Struggling with motivation
Having Hope During Dark Times, Part 2 of 3
Inscribed on five of the six pillars in the Holocaust Memorial at Quincy Market in Boston are stories that speak of the cruelty and suffering in the camps. The sixth pillar presents a tale of a different sort, about a little girl named Ilse, a childhood friend of Guerda Weissman Kline, in Auschwitz. Guerda remembers that Ilse, who was about six years old at the time, found one morning a single raspberry somewhere in the camp. Ilse carried it all day long in a protected place in her pocket, and in the evening, her eyes shining with happiness, she presented it to her friend Guerda on a leaf. “Imagine a world,” writes Guerda, “in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to your friend.”
From “The Art of Possibility” by Rosamund S. and Benjamin Zander
I think about this story every time I think about raspberries. I don’t really want to think about it, but I do. It’s hard to allow myself to feel the sadness this story brings up, hard to imagine two little girls in a concentration camp having a moment of happiness centered on a single raspberry. Some part of me would rather focus on the uplifting possibility of friendship and generosity in dire circumstances. It feels good to imagine how Ilse epitomizes the goodness of human character and our potential ability to find happiness despite it all.
This struggle, between allowing myself to feel sad and preferring the uplifting positive feelings, is exhausting. If you’ve read my previous post, you’re familiar with the connection between lack of motivation and our tendency to emotionally numb ourselves. In that post, I briefly talked about how we are socialized to avoid certain feelings. In this post, I want to talk about a slightly different, but related, dynamic. One where it’s not society per se telling us what to feel, but where it’s our individual subjective experience seemingly at odds with itself.
Getting out of your head about it
If you’re anything like me, you might find yourself over-thinking about or “intellectualizing” things, rather than letting yourself feel your feelings. My mind seems to be the ultimate arbiter about what I actually feel, both the specific emotion and the intensity of that emotion. How did you react to the story above? Did you allow yourself to feel sad? Did you notice yourself getting teary, but hold back the tears? Were you inspired by Ilse’s act of generosity? Did the thought of a friend like Ilse make you smile? Did you struggle (waiver) between the two like me? Did you have some other reaction? Anger perhaps?
More important than what you feel, is how you feel it.
In our fast-paced, modern lives we rarely give ourselves permission to stop and experience our experience. This is a strange thing to say, because fundamentally, you’re always having your experience. So, what do I mean by “experience our experience”? I mean, plainly, getting out of our heads about it.
Hats off to you, if you allowed yourself to genuinely smile, or cry, in reaction to the story above. Or, if you allowed yourself to express any emotion really. In my experience, most folks, for the sake of propriety, or convenience, or to maintain a sense of “being in control,” do not fully allow themselves to be moved by the story. Instead, they seem to rush through it, as if reading it quickly helps make it less real. Isn’t that at least a little bit strange?
At this point, you may be thinking, “But, I can’t just go around emoting all day long!” or something like, “Self-control is an important and adaptive life skill!” To which, I would directly respond, “You’re right!” and at the same time there’s something to be said for being able to fully have your experience. Feeling motivated, as we discussed before, is connected to feeling broadly speaking. Ask yourself, “Is my low motivation a result of feeling torn? Have I intellectually mediated my emotional experience to the point of turning the volume down on my experience writ large?”
Allowing yourself your full experience
It may be a lot to ask of you to fully experience the story above. It’s a tough story. It brings up a lot of complicated and tangled emotions. So, why not start with something smaller? When was the last time you allowed yourself to fully experience a raspberry? Or any food for that matter?
Again, “in our fast-paced, modern lives” we rarely give ourselves permission to stop and savor the food we’re eating. Perhaps, in the abundance, we simply take it for granted. Often, our day-to-day relationship with food seems to be more utilitarian. You need sustenance, so you eat. From time-to-time we might stop to evaluate the food we’re eating, especially if we’re trying something new, or if we’re some place fancy, or if we’ve gone out of our way for some other reason. But, even then, it’s more of an evaluation (“Do I like this? Is this good?”) than it is a savoring of the food.
Alternatively, you might find yourself eating out of boredom. The snacks are within reach, so you reach for them. You’re not sure what to do, so you head to the fridge, just to see if anything looks good. This kind of eating is so cut off from our experience that it seemingly is both outside of our intellectual experience and our emotional experience. What would it be like, if we stopped to savor the food we eat? Would it be like, if we gave our undivided attention to our experience of enjoying a meal?
What would it be like, if we were more attuned to our experience broadly?
Hedonism and the Hedonic Treadmill
The ancient school of thought “Hedonism” promotes pleasure as the primary purpose of life. Pleasure, and the analogous avoidance of pain, are what make life worth living they say. But, as you may have noticed from above, in modern times, many have a complicated relationship with pleasure.
For example, there are many instances of “first-order” and “second-order” desires being at odds with one another. If I want chocolate because it’s delicious AND I don’t want chocolate because too much chocolate is bad for me, can I really enjoy chocolate? Given my competing desires, when I do eat chocolate, will it feel as good as it would have felt had I never second-guessed it? Or will the “second-order” desire of long-term health always put a damper on the sugary treat?
Clearly, preserving the long-term desire for health is important and adaptive. Hedonism has fallen out of popularity in large part because of its association with irresponsible excess. But does “making good choices” mean that the ship has sailed on a child-like enjoyment of chocolate? In these cases, where we are seemingly of “two-minds,” whether or not and to what degree something is pleasurable gets all muddled. Thinking it’s the mature decision, we might (sadly? happily?) conclude that it’s best to avoid chocolate altogether.
Out of sight, out of mind — both minds.
Similarly, there’s the human tendency towards what researchers call “hedonic adaptation” or the “hedonic treadmill.” Here, we simply “get used” to chocolate. It’s not that we’re of two minds, it’s that we quickly reset towards a kind of base-level happiness. The first time you have chocolate, it’s awesome, but eventually, it’s no big deal. It’s just chocolate. It loses something over time. It’s not that it becomes “bad,” most folks will still say they enjoy chocolate. It’s more that it doesn’t quite have the same impact on us. If anything, it loses our attention and thus we become kind of numb to it. The field of positive psychology has been exploring this dynamic for decades, but modeling human happiness has proved, well, complicated to the point of seeming random. Still, simply knowing that we have this tendency, does little to help us in the here and now. So, what are we to do?
Start by savoring the small stuff
While most are familiar with the positive effects of exercise on mental health, few seem to make the implicit connection between our bodies and our minds. Let me put it another way, one way to get out of your head is to get into your body. One of my favorite ways to do that, is by savoring the small stuff. For example…
My sister sent me these chocolates as an early Christmas present. My wife and I have been enjoying a single chocolate a piece after dinner for the last few days. To be clear, we pick two chocolates out of the box, I cut the chocolates in half, she chooses her two halves (because fairness!) and we each get to try a bit of both truffles. My favorite one so far has been the mole (as in the sauce from Mexico). It starts off sweet, grows into a nutty unctuousness, and finishes with a lingering peppery spice. Yum!
This small improvised ritual has been a great opportunity for us to take a moment during our busy and demanding schedules. The chocolates are well-crafted and melt in your mouth. Exotic flavors like passion fruit (maracuyá), Brazilian sea salt caramel, and tamarindo each surprise and delight. For a moment, at the end of dinner, we give our undivided attention to this small gift and it feels great. After eating the chocolates, I take a deep breath and feel suddenly recharged. Back into my body after a long and heady day.
There are many opportunities for gratitude
“Why do you wait until the end of dinner?” you may be asking. “Couldn’t you savor the meal as well?” Certainly we could. But it’s not easy to give something your undivided attention. Mindfulness takes practice. Since we spend so much of our time ignoring the things around us, giving our undivided attention to something feels like opening ourselves up in a kind of vulnerable way. There’s a good and healthy reason we’ve “blocked out the noise” of the day-to-day. Which is to say, that even mindfulness benefits from moderation. These small chocolates were a welcomed opportunity to take a moment and appreciating them fully felt like a genuine way to say, “Thank you!” to my sister.
Of course, there are many opportunities for gratitude. Hedonic treadmill aside, we take so much for granted. In these dark times especially, it feels like fear casts a cloud on everything. The fast-paced media cycle and constant tech-enabled stimuli don’t help. But for every possible future misfortune, there are not only countless past and present gifts, but also numerous possible future fortunes!
For me, for example, as COVID-19 looms, I find myself suddenly aware of how good it feels to take a deep breath. Just, seemingly out of nowhere, I’ll notice my breathing. I’ll notice that I’m afraid of getting sick, being on a ventilator, maybe worse. So, I stop and take a deep breath. And I notice how good it feels. How many breaths have gone unnoticed? I wonder. How many breaths are there to come?
Staying motivated during dark times can be especially difficult because there are lots of opportunities to avoid experiencing our experience. As we numb ourselves, motivated either by our environment or our own internal machinations, it only makes sense that our motivation dwindles along with everything else. Feeling your feelings and savoring the small stuff are two immediate ways to rekindle the warmth which makes us human and the warmth that motivates the “good friend” inside us all, willing to give our everything despite the dire circumstances.
Please share this with your Medium friends and click the ♥ button below to spread it around. Also, feel free to add what you’ve been savoring lately below in the comments!
