Below are five tips to help you enhance motivation when you feel like giving up:
Be grateful
If there’s an instant way to defuse those feel bad vibes, it’s gratitude, and even if it doesn’t directly change your situation, it changes your perspective. A well know quote is “Great things happen to those who don’t stop believing, trying, learning and being grateful.”
Being grateful shifts you from a dwelling, passive and stagnant mode into a receptive one. Being in the here and now and catching that glimmer of light through the darkness. From there you’re open to new ideas, hope and inspiration. Whatever you’re going through, it’s not about discrediting it or trivialising it. Breakups are rough. Heartbreak can be agony; physically and emotionally. But you will always have something to be grateful for. It could be something tiny such as a song on the radio, a call you had with a friend yesterday.
Look to others as examples
This is all about finding evidence that ‘if they can do it, I can too!’ It can be helpful to find examples of other people who have come from a similar place and are now thriving. You’ll often learn that for those people, it was also a process, but seeing them a few steps ahead of you or even miles ahead, can give you the fuel you need to know it’s possible for you too. Ultimately, we all have the same potential regardless of academic intelligence, appearance, wealth or background.
Rewire and reprogram your brain
What this means is learning how to identify and change your internal and subconscious beliefs to heal. Say you just can’t seem to get over your ex despite doing everything in your power. You’ve read all the books and all the articles and nothing seems to help. Even though on a conscious level you want for the pain to be over more than anything, deep down, some of the beliefs you could be experiencing might include not feeling good enough to be alone or in new relationship, being scared of your identity without your ex, not wanting to let go of your ex or being afraid of change. With health, it could be not believing you’re worthy of having perfect health, being scared of what would happen if you were healthy, feeling unsafe in the world, being afraid to speak your truth, not believing that you’re capable of taking care of yourself. Ultimately the process of rewiring is individual and allows you to tap into those deep rooted and often insidious reasons that are keeping you stuck – usually they’re enlightening to discover. It’s then about calming down your limbic system to get into a parasympathetic state as opposed to a fight or flight one to then begin to rewire those old patterns and turn them into new ones that will support getting over your ex, getting back to perfect health or whatever situation you’re looking to bounce back from. This process includes a highly repetitive blend of elements such as affirmation, visualisation and action.
Just DO something
Depression is the worst kind of emotion because it’s passive. There’s no energy behind it. Nothing is impossible but it can be very tricky to go from feeling depressed to absolutely elated in a short space of time. No amount of affirmations can make your subconscious believe it. But aiming just a few rungs up the emotional ladder is more do-able. Even moving from depression to frustration or anger is an amazing step, because those emotions have energy behind them. You can do something with them.
To ignite that emotion climb it requires you to create energy within your body. Do jumping jacks, go for a walk, cook, clean, call a friend, do something which makes you feel like you’re ‘doing’ something. Movement is a great one. A brilliant definition of emotion is ‘energy in motion’. It’s amazing how when we resign ourselves to staying stagnant, we embody that physically and emotionally. We feel tired. We feel worse inside. But just a little movement or environment change can be all we need in that moment to shift and get an extra rung up the emotion ladder.
Be the inspirer you need
Imagine that your younger, childlike self is feeling how you’re feeling. Going through this experience. What would you do or say to them to help them through? To keep them feeling inspired, safe and nurtured. Also know that whatever challenges you’re going through, it will pass. Feel it, be ok with it, know that it’s a human experience, know that like a captain steering a ship sometimes you have to adapt and go left, sometimes you have to go right; it isn’t a linear path. Do what you can to keep yourself moving forward a tiny step every single day.