What keeps you motivated?

[blueangel]

Hey all 🙂

What keeps you motivated to keep going when your anxiety/depression gets the best of you?

For me, it's my dream of becoming a doctor and my dad.

[white knight]

Hi Blueangel, welcome

It's great you have that outlook and its a good question for other readers here. I hope they chip in with their own ideas on motivation.

For me, I have a foundation of positivity. It isnt easy to grasp it and maintain it constantly so on the odd occasion I relax it and let myself become a little negative then bounce back again. Sounds silly but being ultra positive all the time is a little odd and unnatural IMO. My positivity is then realised more when I bounce back from a sorry state.

I think my greatest advance in motivation was my total acceptance of me having the illnesses I have. They are now a part of me and I'd be lost without the positives they bring to my life.  What? What is White Knight saying? Positives from mental illness?

Yes, my creativity, sensitivity, open kindness to others in need and my need for some solidarity and alone time. All positives. Do these positives make up for the illnesses...???? of course they dont but I've trained my own mind to think they do. How? Because I've learned over the years to turn many negatives into positives.

I might ahve a day when everything goes wrong. By late afternoon I'm a mess and me depression has been with me for days.This happened many years ago on one particular day. I walked outside and sat on the steps and focussed on a daisy.

Then I did this, thought this then wrote this-

PETAL POWER

On your saddest day

You take a daisy flower

You pick petal for each of your woes

And count them by the hour  

And when it becomes a stem

Your problems as big as a city tower

Your problems total all together

Still not as many as that flower....

A simple poem kicked in my positivity to keep rolling. And being positive is contagious. Your partner or friend will spring into action to. When my wife and I have a really bad time, at the point we think there is no return, no hope, I ask her to look me in the eye and I tell her "we will be ok, we will have a better day tomorrow....now how about a walk on the beach with fish and chips for dinner?" By the time we are at the beach we are fine and closer than ever.

Tony WK

[geoff]

dear Blueangel, well that can be very different day by day, because no matter how you feel each day, there are pluses and minuses that can affect how you feel.

We might have a goal that we want to achieve, like becoming a doctor and/or a dad which is a great ambition, or similarly we might want to just finish doing an essay that is due to finalise the prospect of becoming a qualified orthopedic surgeon, but we can't achieve this, even though we are at the edge of becoming one, so we are a stones throw away but there is nothing that can stimulate us to finish.

This is where we need the stimulus to be able to cross that road, to be able to spend that final 10 minutes to keep going so that the essay can be finished.

We don't know how powerful those 10 minutes are in our life, they could be the key to our wishes to something that we always wanted, and this is where those powerful desires have to overcome those little fears.

So what keeps us motivated has to be the enduing power to overcome those 10 minutes which we can be fearful of. Geoff.

[thisaquarian]

Hi blueangel,

Sometimes my motivation just packs itself up and takes a holiday... so I try to clutch onto it when I am feeling motivated.  Sometimes forcing myself to look at notes/diary entries/this forum when I am NOT feeling motivated helps.  There are LOADS of videos and podcasts which inspire me so I have a list of them so that when I am NOT feeling motivated, I can turn to that.  Vision boards and post it notes help too.