Losing Momentum: Why Everything Feels Harder From a Standstill
Thought For The Week
I spend a lot of time thinking about motivation: what drives us, why some things feel easier for some people than others, where we tend to stumble, and what helps us get back on track. And I’m not convinced that motivation is a single quality that we either have or don’t.
Different forces seem to act at different times.
When we’re doing something regularly, momentum can carry us. We’re already in motion, each time feels connected to the last, and continuing feels relatively easy.
At the other end of the scale, a break might last long enough that we begin missing it. We remember how the activity makes us feel, what it adds to our life, or why we started doing it in the first place, and that becomes enough to pull us back.
But then there’s the awkward in-between space.
A few days pass. We’ve lost the momentum that was carrying us, but we don’t yet miss the thing enough to feel strongly drawn towards it. Instead, some resistance creeps in.
Returning to it means moving through that resistance.
We may be sitting somewhere warm and comfortable, absorbed in our work, a hobby, or the television. That already has its own momentum. Beginning something else means interrupting it, shifting our attention, and moving away.
That can seem pretty unappealing.
The problem is, we’re usually comparing a current moment of ease with the activity still to come in its entirety. We imagine all of the demands at once, when in reality we encounter those demands sequentially.
Acknowledging this doesn’t mean picking back up should always feel easy. It simply helps to explain the resistance we feel when we’ve lost a bit of momentum.
Exercise Focus
When we’re no longer being carried along by the positive feelings or momentum of our last workout, but we haven’t been away for long enough to begin missing the benefits, we can find ourselves caught somewhere in between.
We feel unmotivated.
Which somehow makes us feel even less motivated.
Reasons to postpone the next training session start showing up. Perhaps it would be better to exercise tomorrow, when we have more time, more energy or are more in the mood.
Sometimes, tomorrow genuinely is the better choice. Our body may need another day to recover, or we may have a deadline that really does require our full attention.
But resistance can become more persuasive when we start thinking about everything the workout involves at once.
We need to get changed, decide what to do, gather our equipment, set everything up and warm up. Then there’s the effort and discomfort of the workout itself, followed by putting everything away and finding time for a shower.
One way to help move through that resistance is to remove some of the hurdles in advance.
We can decide what we’re going to do at a time when we have more capacity to think about it, leave our clothes out ready, or keep our equipment easily accessible.
It can also help to have a familiar route into exercise: a warm-up we know, a first exercise we enjoy, or a piece of music that signals the transition into moving. Rather than having to create the session from scratch, we have somewhere familiar to begin.
From there, we can allow the experience to unfold sequentially.
We get changed before thinking about setting up. We set up before thinking about the workout. We warm up before deciding how much energy we have available for the session ahead.
Often, our motivation changes as our state changes. Our body warms up and our mind shifts towards what we’re doing. The workout stops being an abstract collection of demands and becomes the physical movement we’re actually performing.
Nutrition Focus
When clients tell me they’ve been struggling to make healthy choices, it’s often because they’re tired, stressed, hungry and just want a quick and easy option.
At the end of a busy day, preparing a nourishing meal can feel like another long list of demands: deciding what to eat, checking which ingredients are available, preparing them, cooking the meal and clearing up afterwards.
By comparison, a takeaway or fast-food option may require only a few taps on a screen.
It’s easy to see this as a choice between eating healthily and eating conveniently. But those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
There are plenty of nourishing meals that are quick to prepare and require very little thought. The difficulty is knowing what they are, and whether we’ll actually enjoy them, at precisely the moment when we have the least capacity to work that out.
Rather than relying on our tired, hungry selves to come up with an answer, we can use the times when we have a little more bandwidth to find and test a handful of simple options.
The most useful meals won’t necessarily be the most exciting or impressive. They’ll be the ones we enjoy, made from ingredients we can easily keep available, and simple enough to remain manageable when time and energy are limited.
As we prepare them a few times, the process becomes familiar. We no longer need to read every step, make as many decisions or wonder whether the result will be worth the effort. Eventually, they can become the meals we make almost automatically when we’re running low.
This isn’t about eliminating takeaways or always preparing the nutritionally perfect meal. It’s about broadening our idea of what convenient food can look like.
When our capacity is limited, we don’t need more pressure to make the right choice. We need a few nourishing choices that are genuinely easy to make.
Explore More
From the archive: Today’s newsletter explores what happens when we lose the momentum of regular action. In Consistency or Continuity? The Difference Between a Streak and Lasting Change, I zoom out to consider how we judge consistency over time, and why lasting change doesn’t depend on maintaining an unbroken streak, but on our ability to return after life inevitably interrupts us.
Songs to get you moving: Music can provide that small bridge between what we’re doing now and starting a workout. Here are three tracks that help get me into the gym:
When the Beat Drops Out — Marlon Roudette
Love Me Again — John Newman
10:35 — Tiësto
Recipe: My Garlic Prawn & Cherry Tomato Linguine is quick, satisfying and made largely from ingredients that are easy to keep available. Frozen prawns provide a convenient source of protein, while the linguine supplies plenty of carbohydrate, making it particularly useful when you’re hungry and short on time after training.
Takeaway
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