This may be caused by experiencing burnout, working in a toxic environment, or feeling you have no control over your role. Working in short bursts is one of the best strategies to get you over times of low motivation.
When you feel motivated at work, you're ready to take on the day and make progress toward your goals. There are also some days when you have no motivation for work and both experiences are normal. Understanding what causes you to lose motivation for work can help you better prevent it.
Burnout is one of the most common reasons for having no motivation to work. The combination of mental, physical, and emotional stress can create a sense of persistent exhaustion and detachment.
Common causes for demotivation at work:
You are mentally exhausted or burned out. You're impaired by external stressors (like a pandemic, or personal challenges) You're not feeling inspired by your work, or enjoying your position. Your job is not meeting your needs (pay, resources, inclusivity)
For some people, apparent laziness may actually be a sign of clinical depression, avolition, or other health conditions. Procrastination and lack of motivation may also be related to stress or burnout — something so many of us are feeling in the midst of the pandemic.
Differences in brain chemistry
A study using mice suggests certain neurotransmitters — notably dopamine — may play a role in motivation for people living with ADHD. Lower levels of this neurotransmitter can affect reward centers in the brain, causing a lack of enthusiasm for starting or completing tasks.
Low and no motivation can be a sign of a serious problem like depression or anxiety. For example, for people who are chronically anxious, everything they need to do can feel scary and hard because they're constantly thinking of what could go wrong or ways they're inadequate.
Sometimes, we dread going to work because we have fallen into a sense of complacency and dissatisfaction, and we don't know how to dig ourselves out. Some of the reasons we dread going to work include: You're no longer interested in your daily duties. You find your office space suffocating or tiresome.
Being unemployed is miserable
We find this is true around the world. The employed evaluate the quality of their lives much more highly on average as compared to the unemployed. Individuals who are unemployed also report around 30 percent more negative emotional experiences in their day-to-day lives.
Mental laziness and lack of motivation can also be caused by one simple problem: not having enough exercise and nutrients in the body. One should consider eating healthy food high in protein, such as green, leafy vegetables, and fatty fish. Research also suggests eating berries and walnuts and drinking coffee or tea.
Anxiety Can Appear to be Laziness
When someone struggles with anxiety, they typically want to do well. For those of you who know someone who has difficulty with anxiety, you also know they often avoid what makes them anxious. The feelings of anxiety are so overwhelming, it shuts them down.
While a lack of motivation is not an inherent sign of a mental disorder, it is often symptomatic of clinical depression. Avolition can be the primary symptom of certain mood disorders, such as bipolar depression, or a secondary feature of an anxiety disorder, such as post-trauma stress syndrome (PTSD).
Yes, everyone procrastinates sometimes. But ADHD procrastination is different. Its different, first, because its more extreme. For people with ADHD, procrastination is often something that occurs over and over, causing real problems at work, at school, at home, or in personal relationships.
Differences in emotions in people with ADHD can lead to 'shutdowns', where someone is so overwhelmed with emotions that they space out, may find it hard to speak or move and may struggle to articulate what they are feeling until they can process their emotions.
Many of the less-known ADHD symptoms — working memory and executive function deficits, difficulty sleeping, and irritability, for example — also show up with mood disorders, autism, anxiety, and other brain-based conditions.
Feeling unappreciated at work is a huge demotivator, especially when you feel you're doing great work. Often, the same employees who feel underappreciated find that their mistakes are highlighted more than the great work they do accomplish. This is likely a big warning sign that your workplace is toxic.
For some people, productivity stalls because of a lack of direction. A person may know what their end goal is but they have no idea how to get there. This often happens when you think a task is difficult or when you've never done it before. It can also happen when you're overwhelmed with a lot of other activities.
Other factors contributing to a loss of ambition might include underlying fears, pursuing goals because other people want you to, or experiencing mental health conditions like depression. Believing that you are less ambitious than you have been previously can feel unsettling.
A lot of mental health conditions can affect your productivity — and they do it in different ways. ADHD can make it harder to stay focused. Depression can seriously drain your motivation. Anxiety can fuel paralyzing perfectionism.
“An individual with high-functioning anxiety may appear calm on the outside but feel very anxious internally,” explains Dr. Borland. “These individuals may try to mask their symptoms by taking control of the situation.”
Anxiety can be defined as 'a state consisting of psychological and physical symptoms brought about by a sense of apprehension at a perceived threat'. Fear is similar to anxiety, except that with fear the threat is, or is perceived to be, more concrete, present, or imminent.
It is the act of intentionally avoiding any life changes, feeling bad for yourself, and hoping that anxiety will go away. Feeling like you need to sit and do nothing and that you will somehow feel better is a function of anxiety. Anxiety completely drains the body. It makes it hard to want to do much of anything.