today we're talking about motivation if in the last three years you've worked from home
you struggled with motivation and some level or another i know for myself being at home it was
difficult for me because i had so many other options other than work that i could be doing
right i could do the laundry i could clean up the kitchen i could watch tv so watch YouTube videos
there was so much not related to what i should have been doing that was available to me another
struggle that people talked about was being right beside the kitchen because if you're beside the
kitchen you're beside the snacks and what's more entertaining doing your work or having snacks
the thing that was interesting to me was that we had people who realized like almost immediately
i'm beside the kitchen i gotta stop buying snacks because if i'm gonna be here for a while that's
not gonna work for me and then you had the other people who continued to buy the cookies
cakes and ice cream and all the chips and junk food promising that they wouldn't buy them the
next time they went to the store and then failing because they did buy them and this brought a lot
of conversations trying to figure out like why did you buy them the next time like if you know that
that's pulling you away from what you want to do so the first part is lying which is an intentional
false statement you know you're not going to stop buying them but you say that you're going to stop
buying them because it seems like the right thing to say and then you really don't have an
issue with eating the junk food but you do dislike the weight that you're gaining and then you have
procrastination which is different because you actually want to stop buying the stuff but somehow
you have difficulty not buying it you go to the store the intention i'm only buying healthy food
and then somehow the cookies and the ice cream and the chips are in your basket according to Dr
Tracy Marks and i love this because i love when i find doctors and psychiatrists who are reinforcing
things that i keep saying the more people saying the same thing the more helpful it is for
wellness workers to believe that i'm on the right track if i'm doing what's asking me to do because
this other doctor and this other doctor and this other psychiatrist are saying the same thing and
Dr Marks pointed out the role that dopamine plays in that pleasure pathway i keep talking about so
it has a big role in procrastination now she's talking about it through the ADHD lens but at the
end of the day our brain works a certain way and she explained that dopamine encourages behavior
because it activates the emotional memory for positive experiences so i do something i like it
dope means released it encourages me to seek that behavior again in the future dopamine also rewards
working memory thinking decision making so we work towards a positive experience so we have to
think and make decisions we get the outcome that we want this all feels great and then we
re-engage that behavior in the future so whether it's something like learning like academically
or learning like use my body in a way and i get a result both of them lead to that positive outcome
so now let's talk about the fact that you have work to do that's the computer you have a healthy
keto meal that you want to be making or you have a workout that you'd like to go do doing these tasks
would actually let you feel accomplished you'd be proud of yourself and you would
likely improve your future because if you do well academically that's a good positive for the
future if you do well for your health that's an improvement for your future and instead
you end up eating cookies the thing that we fail to let ourselves truly understand is the fact that
the eating pathway so the eating cookies eating chips eating ice cream the pathway where eating
is reinforced is already known and it's a positive outcome that's easy to do because we've done this
so long like we know this pathway it's it's already reinforced for us however the pathways
are part of our learning and our growth if i continue to let myself reinforce eating eating
eating eating and that's the only pathway that i focus on sure i'm going to get the positive
but will i grow properly and i'm talking now emotionally one thing we need to keep in mind
is that we're either improving or deteriorating change is always happening so everything that i do
leads to a pathway that's being reinforced now we have negative pathways something that we don't
talk about often the unfortunate part about reinforcing the eating pathway all the time
is that if i'm not happy with my weight if i'm not happy with my strength and my flexibility and my
my health reinforcing this junk food pathway is impacting me feeling bad i'm also reinforcing a
pathway that puts me to feel bad about me why am i not doing good behavior and this little loop which
we hear in our head right you you hear yourself saying these things what's wrong with me or i
keep eating like this like you call yourself names maybe i'm so stupid why do i keep doing
you talk to yourself and you're upset with yourself and that pathway is also being
reinforced the positive i get from the eating pathway versus the negative i get from feeling bad
about myself and both are being reinforced if i'm not improving i'm deteriorating change is constant
so when it comes to food especially sugar since we've been reinforcing this pleasure pathway
since we were about six months old because mom started giving us cereal and fruit let the fruit
actually taste sweet and the cereal it might not taste weird if you if your parents are giving you
just plain oatmeal cereal for babies it doesn't necessarily taste sweet but it is sweet because
it's like 19 grams of sugar and a serving of baby cereal so we're starting our children off
this way which means that we have this expectation now that we create where
junk food gives us emotional positive release right we feel good and therefore we eat it easily
and we actually believe that we will feel better because we do feel better so i'm sad
i eat ice cream right my broken heart is going to be mended by by ice cream or cookies or chips or
in insert whatever your pleasure food is there we have to work to get the positive emotional release
of completing an assignment making the healthy keto meal or doing the workout so it's not do
the action bang i get it right away do the action you know i feel i feel good that i completed it
and then i also feel good that like over time i get the result of hey look my weight's improving
and each one of those things does make us feel good so for example i cook that keto meal and if
i actually cook it and eat it and like it i feel good because i did the better thing for my health
that's going to give me a positive release and then eventually i get the added bonus of hey my
body feels good i'm going to like that and i get the release of seeing that hey this outfit fits
better i like that so all of these things give us positive releases but they take work to get to and
their hearts harder to start so there might be new pathways if i'm not used to studying or i'm not
used to cooking differently they might be a brand new pathway that i'm trying to get myself to to
love doing or it's not as automatic as the sugar pathway so that part where i need to overcome to
then be on the right path of cooking and feeling good about what i'm doing right now or sitting at
my computer and working and feeling good about how much i'm accomplishing right now and eventually i
will get the good grade or the promotion or the good income or whatever however i'm measuring
that i did the work at work to accomplish what i and feel good about it the elephant in the room
is that sugar addiction keeps us going for that easy pathway so we have trouble letting go of
sugar because we don't actually realize that we're addicted to it and the reason we don't
realize that we're addicted to it is because we have so many avenues to get to sugar i can count
on my hand the number of times that i saw my dad eat a cookie when i was growing up a cookie or any
junk food one hand whenever i saw my dad eating he was eating food i don't live there anymore
i don't know if that's changed but i remember being in the house he had to go to work and his
focus was eat food go to work you know then spend time with us he didn't eat junk the one thing i
remember him indulging in was my mom's um sweet bread we called it he would eat that but besides
that i didn't see my daddy junk yet i know he was addicted to sugar he's since changed a lot in his
life much more fit and eating much less sugar so eating much less what then you might be wondering
because if he wasn't eating junk food what was he eating he was eating adult foods like bread pasta
rice potatoes right he was eating food but the food was high in carbs so sugar and candy isn't
the only way that we feed this addiction that we have the thing is that we want to feel good
we want to take the easiest path to get to feeling good the problem is that we don't even know we're
doing that so this easy path to the dopamine hit we take it whether we know we're taking it or not
and if you're procrastinating i need you to stop and ask yourself what am i doing instead of the
thing that i know i should be doing because chances are you're going to realize that you're
getting your dopamine hit from either food social media video games or whatever other preferred
dopamine boosting activity you tend to engage in i want you to check out this video that i have
right here about dopamine to learn how to get the positive out of dopamine without triggering your
addiction because it is actually possible and it's going to help you to live the life that you truly
want to be living so engage your activities feel healthy in your body it's going to help you to
to to live your life the way you want to live your life rather than constantly chasing snacking
constantly chasing social media constantly chasing mindless watching of television or
right like you need to do the healthy things and then we can reward ourselves with a bit of time
doing these things that are not towards our goal but our goal needs to be first