How to motivate yourself to not give up when stressed

I’ve been going through an incredibly stressful time in life. Finishing my Ph.D. Trying to find a new job and a place to live at the same time. It’s been incredibly overwhelming and some days it gets the best of me. When this happens, all I want to do is curl into a ball, give up, and simply hide away from all the responsibilities. Fortunately, I’ve been able to find a few things to snap me back into action. In today’s post, we’ll be looking at ways to motivate yourself to not give up when things get too stressful. 

Start your day off on the right note 

This is by far the most important advice. Get a morning routine, and stick to it. Here are a few things that you can do to kickstart the day. 

• Positive affirmations 
• Exercise 
• Podcasting
• Journaling  
• Meditation 

The common theme among all of these activities is that they are all forms of self-care shown to have tremendous benefits to our mental health. What you don’t want to do is hop on your phone and browse social media as soon as you wake up. By doing this, you’re subconsciously entering ‘comparison mode’. I’m not as fit as them. I’m not as successful as them. Why am I not like them? Allowing yourself to stay in this mode removes all the focus from you and places it on what other people are doing which can be very demoralizing. 

Work smarter not harder

When you’ve started your tasks for the day. It’s easy to follow the previously stated advice and give 1000%. Working for hours on end without a break in sight. However, studies are now showing that working like this isn’t effective, in fact, it can lead to a lack of motivation and subsequent burnout. You need to take breaks, and that’s where the Pomodoro technique comes into play. 

There are six steps to this original technique: 

I recently started using Kaizen Flow to help me with this method. It’s a free online timer that plays lo-fi music for the duration of 25 minutes and then plays an alert once it’s done. Applying the Pomodoro technique, originally felt strange as it felt like I was stopping work as soon as I got into my stride. However, I found that I was working for longer total hours in the day without feeling extremely mentally fatigued. Trust me, it’ll be a gamechanger to motivate yourself not to give up.

Acknowledge when you’ve hit a wall 

This advice ties into the previous one quite nicely. Every now and then, we all reach a point where it feels like we’re banging our heads against a wall. No matter how hard we try, there is no more motivation in the well to get us going. 

Most people think that at this point what you have to do is just keep trying until you magically find some motivation. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In actuality, when you do this, all you do is bury yourself deeper in the hole of burnout. 

It’s ok to take more than a break and take significant time off when you need it. It’s like they say, you can’t work if you’re dead. There have been so many times where I’ve forced myself to not look at my Ph.D. project for a week despite every fiber of my being telling me to do so. 

I was so afraid that I would somehow forget every single thing I had learnt and that I would have to start from zero. However, I found that after taking that time off, I was able to (1) be more motivated than ever, and (2) come back with more creative ideas. 

Focus on progress instead of perfection 

The final piece of advice for how to motivate yourself not to give up is to focus on the little steps that you’re taking. So many of us are living in the future, thinking only about the perfect end goal, and that’s what is causing us a ton of stress.

When you focus on perfection, you’re comparing yourself against an unrealistic standard. That physique that you’re chasing probably took the person a decade or more to sculpt. The nice cars that you’re so envious of might have taken thousands of hours of studying to earn. We can never know the true story behind these things, and so when you put them on a pedestal, you’re destined to fail. 

If you want to motivate yourself to reach a goal, focus on the little actions that you’re taking every single day to reach that goal. Do you want to earn a promotion at work? Start simple. Get to bed on time every night and get to work early in the morning. Those are simple achievable goals that will keep you grounded every day, and the best thing is that they are completely within your control.

Once you start focusing on things like this, you’ll begin to build a reservoir of internal motivation and discipline that will last you even when things get stressful. 

Conclusion

Wanting to give up is extremely tempting, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. However, by following these steps, you’ll put yourself in the best position to motivate yourself to not give up.

What do you think? Have you tried any of the steps above? What do you do to keep yourself motivated? Let me know in the comments below. I’m curious!