Motivatie

February is often the month when motivation quietly begins to slip after all the New Year’s resolutions. When that happens, many people jump to the same conclusion. “I am not disciplined enough.”, “I lack willpower.”, “Something is wrong with me.” Yet this interpretation misunderstands how motivation actually works. What looks like a personal failure is very often a consequence of how our brains evaluate effort, reward, meaning, and capacity.

Research on New Year’s resolutions consistently shows, that most people experience fluctuations in motivation very early on. This is not an exception, but the norm. Large-scale studies demonstrate that goals framed around positive actions tend to be more successful than those focused on avoidance. Saying: “I will walk for thirty minutes a day” works better than saying: “I will stop scrolling on my phone”. Support also matters. People who have someone alongside them, whether a friend, mentor, or professional, tend to persist longer. Structured approaches like SMART goals can help, but they are not universally effective. For people who are anxious or more creatively oriented, rigid goal structures can sometimes do more harm than good.

A common assumption in everyday thinking is that performance is simply a function of ability multiplied by motivation. At first glance, this sounds reasonable. In practice, it can easily turn into a self-blaming model. When we fail, we conclude that we were either not capable enough of not motivated enough. What this equation ignores is context. Running in spring sunshine is not the same as running in a dark winter morning. Emotional state matters too. Anxiety shifts which brain systems are active, altering how much energy something feels like it requires. Health, stress levels, and environmental conditions all shape performance. It is also worth asking whether the relationship might sometimes run in the opposite direction. Perhaps motivation is not only a cause of performance but also a consequence of it.

To understand this, we need to slow down and ask a more basic question. What is motivation, really?, Is it desire translated into action?, Is it willpower?, Is it something you either have or do not have? We rarely ask why we feel extremely motivated to eat when we are hungry, yet struggle to find motivation for tasks like washing the dishes. The difference is not moral. It is neurobiological.

Our most basic motivational systems are designed to ensure survival. Hunger, thirst, pain avoidance and safety require very little conscious effort in healthy individuals. These systems are primarily regulated by the hypothalamus and the limbic system through complex feedback loops involving the entire body. Acting against them takes far more energy than acting with them. When motivation becomes goal-directed rather than survival-based, the picture changes – dopamine takes over.

Dopamine is often oversimplified as the pleasure chemical, but this is misleading. It is more closely linked to anticipation, reward prediction, craving, En action readiness. It plays a role in movement, attention, learning, and motivation. Of its six main pathways, motivation is particularly associated with the mesocorticolimbic pathway. When something unexpected happens or when a cue predicts reward, dopamine is released from the ventral tegmental area. The nucleus accumbens translates this into readiness for action, while the prefrontal cortex uses dopamine signals to update future decisions.

Yet dopamine alone is not enough. Because it is closely tied to novelty, its effects are short-lived. Social media offers a clear example. Brief dopamine spikes are followed by a sense of emptiness of lack of satisfaction. The brain is constantly asking a more fundamental question: “Is this worth the energy?” Despite making up only a small percentage of body weight, the brain consumes a disproportionate amount of the body’s energy. Every neural process has a cost. Oxygen and glucose are never free.

So what makes something worth the energy in the first place? For short term, low effort activities, pleasure and enjoyment are often sufficient. For long term goals that require sustained effort with delayed or uncertain reward, the brain relies on meaning. Meaning, in neurocognitive terms, is stored knowledge shaped by emotional significance. We struggle to remember information that has no meaning to us. Identity, values, and personal narratives are organized in semantic networks, with the hippocampus playing a major role in consolidating these experiences.

Values emerge from these networks. They serve as relatively stable representations of what is worth effort. They reduce uncertainty when we make long term decisions and are deeply linked to identity, autobiographical memory, and emotional learning. Values explain why some efforts feel worth it even when they are hard. They also explain why we repeatedly choose certain paths despite their cost.

Self-determination theory offers a particularly useful framework for understanding value aligned motivation. Developed by Deci and Ryan, it builds on decades of research and identifies three universal psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these needs are met, people tend to be inherently proactive. Motivation is not something that must be forced from the outside but something that naturally arises within supportive contexts.

Within this framework, motivation exists along a continuum. At one end is intrinsic motivation, where we act because the activity itself is enjoyable or interesting. Extrinsic motivation takes several forms, ranging from external regulation driven by rewards or punishment, through introjected regulation driven by guilt or approval, to identified and integrated regulation where actions align with personal goals and core values. Importantly, extrinsic motivation can be internalized. External values can gradually become part of the self, especially when autonomy, competence, and relatedness are supported. When this happens, effort feels more chosen and less forced.

This is also why money alone is rarely enough. Classic experiments show that external rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation by shifting attention away from the activity itself. When behavior becomes dependent on rewards, curiosity and enjoyment decline. Positive feedback can enhance motivation when it affirms competence, but only if it is delivered without control or pressure. Stress further complicates the picture. Under stress, the amygdala becomes more reactive, attention narrows, and the prefrontal cortex becomes less effective. Chronic stress and elevated cortisol reduce dopamine sensitivity, making curiosity and exploration less likely. Survival takes precedence over growth.

Supporting motivation, therefore requires more than pushing harder. Physiologically, sleep improves dopamine sensitivity and prefrontal regulation. Movement increases dopamine and brain-derived neurotrophic factor, supporting neural health. Stress management activates parasympathetic pathways that allow curiosity to return. Nutrition provides the building blocks for neurotransmitter synthesis and energy regulation. Psychologically, motivation thrives when there is room for personal ways of doing things, when joy in the process is prioritized over outcomes, when meaningful connections are present, and when challenges are neither overwhelming nor trivial.

Ultimately, supporting motivation means supporting needs, meaning, and nervous system capacity. Values sit at the intersection of all three. And while psychology offers many tools, no one has yet escaped physiology. When motivation is lacking, the most useful question is not what is wrong with me, but rather whether something is missing. Is it meaning, unmet needs, or simply capacity?