I’ve been thinking about the nature of motivation for months. Today I figured out a big piece of it, at least for me.

Motivation is energy.

By “motivation” I mean general motivation. Feeling like doing anything at all, rather than feeling like doing something in particular. Specific motivation is beyond the scope of this post. (: By “energy” I mean physical/mental energy. Whether my brain is feeling active or sluggish, how tired I am, that sort of thing.

This may seem obvious to you, but to me it’s a huge epiphany! It means that I can solve my motivation problems by changing physical things instead of mental things! It’s not just some mental block that I have to muster up willpower to overcome, or do a bunch of digging and self-work. It’s something that I can improve by making lifestyle changes that affect me physically. That’s still self-work, but of a different kind, and it explains why the mental self-work I’ve been doing has been utterly failing at solving this problem.

And the problem really is general motivation rather than specific motivation. If I’m feeling generally motivated but not specifically motivated, I can work on something else. It can still be a problem, but it doesn’t have all the bad side effects that a lack of general motivation does, like being in a bad mood, feeling unproductive, thrashing, etc.

So, I hereby begin a new phase of paying attention to my body and optimizing my health and physical well-being. Here are some things I’m considering trying:

• Changing what I eat
• Changing when I eat
• Getting more exercise, trying some different schedules
• Doing some magick and/or self-work to get in better touch with my body
• Having my two resident healers help me out
• Seeing some external healers, like maybe Claudia, Kyeli’s acupuncturist
• Optimizing my sleep schedule
• Trying various vitamins, herbs, and supplements
• Researching caffeine and other stimulants. Caffeine is like energy in pill form, but I want to know more about the negative effects before I up my caffeine intake.
• Keeping logs of some of the above things and my motivation levels throughout the day, so I can attempt to notice patterns

I wish there was something like a… holistic diagnostician. Someone who would listen to what problem I’m trying to solve, ask a bunch of questions, do a bunch of tests of wildly varying sorts, and refer me to someone who could help me. Everyone I’ve ever heard of has a less broad domain, like it’s a foregone conclusion that we will fix my problem by sticking needles into me, or by drugging me, or by doing Reiki, or by talking about my childhood, or by cracking my spine. It would be cool if there were someone broad enough to encompass all of those.