Ask a therapist: How to avoid the motivation trap

For today’s Ask a Therapist question,I just want to share a helpful tip when you're thinking about goal setting or new year’s resolutions. This comes from cognitive behavioral therapy, but it's the idea of the role of motivation when we're trying to create new habits, set new goals and things like that. And you might be familiar with this, but I found it to be really helpful when I started to understand the way that this works. So there's something that researchers call the “motivation trap,” which is the idea that in order to do something new, like create a habit, start working out, start developing a daily writing routine, start eating out less, being healthy, whatever you might be interested in, that we commonly start off the new year with a ton of motivation and we feel excited about it.

But then obviously we hit a point where the motivation lags, and then it's harder to actually follow through on whatever that goal was that we set. And so we typically will put it off and wait until we feel like doing it. And we let the feeling of “not feeling like it,” get in the way of us accomplishing that action. And so there's something researchers call the “motivation trap”, which wrongly assumes that I should feel motivated before I take on a new behavior. And so what research has actually found, is that the feeling of being motivated to do something or being excited about it, typically does not come before we undertake an action, it comes in the middle of the action. So instead of waiting to feel like working out before I do it, the feeling of motivation will come, the research says, more likely halfway through the workout.

So it's a fallacy of thinking to wait to feel motivated to do something before you do it. And so if you want to change your relationship to motivation, instead of waiting to feel motivated to start something, to create a new behavior, you can choose to do it based on what you value, not your feelings.. So that is taking action in accordance with whatever your values are.

So if you say, "I really do have a value of being healthy, I haven't been living up to that value, but I want to." Then I'm going to take action based on what my values are, regardless of how I feel about it. And so hopefully once I get into whatever that action is, the motivation will come partway through you doing the thing. And it's a reward that helps you keep on going to follow through whatever that that goal is.

But it will typically trip us up, if we wait to feel motivated before we try to enact some new behavior. So I'm not an expert at this, this is something I'm working on and growing on, but this is in my mind as I'm thinking about my goals for 2020. And so how can I set myself up for success to make choices and do actions, regardless of if I feel like doing it or not? And hopefully get that extra boost of experiencing motivation after I've already made the choice in line with my values to undertake a new behavior.

So I hope that's helpful. Don't fall into the motivation trap, the myth of being motivated before you start something new. Instead choose to take action based on whatever your values are.