Dealing With Dismotivation

I dislike the word dismotivation.

A lot.

And yet I’ve found it flitting through my head throughout all of quarantine.

I finally decided to get off my butt and do something about it.

I am pretty sure the word dismotivation doesn’t exist.

A lot of the time, in English, words can get mixed up or shortened.

Here’s an example:

Legitimate means accurate, true, and verifiable.

It has now been shortened to “legit”. It’s not technically a word, but legit is now common slang.

So, in lieu of COVID, people started to coin the term “dismotivation” or “dismotivated” in order to shorten down the grammatically correct version of “I am not motivated to do anything”.

The root dis- means no, not, and has a negative connotation, so people slapped it on in front of motivation to describe how they were currently feeling during the craziness of 2020.

However, for the grammarians out there, I found the proper way to say that you aren’t motivated.

Unmotivated.

The root un- is similar to dis-, but dis- sounds better.

That’s what I feel, anyway.

For the sake of continuity and the post title, I’ll keep using the word “dismotivation”.

In self-isolation, we’ve all felt weird mood swings at inconvenient times. One day, you could be completely fine with everything, content to binge-watch away, and others you’d like to just sit in your room and cry.

There isn’t a set cure, really, to get yourself motivated, but setting up a mindset can help, and so can coming up with steps to take when you feel demotivated.

This is what I do- steal my steps if you’d like!

Step 1:

Just wait it out.

A lot of the time, it’s totally worth it to just sit and wallow.

I feel like being stuck inside and away from people is like dealing with a breakup.

(If you haven’t been in a relationship that ended semi-sadly, then this probably will make no sense. Just get the memo and skip it ha).

You used to be “dating” life, going out, having fun, and whatnot, but your significant other (normal life) got a serious illness that was contagious and you couldn’t be together.

Eventually, you’ll have to come to terms with it, and start to move on, but not before a lot of crying and ice cream containers have been demolished.

Let yourself be upset, stressed, angry and sad- it’s helpful and definitely cathartic.

CHOOSE to do something productive.

So let’s say you’ve had a crappy weekend. Maybe you had a small argument with a sibling or a parent, stormed off, and plugged into devices for a binge to vent. You eventually unplug and just sit there, angry, or mindlessly skimming through texts, really just thinking about the fight, and your crap weekend, and everything else you can’t do.

You’ve got two options here- sit and mope more, and continue the cycle of miserableness.

OR…

You can say to yourself “alright, that’s it, I’m doing stuff today.”

There are several benefits to doing this, but the best part of this is that this will one, help your self-esteem, and two, get you doing stuff which you probably had to do anyhow.

The self-esteem part comes in when you stop blaming yourself for feeling terrible, which, if we’re being honest here, many of us do, and you can say, “hey, I accomplished something!”

It’s all just one step after another.

Hang in there, everyone.

Finn out.