Lack of Motivation or Exhaustion? Human Basic Needs To Be Met

If you are feeling a lack of motivation in life, maybe, just maybe some of your human basic needs aren’t being met.

1. Motivation = Motive + Action

We have several interpretations for this, here’s one:

Either you lack in motive, or you lack in intentional action.

If you lack in motive it’s possible that your goals don’t excite you that much, there’s a strong possibility that there’s no alignment between your goals and your personal values.

You might even be active, doing the action, but if those actions are not aligned either with your goals or your personal values: they bring that feeling of exhaustion.

You should consider identifying your personal values and make sure that when doing the action, that it is intentional towards your personal goals and that they are considering those values.

2. Living The Avatars: Minimize Mental Exaustion And Identify Your Values

Many people create avatars to show up on the internet, as a way to protect their privacy and identity.

If you’re “living the avatars” way too much: that might lead you to mental exhaustion, for "playing the characters too long, on and off.

What do you mean by” living the avatars”?

Well: means living a character, not real, based on commentaries, image projections of ego, clichés, short phrases, even shorter reasoning. At a certain point, you get confused. Things make no sense. You don’t know who you are anymore. That can lead you to depression, exhaustion.

And we all want to be happy and fulfilled, right?

There are at least 4 dimensions in life, that you should consider: health, wealth, self, and social. Fulfilling just one dimension (wealthy, for instance) won’t make feel happy on a pluri- dimensional level.

Identifying your main values is work worth doing. Because it makes easier decision-making (even on the way you choose to express yourself on the internet) in concrete life and less conflicting on an inner level.

Walk hand in hand with your values. Even if you are shaken, you’ll always feel grounded and with boundaries set.

If you don’t know how to set your 5 main values, take an hour or two to think about what’s important for you and hierarchize them.

This Richard Grandson video should help you with identifying your values.

Of course, you can live without that list.

But, you will be more exposed to mental imbalance. The times are changing, the outside world is too uncertain. Is for sure that you have to be able to wave within the uncertainty, but you have to have “tools”, skills, you have to be able to stay well-grounded inside: knowing yourself and your values is more than an advantage. Is a strength.

Not knowing yourself? You will be meat food in the chain.

Especially when facing challenging situations, that would cause some anxiety: when if you do not know yourself enough, you will be more prone to anxiety crises. Those anxiety crises will lead you to take random decisions (not based on your values), but based on the impulse of running away for the thing that fears you most or that you perceive as a threat. Might that fear be small or big, real or perceived as gigantic?

The ”runaway” from whatever uncomfortable emotion you feel, might take a form of a distraction: scrolling social media or buying something you don’t need.

Or the “runaway” might lead you to cover those uncomfortable emotions, developing many forms of addiction, whether might that be porn or abuse of toxic substances. In these cases, you should consider getting professional help to rehab. And even in this case, if you decide to take professional help knowing your values would be a supporting tool for your recovery to your better self.

If you don’t identify your values, if you don’t know yourself enough, you might get your goal: but it won’t feel like a win. You’ll feel like you have lost more than you gained.

Self-abandonment should not be an option nor a choice that’s why you ought to do self-work.

You are worth that self-work.

If you’re feeling exhausted and lack motivation, check out if your needs are being met.

2. Living the Avatars: Minimize Mental Exaustion And Identify You Values

3. Find Out If Your Human Basic Needs Being Met

According to Maslow, these are the hierarchical basic human needs:

Level 1: Physiological needs

According to Maslow, this first basic and first level must be fulfilled by humans before they can move on to the next level.

Physiological needs include: breathing, excreting, food and water, sex and reproduction, sleep, body balance homeostasis, and overall health

Level 2: Safety needs

Health security, the safety of the body (from aggression, violence, and theft), the safety of the job, of resources, of family, the safety of the property.

Level 3: Love and connection

Family, friends, and intimate relationships. The feeling of belonging

Membership in social groups has a contribution to this need of belonging. Social media has the ambition and intention to fill completely this basic need. It’s a fact: times are changing.

Level 4: Esteem needs

The primary basis of esteem is self-respect and self-confidence: the belief that you are worthy and deserve dignity. It also includes the esteem and respect from and to others

Level 5: Self-actualization needs

This level is about growth and contribution: education and skill development or refining talents, creativity, morality and caring for others, traveling to new places.

Now that you know the Maslow hierarchical human needs, don’t you find it thrilling that with the pandemic, even the more developed countries are feeling the threat at a second level (healthy security)?

Yes: be kind to yourself. The whole world is going through the same.

No: do not be indulgent with yourself. Being in an attitude as if you were saying "I won't fight it", to cross your arms, and accept that there’s nothing you can do about it, isn’t nor pro-active neither will bring the results you surely aim for.

Yes, there is something you can do.

You, like all of us, are facing the fear and the threat of uncertainty in one of our humans' basic needs: health.

Adding that threat to the many problems you all carry: personal challenges, some healing to do, choices to make or deal with choices that were made, future to design... Might feel challenging.

More of a reason to work on inner strength: so you can still have the ability to question, analyze, and think for yourself.

And still, feel motivated.

And the best way to do it is faith in the future. Have belief in yourself.

As Dr. Joe Dispenza would say in the following video, you should believe more in your future; you’ve got to be more in love with your future than you are with your past.

If you are feeling in lack of motivation or exhausted there's a strong possibility that you are “making love” with your problems of the past, when you should be romancing the vision of your future.