3 Tips For Persisting When You Don’t Feel Motivated

Recently, I’ve been hearing from a lot of daily content creators about feelings of burnout or exhaustion.

Can you relate?

We live in a culture that conditions us to produce and consume non-stop, as if we are robots or machines just churning out content, executing workouts, or showing up as the same person every day.

This isn’t how human beings are designed to work.

Here are 3 ways to work with a period of decreased motivation:

(1) Acceptance

Whether your daily practice is a workout, a blog, a YouTube video, a yoga practice, or anything else, waxing and waning in motivation to get up and do it is normal.

Just like the moon waxes and wanes, and the waves crest and trough, there are times when we feel less motivation to show up for our practice.

We cannot expect to maintain the same intensity in any one practice or type of work for weeks, months, and years without variation.

All of life happens in patterns of cycles and seasons.

Periods where we have higher productivity and output are followed by periods of lower productivity and output, which must be followed by periods of rest and recovery.

Trying to fight against your lack of motivation is futile: it’s like trying to fight your way out of being stuck in the mud. You’ll end up depleting yourself more through your efforts to fight resistance.

Accepting that this is where you are right now can help you preserve energy for steps 2 and 3.

(2) Change What You’re Doing

When I notice long stretches where I am deviating from my normal routine by being extra slow, when the activity doesn’t help me “feel like it,” or when I don’t feel good after a workout, then I know something is off and I need to make a change.

That doesn’t mean I stop exercising.

Instead, I experiment with changes to my routine and rituals: shifting the nature of my workouts, changing the timing, the environment, the type of activities.

(3) Maintain Your Routine By Doing Something

As much as possible, keep the the framework of your routines and do something.

This is where having a good foundation of routines and rituals comes in handy.

For over a decade, people have asked me how I have managed to sustain a daily workout practice.

Even on days when I don’t feel like working out, or I need a recovery day, I still practice my ritual of getting up and going to the gym, or doing some form of movement.

In the world of fitness it’s called active recovery. Sometimes it’s a day, and sometimes it’s longer.

Over the past decade, I’ve had periods of weeks or even months where I went to the gym just to foam roll or stretch.

The act of going to the place meant that when motivation resurfaced, I was already in the place to take action.

This is the place where many people fall down. They completely take time off, then lose the momentum of their routine. When they are ready to restart, they struggle to “find time.”

If you keep to your routine, you won’t need to “find time” for it again. And motivation will resurface faster.

In the context of exercise, “active recovery” means that you are still doing some form of movement, even if it’s not the same intensity.

The same applies to creative work.