Where is my motivation?

Post Reply New Topic

Back at work this afternoon after taking most of last week off due to burnout. Had CBT for trauma yesterday afternoon. Feeling drained and flat. I'm teaching online. Don't know how I'm going to motivate myself to have the enthusiasm to teach. I feel like such a failure. I thought I finally found a job I could manage - I'm in my thirties and had more jobs than I can count or care to remember. I feel slow and empty. And that's after coffee.

My question is, how do you motivate yourself when you have low energy?

My executive function goes to s**t when I'm like this and I can't make decisions for love nor money. I've been too depressed to do much at all for the past few years and I'm fed up of giving in to the desire to lie down and eat and watch TV.

I miss better days.

Sometimes slowing down is healthy... especially now, with a global viral problem... I don't just give in to a desire to watch, I prioritize it after sleep (and why try to motivate yourself for others, at least do boring things that benefit yourself, and only do jobs if you really need the wage or really like them...)

Happens to me a lot too, especially when I'm living alone. i don't know of a solution. I suppose in theory when the annoyance of seeing myself wasting days gets intense enough, that might drive me to get off my butt, though I've not seen any evidence of that actually happening.

One thing that does seem to "help" is negative motivation - if I think others will be disappointed to find I've not done this or that, then I'll tend to do it (though even then I'll put it off as long as I dare). Trouble is, it's not a very happy solution, because sticks aren't as nice as carrots. Still, if getting things done is important enough to you, then you could do worse than to try to arrange for your goals to be linked to the approval of others in some way.

But in my own case a lot depends on the nature of the tasks that occur to me - often there are reasons why I don't feel like tackling them. The likely outcome might not be worth the investment of effort. Part of the task might be painful or dangerous. I might end up making matters worse. So when a job occurs to me and I find myself rejecting it, I try to think in detail about it to find out why I don't want to do it, and whether or not my reasons make sense or whether they're just a product of slipshod thinking or a negative attitude. Sometimes there's just a shortage of feasible projects - there have been times when after a time of doing nothing I've finally stumbled on something that's a good match for my skills and is likely to give a useful result. At times like that I'm glad of the evidence that it's not just me being lazy or negative.

Strangely, when I'm living with my partner I feel better motivated than I do when I'm alone, though I have less control over my time and movements and can't be so sure where the tools for the tasks happen to be. So I guess there's a psychological element to it.

Regaining motivation is not a logical progression. I found it by getting more sunshine and exercise. Observing the sheer improbability of having a human body, I was more inclined to see what it could accomplish. Teaching may be like fishing, though - the rare student who "gets it" is the big payday bonus, but you have to fish every day with the same odds.

Considering that procrastination is usually a feature of ASD, you've likely got that on top of all this fatigue and depression, and you might bear that in mind if you're being hard on yourself for not feeling able to get on with anything. So I'd say try not to accuse yourself of being a failure, because there's no evidence of that here.

My Aspie partner also went through a lot of jobs, ending up on disability benefit, and still blames herself, though she's actually a very intelligent person with a lot of skills and diligence. I've often wished she'd see more clearly the counter view, that she was pearls before swine.

I imagine how I'll feel about not accomplishing whatever I want to accomplish. I also think about my life being limited and my wanting to spend it doing things rather than sleeping or resting a lot. The best solution is fixing the low energy problem, however.


The depression needs to be fixed if it's the root cause of the low energy. That's ultimately more important than quick fixes to accomplish things with low energy.