Monday Motivation: How to Act When Motivation Isn’t There

Why can't we do the things we say we're going to do?

Setting goals is energizing. Making future plans is an easy way to generate dopamine, and it works every time. New goals are a source of hope and future plans are anticipatory—a natural form of inspiration. They give us something to look forward to. If goal setting were a day of the week, it would fall somewhere around Friday at lunchtime. Nothing but blue skies ahead.

Executing goals is a different story. Following through on previously made plans, once the novelty has worn off? That's Monday morning territory.

Unfortunately, if you want to accomplish anything worthwhile, you'll need to become comfortable operating in this space. It's often devoid of the good feelings we crave, but it's also where latent ideas are converted into tangible reality.

If you want to take your life to the next level, you must learn how to generate Monday motivation.

Your mood states are unreliable

We pay far too much attention to our feelings. They're fickle, transient, and unreliable—yet because they're ours, we blindly regard them with a great deal of meaning and importance.

We're not very good at tracking our feelings, and because of this we're often unaware of just how variable they can be. You can wake up on any given day feeling irritable and cranky for no clear reason, and later on that day feel significantly better—also without any discernible reason.

Remember this: mood states have no underlying substance. They're ephemeral. Phantoms of the mind. Their presence does not automatically indicate significance. The sooner you can begin to appreciate this, the sooner you'll regain a sense of agency and control with respect to your emotions and your behaviors.

Misreading the Signal

Think of it as a misinterpreted evolutionary signal. Physical pain is salient. It's often a reliable indicator of danger. The hot stove hurts because it can do serious damage. Although physical pain can be ignored in certain contexts (such as intense athletic conditioning), for the most part it's almost always a reliable indicator that something is amiss.

The problem is that we regard emotional pain in a similar manner. We treat them with a similar level of concern, even though emotional pain is rarely an indication of imminent danger.

Psychologists call this the affect-as-information principle (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). It describes how we often treat our feelings as though they are data points about reality. A good mood is interpreted as proof that things are going well. A bad mood feels like evidence that something is wrong. This bias runs deep—we rarely pause to ask whether the feeling itself is reliable or relevant.

The trouble is that mood states are highly sensitive to small, situational factors. Classic experiments show that people often their lives as more satisfying on sunny days than on rainy ones. Bad weather on any given day obviously doesn’t make life objectively worse. But the mood it generates feels true in the moment, and so we take it seriously.

When it comes to long-term goals, this misinterpretation is costly. A wave of frustration or boredom can feel like a signal that the project itself is flawed, when in reality it may just be the psychic equivalent of a rainy afternoon.

Why Feelings Seem So Convincing

Another reason negative moods seem so convincing is the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). In psychology, this refers to our tendency to overestimate the importance of things that come to mind easily. Emotions—especially unpleasant ones—are mentally loud. They crowd out other inputs and dominate awareness. Because they’re readily available in memory and easily capture our attention, we assume they must matter more than they actually do.

Think about the last time you received criticism. That single remark probably occupied far more of your mental bandwidth than the many neutral or positive interactions surrounding it. The mind inflates its value simply because it is vivid and easy to recall. The same process plays out internally. A moment of irritation, emptiness, or fatigue rises to the surface with such intensity that we mistake it for significance.

But the vividness of a feeling is not proof of its truth. It’s proof of how the mind works—prioritizing what is most intense, rather than what is most accurate. When you understand this, you can begin to loosen the grip of those moods. You can notice them without surrendering to their distorted sense of importance.

So how can we generate Monday motivation from scratch?

The secret is that Monday motivation generates itself. In order to generate Monday motivation, you must be comfortable with its absence. It simply won't be there when you want it to be. At least not right away.

Ignore this lack of good feelings. Better yet, take it as a sign that you're avoiding something—that you need to get started.

Getting started when you don't want to is actually a powerful catalyst for good feelings. It sets in motion a process that will almost certainly result in you feeling more inspired and more motivated than you were at the outset. It doesn't even matter what it is that you get started with. Pick the easiest step you can think of: open your laptop, return an email, start reading. Whatever it is, once you get going you will immediately start to generate momentum. You will start to regard yourself differently. The hope of good things to come—that wonderfully good feeling that seemingly abandoned you—will return with a vengeance. You'll no longer be ruminating on your lack of motivation at this point, because your work will take on a life of its own and you'll be fully engaged.

There is no mental space available to dwell on bad feelings when you're completely engaged.

You're too busy doing things.

Remember This When Motivation Fades

For the vast majority of you reading this particular article, the emotional pain that you experience on a consistent, day-to-day basis is not representative of an actual problem. More often than not, it is simply boredom, angst, and emptiness.

We're addicted to good feelings, and when they're not there all the time we're in pain. But this pain isn't meaningful in the same way physical pain is. It's rarely an indication that something is seriously wrong. It certainly is not an indication to STOP and seek help. In fact, it's usually an indicator that you should be doing MORE of whatever it is that you're avoiding.

This is ironic, as we often take it as a sign that we should stop trying and give up. That we should move on to something else, because whatever it is that we're doing is no longer sufficiently stimulating.

This is a mistake. It will result in you starting many projects, and finishing very few of them.