Experiment Findings, Research, etc.

                In my experiment, I am trying to figure out the best way to get motivated to do things that I have to do, but don’t necessarily want to do. The first thing that I found is that attempting to break this habit of lacking motivation is incredibly difficult and I still have not managed to find a way to beat the habit in a way that I would like to. While I have made minor progress by doing a bit of research on motivational strategies they have not really helped much. These strategies include, yelling at yourself like a drill sergeant, imagining the task completed, and imagining a big task as individual pieces. These strategies haven’t been working so I decided to look a little more into what causes a person to be motivated. There is a whole theory in psychology called behaviorism that goes along the lines that all living organisms get motivated to do things through stimulus, basically it goes like this you start to feel hungry so you’re then motivated to stop whatever you’re doing at the moment to get up and go get some food. According to the behaviorist theory this will work all the way up to incredibly complex decisions that humans have to make every day. I decided to try an experiment based upon this theory I would give myself rewards to help motivate me, the motivation mostly being cookies. My recent experiment has me questioning this theory though because I do often know what is best for me, running for example is very good for me. If I know this is good for me then why don’t I just do this immediately because I know that this is what’s best for me why do I need that extra incentive? It turns out that this form of extra motivation does not really help all that much for me. The behaviorist theory can be spotty at times and there are a few other theories that say that as a species we are above simple stimuli to motivate every single one of our actions there must be a better way to get motivated.