentum, the faster you run before the jump, the further you’ll be able to jump. Rewards from previous steps are often looked down on by the brain after a couple of iterations and it starts pushing you forward to grab a bigger achievement to satisfy this cycle. So, start the chain reaction and hustle, you got it mate!

Pumped up already!

To Connect

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