What Is Motivation?

Talk to your doctor if you are feeling symptoms of apathy and low mood that last longer than two weeks. Sometimes a persistent lack of motivation might be tied to a mental health condition such as depression.

Thinking that one size fits all. Just because an approach or method worked for someone else does not mean that it will work for you. If something isn't helping you reach your goals or is making you feel unmotivated, look for things that will work better for you.

Quick fixes or all-or-nothing thinking. It's easy to feel unmotivated if you can't fix something immediately or if you can't have it all at once. Remind yourself that reaching your goals takes time.

What exactly lies behind the motivations for why we act? Psychologists have proposed different theories of motivation, including drive theory, instinct theory, and humanistic theory (such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs). The reality is that there are many different forces that guide and direct our motivations.

Motivation doesn't just refer to the factors that activate behaviors; it also involves the factors that direct and maintain these goal-directed actions (though such motives are rarely directly observable). As a result, we often have to infer the reasons why people do the things that they do based on observable behaviors.1