Motivation: What is Motivation?

Lesson 1: What is Motivation?

What Is Motivation?

Believe it or not, it’s possible to become more motivated, and being more motivated can make starting tasks easier, increase satisfaction, help you to meet your goals, and improve many other aspects of daily life.

Each of us is motivated for different reasons, and the better you understand your own motivations, the better you can improve them.

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic

There are two main types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic.

It is thought that we are all naturally motivated to be curious and to do things that benefit our own personal goals. This motivation has helped humans survive throughout history. After all, someone that is motivated to look for food is much more likely to find it than someone that isn’t.

While we often purposefully make decisions to do things, they are also made deep inside our brains without us even being fully aware.

Our brains take in lots of information and then decide whether or not a task is worth doing. If it is, our brains give us motivation to do it. If not, we lack motivation to do it.

Some of this process is controlled by certain areas of our brains, and some of it by specific chemicals in our brains. You can think of it like a car engine and gasoline. Both the engine and the gasoline have an impact on how the car runs.

Our biology has a large effect on how our brains work, but so do our experiences and decisions.

Motivation Tips

So how do we make our brains motivate us for the things we think are worth doing?

A great first step is to simply ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?”. Make an effort to understand all of the reasons that you are choosing to do something.