The Secret To Always Staying Motivated

today we're going to talk about how to unlock 100% of your [Music] motivation the frustrating thing about life is that we know if we can get this person to actually put forth 100% of our effort instead of half-assing it we would do awesome and we know that it's theoretically possible because there are tasks in your life where you've been able to give it your all and when you give it your all things turn out so well the problem though is that as we look at the tasks in our life like maybe I have this project

for work I have to do something for school or my brother's birthday is coming up whatever the task is we just can't put forth 100% effort and in those moments if you're like me you start to wonder what would my life be like if I could actually put forth all of my effort all of the time I'm super excited about this topic because this is one of those cases where everything that I've invested in seemed to to click so my years of studying to become a monk or during doing Neuroscience research at Harvard or even

years of clinical practice because the problem with motivation is that it's quite multidisiplinary we can sort of look at the Neuroscience of it we can discover particular things but how do we translate that down into what you do today and so that's exactly what we're going to teach you and we're going to weave together some aspects of Neuroscience some aspects of clinical practice I.E working with people to get them more motivated and lastly we're going to understand sort of this yogic or Eastern perspective to help you really unlock motivation hey y'all if you're interested in

applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out Dr K's guide to mental health it combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a Choose Your Own Adventure format so check out the link in the bio and start your journey today so let's start by understanding the experience of one 100% effort so when you are in a situation where you're putting forth 100% effort what are you feeling like what's your

internal experience so the first thing is that emotionally usually your emotions are aligned with the task right so this doesn't even necessarily mean good emotion so if you're really pissed off at someone and you're like I'm going to teach this person a lesson your anger is in alignment with yourself often times this also means that or in other situations you're excited right or you're curious about something I really want to learn about something so there's alignment of emotions with the task that's number one the second thing is that your energy level is pretty good right

so when you want to do something your energy level is good like you're putting forth a 100% effort which means you've got enough energy to sustain the effort now let's look at the alternate scenario where you don't want to put forth 100% effort what are the most common experiences within your mind and your body so number one thing that a lot of people will say to themselves is I don't feel like it I just don't have the energy today so if we sort of look at a lack of 100% effort what we're talking about is

not feeling like it or not having the energy to do it today right it's oh I'll have the energy tomorrow but just today I don't have the energy so I'm not going to I'm not going to put forth 100% effort so let's understand what these subjective experiences in the mind actually mean in your brain when we say I don't feel like it which part of our being does that relate to and it turns out that it's actually emotions right so you don't really Noti that you don't have an emotion right it's kind of I just

don't feel like anything you sort of feel emotionally neutral but at the same time you're also using the word I don't feel like it you're not saying I think it's a bad idea or I've made a logical calculation using the tools of AI available on the internet and I have naturally concluded that I'm not going to do this task that's not that's not what happens what happens is I don't feel like it and what is feeling feeling is an emotion and so now the question kind of becomes what determines your emotional state in response to

a task right because if we don't feel like it we have to cultivate the right kind of emotion well how do we do that so I'll give you all a scenario okay let's say that I go out with my friends for dinner and then they say afterward okay let's go dancing or maybe I'm sitting there in the restaurant and a dance floor opens up in the middle of a restaurant now what do you imagine my emotional reaction to my friends getting up and starting to dance are well that depends on you right so depending on

who you are you may say wow this is an amazing opportunity I can't believe that they just opened up a dance Lords time to go Boogie let's go or you could say oh crap I'm not very good at dancing I don't know how to dance now all my friends are on the Dance Floor I'm sitting here awkward alone oh my God so even though the scenario is exactly the same our emotional response can change depending on our perception of self okay so I know it sounds kind of weird but just hear me out so depending

on how I think about myself so if I think of myself as I enjoy dancing or I am a good dancer then my emotions when it comes to dancing will be positive in nature exciting in nature and if I think of myself as not a good dancer I don't know how to dance then my emotions will be negative and I won't feel like doing it literally the difficulty of getting on the Dance Floor depends on the emotional response that I have and the emotional response that I have depends on my sense of identity but you

will say but Dr K hold on a second it's not just my identity it's not it's not all in my head I am objectively a bad d answer like I never learned how to dance so it's not that it's my ego it's not my sense of identity I literally do not know how to dance TT I don't know if you've met these people these people piss me off but these people who aren't good at stuff and can still do it 100% have you ever met these people these [ __ ] you know they're like the

people who like the first time you're like visiting some tribe in the Amazon and everyone in the Amazon starts dancing or I see these people when I'm going and doing like Indian dancing stuff like garbar NRI if you'll ever seen this stuff it's a lot of fun so sometimes you'll have like when we go to this Festival where there's a bunch of like th like literally thousands of Indian people dancing and and stuff like that and then I'll sometimes like take my friends who are Caucasian or of other ethnicities Asian africanamerican whatever and then when

I take these people there there's two kinds of people none of them know how to dance they've never been here before it's absolutely insane but some of them are like super excited it's like even though I don't know how to literally do this skill I'm excited to learn and I'm going to put forth 100% effort and there are the people who are like I don't know how to do this this makes me feel awkward I am going to look like an idiot y'all both going to look like idiots but one of y'all is okay with

it and this is what I end up seeing is that out of the friends that I take the people who are okay looking like idiots are the ones who do a good job learn how to dance and have more fun so it's not about the objectivity of whether you have the skill or not it's about your sense of identity and the emotion that that creates in response to that task and if you're like me because I'm the one that when I you know go to things and I'm like learning new stuff I have friends with

with me who are like Yay let's learn and I'm like I feel like an idiot I'm not going to do that and I look at them with envy and jealousy it's like I wish I could do that I wish I was willing to make myself look stupid to enjoy and engage with life and then I would learn so much more too because the other really frustrating thing about these people is that they like learn so many different things because they're living life to the fullest we're going to teach you how to do that today the

second thing to understand about when you don't have maximal effort you can't put forth Max maximal effort is that you don't have the energy for it so now we have to understand the science of arousal and what gives your body energy okay so we have this axis called the HPA axis the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis and this axis governs a lot of our energy and arousal in life and so if we kind of think about it the level of energy that we will kind of have when given a task fluctuates depending on our opinion of

the task so I know it sounds kind of crazy but hear me out okay so if if we look at our energy level what we tend to see is that our energy level goes like this okay and what this is is essentially our level of stress and what we sort of discover is that in order to have optimal energy for a particular task you need a medium level of stress this is something that we call you stress now if a task is not stressful enough I.E down here the stress level is really low then our

energy level is low this is what we call being bored right so doing paperwork is not stressful at all it's just annoying and even though it's easy to do the level of effort required is super high because our energy level is naturally low the task is easy but our energy is so in the pits because it's a boring task that it ends up being hard to do next thing to understand is when our stress level is too high our energy level actually tanks and this is what we call being overwhelmed so this is when our

body our brain is basically saying okay this task is too much for us to handle we won't be able to succeed in it therefore we don't want to waste energy because it's too much it's too big it's too much it's not going to work it's going to be waste of energy and our brain and body if there's one thing that they're really good at is being efficient so this is when we feel overwhelmed our mind is like okay I have 15,000 things to do I don't know where to start it's too much I and then

internally how do you feel when you're overwhelmed you feel energetically drained so this is the key thing to understand is that when we we're talking about putting forth effort we need to have the right level of energy but instead often times we are bored with the tasks or we are overwhelmed by the tasks and now the question kind of becomes okay well what do we do about that right because can we control how stressed out we are about something it turns out yes we actually can and that too has to do with your sense of

identity so let's understand this so depending on how you feel about yourself or who you think you are the the level of stress a particular task evokes will be different so if you think something is beneath you then you will sort of start to think it's kind of boring it's too easy you'll sort of slip into the low stress category where everything in life is boring and I used to be one of these kids maybe you all know these kids they're all over the internet where they're like yeah I study quantum mechanics in my like

free time and like I'm a philosopher stoic and like oh my God Marxism and I'm so much better than you like oh my God I can't ever apply for a job ever like oh my God it's so boring I can't believe this this is crazy and those people don't like accomplish much right they're just like arguing with people on the internet so it is our perception of the self and if something feels too easy to us or feels boring then our energy level will decrease on the flip side things that are overwhelming are not always

overwhelming when you first engage with something it can feel overwhelming because you don't know how to do it and that's what you'll tell you you're you'll tell yourself right if someone else was in this situation they would be able to handle this but I've never done this before this is too much for me I don't know how to handle this kind of thing and so it is your perception of self which tells you that this is too much for you to handle because if you were different or you said to yourself you know what even

though I'm inexperienced with this I have faith in who I am this is a challenge that I can rise to let me sort of give it my best shot it all has to do with the perception of so this is the really insane thing when it comes to unlocking 100% of your motivation there is an energy component which is governed by our arousal system in our HPA axis and there is an emotional component which is governed by our emotions and furthermore both of these things our emotional response to a task or how stressful or engaging

a particular task is how much it activates our HPA access actually has to do with your perception of self now science can get us this far but now the question becomes okay from a perception of self standpoint what do we do about it right so if I believe I'm all of these things like do I need to go through 15 weeks of psychotherapy to change my identity you can absolutely do that by all means some people will say should I go do psychedelics and change who I am I wouldn't recommend it but some people have

this is where we turn to yoga because yoga and meditation in these Eastern Traditions they the ones who sort of figured out from a subjective standpoint how you can change your sense of self and here's the basic thing that they figured out essentially all of the constructions that we have about our sense of self are constructions they're not really who we are they are intellectual conclusions or even emotional conclusions but they're something that we build up about ourselves and this is precisely why identity can change over time if identity was like fixed and physical and

true then it wouldn't be able to change over time really but if you sort of think about your identity your identity is quite fluid based on the conclusions that you draw and this is what we literally do in like Psychotherapy for people with like trauma is we will take an identity and we will literally cognitively reshape it into something else it's absolutely possible and we're going to teach yall a very simple powerful technique that if you do over time will change your sense of identity this technique starts with this step so the first thing to

do is take a task where you can't put forth 100% effort once you have that task you will notice one of two things either you don't have the energy or you don't feel like it and now what I want you to do is take either of those things and try to trace that back to a sense of identity you can do this with like a piece of paper you can pull something out right now whatever you want to do but start to think about okay what is it about me that creates this emotional response so

if I feel like H I don't have the energy to do it or I I don't feel like doing it or I'm afraid to do it or I'm anxious to do it recognize that other people would not be quite as anxious as you are right or even if they were anxious they would be able to handle that anxiety in a different way so what is it about you that makes you unable to engage in the task and from an energy standpoint the same is true what about this is overwhelming for you or or what about

this is boring for you and if you tunnel down you'll discover some aspect of your identity it doesn't have to be 100% correct you're we're not going to worry about arguing with it or trying to like convince it to be different you may sort of slip into that don't do any of that just notice some aspect of myself and this could be something as simple as you know I'm not good at dancing very simple I'm not good so the simpler it is the easier it is so make some statement about yourself now comes the fun

part so once you have that piece of your identity what I want you to do is sit up straight so your spine needs to be absolutely straight spine is straight neck is straight head is straight so if you want to one of the things that you can do is imagine that there is a uh like a string or rope at the top of your head and you're kind of pulling up on that string and imagine what it would do to your spine that's how you can sit up straight okay so you want your spine neck

and head to be 100% straight now what I'm going to do is take a moment take a deep breath You Can chant M three times if you want to that really helps a lot so you can do five minutes of oh chanting for for this practice that's ideal you yall can check out Dr K's guide or some of our other YouTube videos on instructions how to do that but just use some kind of centering practice om chanting works really well and then what we're going to do is look within yourself for that attribute of your

identity right so notice your experience of this moment what exists within you what are you you'll notice you have certain physical Sensations you may notice your breath you may notice sensory stimuli then you may notice thoughts and emotion but thoughts are just thoughts they're not real things they're like literally thoughts right so I can think of a unicorn doesn't make the Unicorn real a thought is an abstraction it's some not reality thing it is a construction of the mind and you may have understood this very simply if you thought you left your keys in this

particular drawer but then you open it up and the keys aren't there oh no thoughts are not reality so if you by all means you can notice thoughts there's no problem with noticing thoughts in fact we want you to but notice what actually exists and as you just notice what actually exists look for that aspect of identity within you in this moment so if all you have is this 60 seconds could you determine from your experience in this moment that this thing is true is this a real thing within you and you may some of

y'all will get tripped up because you'll start thinking about it but as we already said thinking is not real right sometimes it mirrors reality but thinking is not a real thing it's just what we think and we sort of know that people can experience psychosis which literally means they think particular thoughts which they believe are real which you're distorted from reality thoughts are not reality and so as you look in yourself look for this attribute of your identity and what you will discover is it is not there because all aspects of your identity are abstractions

are conclusions and as you sort of look for this part of yourself I'm not good at dancing I'm neither not good at dancing or not good at dancing or even if I'm not good at dancing it's simply because I haven't learned yet right this vessel has not been trained so be it and then as you cannot find this thing within you take a deep breath in deep breath out and let that attribute of identity go just let it go it's something I believed about myself but it isn't true in this moment so I'm going to

go ahead and let it go and as you do this practice over an extended period of time and you take these attributes of your identity and you start melting them away this is where someone would say you will unlock your true potential right you will be able to accomplish things beyond your wildest dreams and that was true for me so the big difference between failing out of college and training and teaching at Harvard Medical School was a change in my sense of identity because I used to think I was a smart kid and then I

realized I am what I am I don't know if it's smart I don't know if it's stupid I'm just going to focus on learning I'm going to focus on becoming the best that I can the best person on the planet on understanding the science of complimentary and alternative medicine understanding the science of meditation and yoga and herbal medicines and then suddenly that attitude is what allowed me to rise to the top and so this is where sometimes someone would say oh this will allow you to accomplish your full potential it's not going to do that

we're not here to have you accomplish a damn thing we're here not for your accomplishments but to let you put forth 100% effort and in order to do that you have to let go of who you are and then this vessel will have more energy and the right kind of emotions to rise to the task [Music] he