3 tips for optimizing your happiness - Part 4

In this series, I discuss how you can create a plan that will help you be more successful in your attempts to increase personal happiness. This article (Part 4) discusses how to capitalize on motivational tricks. (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are here in case you missed them.)

Why it is important to use motivational tricks

You could do everything right and still fail to stick to your plan is you don’t take your personal motivation into account. This is why it is so important to put systems in place that keep you on track. As our lives continue to get busier and busier, we simply do not have the mental energy to remember everything we need to do. We are not motivated, or able, to work on our happiness all the time. But, by using motivational tricks, you can make it just a bit easier to start seeing the rewards of your efforts to increase happiness.

Steps for using motivational tricks:

1. Capitalize on motivational bursts

It’s human nature to get excited when we decide to pursue a new goal. We have a burst of motivation, and we suddenly think we will go to gym everyday, eat only health food, or spend hours learning a new skill. But, by the end of the week, we’ve exhausted our motivation and abandoned our goal. People often blame these types of failures on a “lack of motivation”. But I don’t think we give motivation enough credit.

Motivation - or the desire to exert effort towards some goal - is a limited resource. It takes energy to be motivated all the time, and, let’s face it, our busy lives deplete us of energy pretty quickly. So, it is completely natural for motivation to ebb and flow. Expecting motivation to be high all the time is unrealistic. When we have these unrealistic expectations - and give ourselves a hard time for not meeting them - we can end up worse than when we started.

For example, if your goal is to lose weight, you may suddenly get motivated and decide to run on the treadmill 4 hours per day and eat only carrots. This is a surefire way to tire yourself out and quit by the end of the week. What’s worse is that you can’t make much progress in one week, and you end up blaming yourself for your "lack of motivation". Don’t fall into this trap! These motivational bursts will fail every time if we don't use them correctly. 

The trick is to use those bursts of motivation more wisely. When you have a motivational burst, this is the opportune time to really carefully strategize, plan, and schedule happiness practices - practices that you will not only be motivated to do today, but for a month, a year, or 10 years. Use that extra energy to develop realistic goals, schedules that you can stick to over the long term, and systems to remind and encourage you to continue to pursue your goals, even during times when motivation is low. This is how you use motivation to your benefit.

2. Let technology do some of the work for you

Just as our motivation is limited, our memory is limited. Maybe we fully intended to practice our happiness skills last week, but we just plum forgot. It happens. We forget things. In other areas of our lives, we use tricks to prevent forgetting. For example, do you use an oven timer when you are baking? Do you use a calendar to remind yourself of meetings? Do you put sticky notes around the house to remind you to pick up your kids from school? Now imagine if you didn’t do these things. How much mental energy would you expend trying to keep all of these tasks in your memory? I don't know about you, but for me, it would take a lot of energy.

I cannot say enough how helpful online tools are for helping us reach our happiness goals. Yes, we have to put in the work to build our happiness skills, but we can rely on technology to do the organizing and remembering for us. This way, we don’t waist our mental energy on activities that don’t directly increase happiness.

Don’t let “forgetting” be the reason that you are not as happy as you would like to be. If you need help learning how to use online tools for personal happiness, my online happiness course provides email reminders, quick links to happiness activities, and information on how to use the internet to grow your well-being.

This concludes this 4-part series on optimizing your happiness. Follow me on LinkedIn to read more cutting-edge, science-based articles on happiness and well-being. And feel free to check out the resources below:

For step-by-step instructions on building happiness a happiness plan, download my ebook: Happiness Skills eWorkbook: How to develop, grow, and maintain your personal well-being.

For customized happiness activities, pre-register for my online happiness course. Get started for free!

And for more on how to improve your well-being, please visit berkeleywellbeing.com.