 There's value in knowing different ways to combat a lack of motivation, but they might not be as effective if they're not tailored to your specific situation. After all, how can you effectively deal with the issue if you don't really understand it or why it's there in the first place? In this video, I want to cover 7 common reasons why students aren't motivated to study or generally why people aren't as motivated to get their work done. See if any of these apply to you and have a think about how you can change them moving forward. Oftentimes when students are lacking motivation, they can be quite harsh on themselves and immediately jump to the idea that they're just being lazy or they're not trying hard enough or something like that. But sometimes your lack of motivation is just a sign that you're tired and you need to rest. It's better for you to understand this as it's happening, take the time that you need to rest and then come back to your work instead of just forcing yourself to push through. You'll end up working with a better attitude and most likely get more work done and to a higher quality if you give yourself the rest that you need. Sometimes it can be hard to differentiate between being physically tired and mentally tired and of just having a lack of motivation due to a bunch of other things. So try to think about, you know, how often you've been working, the other factors in your life that might be causing you to be tired. Have you been physically pushing yourself more than usual, maybe at the gym or in sports? Think about your life as we like saying medicine holistically and, you know, consider whether you just need some time to rest and recover. You might also be feeling low motivation because of stress. Having a lot of stress can become really overwhelming, which can just lead to you sometimes shutting down, you know, when it comes to being productive or getting things done in your life. It can become really hard to compartmentalize all the different stressors in your life and focus on your priorities in these times. Try and reach out to the people around you for additional support. And when it comes to studying and things like that, use all the tools that you have and you know about like scheduling or prioritizing, making to-do lists, et cetera, to try and sort of lighten the load that you have. Now in our life, distractions are plenty and they can easily keep you from getting stuff done. Going out with your friends compared to sitting at your desk and working is a tough comparison. The temporary discomfort of studying for future success is something that's really hard for us to work on in the present moment. It's much easier to pick the option that's going to offer immediate pleasure. If you find that you're constantly blowing off your work for other things in your life, then you might want to start thinking about making a list of priorities and being honest about how much time you can give to other parts of your life that are not your immediate priorities. For example, if you've got exams in a couple of weeks, like I do right now, then you might want to limit yourself to a couple of days off a week, which you can give to everything else in your life that you want, but it's important to create those boundaries and stick to them if you want to reach your chosen goals. Worrying about failure can easily backfire on you. You can feel so flustered that you spend all your time fixating on the fact that you might fail, so you avoid work in the first place. You convince yourself that you're going to fail and the panic of it all means that getting your mind to focus on work seems impossible. The key here, I think, is to almost counsel yourself, talk to yourself, or like be your own hype man or hype woman, you know, and see if you can change your thinking and your mindset into believing that if you put in the work now, then this actually gives you a better chance of success in the future. Not trying in the first place or not trying at all is pretty much the only way that you're guaranteed failure. Doing even a small amount of work or a small amount of effort towards the goal or towards the exam or stunning or whatever is going to result in some sort of improvement, no matter how small or how big. And spending all your time worrying about failure sabotages your own success. If you can relate to some of these feelings or thought patterns, then remember that you've gotten this far in your journey for a reason and that reason is unlikely to be that you are a failure. It's much more likely because you deserve to be here, you're capable of being here and you can do this and you can get through this. If you can overcome the negative thoughts and feelings around, I'm going to fail no matter how much work I do. It's not going to be worth it or enough, etc. And see the time that you have to work as an opportunity to succeed instead of a certain path to failure. And you're going to do much better than you would have otherwise. Trust me, I've been using these Jedi mind tricks on myself, talking to myself, convincing myself, telling myself all these things just so I can keep a good mental state and, you know, tell myself that the work that I'm putting in now is going to be worth it. And any amount of work that I do is going to be an improvement, no matter from where I am at the moment, you know, all these ways of tricking myself, convincing myself to start studying, to keep studying and to keep myself in a good mental space. So we've all been in a place where we're sitting in front of our computer or workbook and we don't know what to do next. Coming up with any sort of game plan seems impossible because you just don't know if anything you come up with is actually going to work. This is one of those situations where just starting is all you need to do. It doesn't matter what you start by doing, just start with something. After that, your resources will become your best friends. You can also speak to your tutors or students in the years above you. You can look online to try and get some advice or strategies on how to get going and how to get started. But if you already know what the plan or strategy is and it's just that initial starting of the work that's the problem, then that can be tough. And often what I really like to do in those situations is just to start with the easiest little piece of work that I have in front of me. For example, if you're watching a lecture, that is like an hour long with 50, 60 PowerPoint lines and you just can't bring yourself to get through them and watch them, I feel you don't worry. I've been there many times. Try and find creative ways to get around this sort of block. So, for example, instead of just starting on lecture side number one and watching grinding through to get through to the end, you might want to pick out certain topics or titles that you think are high yield or the most important. And then you can go on YouTube or other resources and search up videos or other maybe more interesting ways of learning that same information. Resources like sketchy medical, the cartoon drawings that help you memorize things or random YouTube videos or things like osmosis, flashcards, past paper questions. You know, there's so many different ways to study the exact same thing. And if you're finding particular difficulty sitting through a boring, boring lecture, which I have many, many times, try and get creative and find other ways to study the exact same knowledge. Honestly, just find any way that you can get started and get into that studying zone and mood, get flexible with your study style and get creative and just work your way around that initial block. You're going to feel less motivated the more you study if you're already studying for long periods of time. Just makes sense. At the end of my USMLE studying period and other big exam periods in medical school and before, I was just getting less and less motivated with each day that I continued going on. Say, for example, that you've been working for four hours today, but you start to feel unmotivated. Instead of realizing that you've probably hit your limit for the day and need to rest, you decide to push yourself for another four hours of work. You grind out these four hours of not so great studying and end your day feeling like trash. When you wake up the next morning, you're so much less likely to do another full quality day of studying because you've overworked yourself the night before working too much or too hard is really tough to gauge, especially when there's all kinds of peers around you who are probably working very, very long hours or very, very much. And all of us, I think, deep down are kind of programmed to feel like we need to work more and study more and that we're not working hard enough or as hard as other people, etc. This isn't the case for everyone, but particularly amongst people in competitive environments like medical school, law school, engineering, whatever, it tends to be present quite a bit. If this is you, then try to come up with boundaries that you can use to work with. So if, you know, for example, that after six hours of studying in a day, you get completely fried, your brain turns to mush, then after those six hours, just plan to give yourself some downtime, some other activities that you can enjoy and use to sort of de-stress, relax and reset before you get working again the next day. The perceived difficulty of the task can be one of the biggest barriers to motivation. And I've experienced this so, so, so many times. I have an assignment to do and it just seems like this impossibly tall mountain that I need to climb and I'll never be able to. And the key that has helped me overcome these feelings is to understand the difference between perceived difficulty and actual difficulty. It could be that the work is objectively just really, really difficult. And in this case, you need to employ, you know, all of the techniques you know about studying and motivation to help you get through it. I'm talking about things like chopping up the work into by-size manageable pieces, reaching out to more experienced people like tutors or older years using online resources and so on. If this isn't the case and it just seems that the task is really difficult, then you need to take a different approach. You need to figure out why this seems so difficult to you. It might be that you're really struggling with the topic, let's say algebra or organic chemistry or physics or whatever. It might be because you haven't done well on previous tests. And so now you're worried that that's going to happen again. It might be that you're worried about tackling the subject because of your lack of prerequisite knowledge, or you just find it really boring or not as engaging or whatever. All these things can build up in your head and mean that you perceive the task to be so difficult that you don't end up doing anything at all, or you just feel terrible about it to begin with. If you can figure out why you think the task is so difficult, then you can come up with a game plan to tackle it. And on top of that, this is another scenario where I found that just getting started is so, so helpful. 100% of the time when I've had this feeling that there's this huge mountain for me to climb but I'm never going to be able to climb it or whatever. As soon as I start and I put in like five minutes, 10 minutes of work, maybe the first hour, I always realized this isn't as bad as I had made it out to be in my head. I slowly start to work on it. I just get on with it and before I know it, progress has been made. So genuinely just getting started, giving the thing a go is one of the best things you can do. Force yourself to start. For some students, having a false sense of security can prevent you from studying altogether. If you think that you've got plenty of time to work or that the work isn't that difficult or that it doesn't require a lot of time when it actually does, then you're actually underestimating the amount of work that's involved and you might not study at all or get started way too late. You can easily talk yourself into not studying and you're OK with it because you've convinced yourself that you don't need to. This can sometimes be a cycle of being unmotivated and then convincing yourself that you don't need to work, which confirms your need to not work in the first place. It's difficult to recognize, but often it's worth speaking to people around you to get some sort of sense or idea of what other people are doing. It acts as a litmus test as to whether you're doing enough or not. If you're the only one who's starting studying a week before the exam when everyone else has given themselves four weeks, then you might want to reconsider your mindset around how much time you've given yourself to work. Literally, last week I messaged Kenji and Georgina and I asked them what their game plan was for our upcoming exam and I did this so that I could compare my own game plan to their game plan and see if I'm giving myself too little time to study or if others are doing something similar and probably going to be OK. It's easy to fall into this trap and it's also easy to selectively listen to the few people that will tell you what you want to hear, you know, confirmation bias and all of that. You need to try and take a step back and think about things a little bit more critically than just through the filter of being unmotivated. I hope this video has helped you to think about some of the reasons why you might be feeling unmotivated. I feel that it's really important on this channel that we discuss some of the reasons why we're not feeling motivated as opposed to just always talking about solutions and ways you can do things. I think both are really important in how we think about our work or studying and so we should discuss both. If you've got any additional reasons why you think you might be unmotivated or are looking for advice or help from anyone else in a studying or university community, please do leave a comment down below and I'm sure myself or someone else can hopefully get back to you and we can all share our ideas around motivation and studying. And that's it from me. Until next time, I'll catch you in the next one. Peace. Cool, that's parking section number two. Let's get off this balcony without dropping my 5,000 pound camera. Easy does it.