Why Your "Mustabation" is Keeping You Stuck.

Self- Motivation - Why Your "Mustabation" is Keeping You Stuck.

Welcome back to The Renewed Mind. I’m your host, Jeremy McCandless. We’ve spent the last few episodes rebuilding the foundation of your worth, but today we’re going to talk about the 'engine.'

If you’re struggling with depression, you probably feel like you’re walking through waist-deep molasses. Every task, from answering an email to simply getting out of bed, feels like trying to summit Mount Everest in flip-flops. And usually, when we can’t move, we do the only thing we think will work we start whipping ourselves with ‘Musts and 'Shoulds’. Today, we’re going to look at why your system for self-motivation might actually be the thing keeping you stuck.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Welcome back to the Renewed Mind Podcast. I'm your host, Jeremy McCandless. Now we've spent the last few episodes trying to rebuild the foundation of your worth, but today we're actually going to talk about the engine of that. If you're struggling with depression, you probably feel like you're walking through a waste deep molasses. Every task, from answering an email to simply getting out of bed, feels like trying to summit Mount Everest and flip-flops. And usually when we can't move, we do the only thing we think will work. We start whipping ourselves with musts and shoulds. Today we're going to look at why your system for self-motivation might actually be the thing that's keeping you stuck. It's about living under a tyranny of musts. Most of us have an internal dialogue that sounds a little bit like a drill sergeant. I should be up by now. I must get this done. I ought to be more productive. We think that if we feel enough guilt, we'll eventually move. But psychology tells a different story. The late Dr. Albert Ellis, a giant of cognitive CBT therapy, famously and rather cheekily called this masturbation, the act of constantly musting and shooting ourselves. He argued that all these absolute demands don't in fact motivate us, instead, they overwhelm us. They drain our energy and extinguish the very desire we're trying to ignite. From a spiritual perspective, this is the language of legalism, the law, but without the power of the Spirit. When we lead with shoulds or musts, we are leading with condemnation. As C.S. Lewis widely noted, the Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us. Growth doesn't come from the whip, it comes from being loved. Instead, Proverbs tells us to try the honeycomb approach. In my book, The Renewed Mind, I suggest a radical shift, to speak to yourself with the same kindness that God uses when he speaks about you. Think about that morning struggle. Instead of the harsh command, get up, you're being lazy, try this honeycomb approach. This is what the book of Proverbs talks about when it says things like gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body. So instead, try saying these things to yourself. It will make me feel better to get up, even though I'm finding it hard right now. I'm not under obligation, but I think I'll be glad if I do. But here's the kicker. If you choose to stay in bed, then don't berate yourself. Reframe it. I'm choosing to benefit from this rest, and I'll consider getting up later. When you remove the aspect of sin from the struggle and see it no longer as some sort of moral failure, you remove the thing that causes the paralysis in the first place. You move from being a slave of the shoulds to a steward of your energy. One of the most powerful things you can do for your mental health is to translate your shoulds and musts into desires. This restores what psychologists call intrinsic motivation, the drive that comes from within, rather from that drive of external guilt. Ask yourself, what do I actually want today? What would be more beneficial for me right now? This honors your personal dignity and it treats you like a partner in your own life, rather than a mule who is simply driven by guilt and shame. Modern psychologists like Dr. Kristen Neff, a pioneer of what is termed self-compassion research, has found that people who are kind to themselves are actually more likely to succeed than those who are self-critical. It's lowering the hurdle that you've put in front of yourself so that you can actually clear it. If you're feeling stuck, it's time to stop the internal argument and put it on paper. I want to try a simple advantage versus disadvantage technique, creating a list. If you've debated whether to get out of bed or to tackle a project, list the advantages of doing it. In your mind, or better still on a piece of paper. Things like I will feel a sense of accomplishment if I do this, I will not need to be rushing later because I have chosen to get up, but also list the disadvantages. It's cold this morning, or I may feel tired later. Often when we see these things set in black and white, our rational mind can overrule the more minor, depressive fog and replace it with something more positive. It's not about forcing yourself, you see, it's about convincing yourself with evidence. Consider the case of an accountant who was overwhelmed by his workload at the end of the tax year. Faced with mounting complaints from clients, he tried to avoid the problems he knew were mounting up by staying in bed for weeks, ignoring phone calls and deadlines. Many customers left him during that period, and his business began to fail. His mistake actually lay in his self talk. I know I should go to work, but I don't want to and I can't. This perspective trapped him in an action, and he began to see work solely as a sort of unpleasant obligation to others rather than something that would benefit him as well. His breakthrough came when he wrote a list of the advantages and disadvantages of staying in bed one morning. Avoiding my problems won't make them disappear was top of his list. Facing my problems will give me the satisfaction of overcoming them, even if initially just one at a time. The short term discomfort of facing my work is probably less depressing than just lying here all day doing nothing. I can't sleep forever, it's not possible to sleep for more than sixteen hours a day. I will probably actually feel less fatigued if I just get up and move around. After preparing this short list, he immediately realized it was in his best interest to get out of bed, and he gradually began to re-engage with his work, and his mood improved, despite those setbacks caused by his early inactivity. This echoes the biblical principle that whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your heart. When we recognize the benefits of actions and shift our mindset, we are better equipped to move forward. This process aligns with what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer emphasized when he said actions spring not from thoughts but from a readiness for responsibility. Rather than waiting for motivation to strike, it's best we cultivate it by choosing responsibility over avoidance. But by replacing harsh self-criticism with self encouragement and restructuring how we view our tasks, we create a more effective and sustainable system for motivation, and in doing so we align our action with God's wisdom, thereby experiencing both practical and indeed spiritual growth. This story of the overwhelmed accountant is an example of how depression doesn't just make us sad, it makes us stuck. It illustrates a phenomenon some psychologists call avoidance patterns, when the pile on our desk or the pile in our heart gets too high. Our brain then sort of circuit breaks, it trips, and we retreat to the only place that feels safe under the covers. But as our friend the accountant discovered, the bed eventually stops feeling like a sanctuary and starts to feel more like a prison. So here are four intensely practical ways where you can take his breakthrough and turn it into a roadmap for your own life. First, identify the trap of shooting or musting yourself. You see, the accountant's internal dialogue was in fact his first enemy. I know I should go to work, but I don't want to and I can't, he thought. And when you frame your life as just a series of unpleasant obligations to others, you feel you lose your agency. You become a victim of your schedule. Motivation dies when it feels like a death sentence has been handed down to you by a judge. To break free, you have to start looking at your task not as things that you must do for the world, but start looking at them as things you choose to do for your own well-being. Secondly, you can begin to build pillars of productive realism. When this man finally settled down to write his list of advantages and disadvantages, he wasn't just doing some sort of maths problem, he was performing a form of what is called cognitive restructuring. If you're feeling paralyzed today, take the insight from this example and apply them to your own. Doing nothing in reality is actually quite hard work. Lying in bed all day criticizing yourself is probably more exhausting than the actual task you're putting off. It's a sort of passive aggressive war against your own soul. Action is the cure for aughts and musts. You aren't obliged to be a superhero, but getting up might actually make you feel just ten percent better, and in depression ten percent is a major victory. Avoidance, you see, is a dishonest friend. It promises relief, but it delivers a bigger crisis later. Facing a problem head on, even if you lose the first round, is more satisfying than just hiding from it. Try to apply the one at a time rule. By that I mean by realizing you don't have to finish the entire task. For in our example, the entire tax year, for instance, you just have to begin by opening one envelope means that small victories can build that dopamine bridge back to sanity and feeling better about yourself. Movement actually beats fatigue. Paradoxically, the more you lie still, the more tired you feel. Moving your body sends signals to your brain that the emergency is over and it's safe to move around and to begin to produce energy and activity again. And here's the reality check. You can't actually sleep forever. Eventually your body will force you awake. So why not wake up on your terms rather than just your bodies? Thirdly, understand the theology of the next right step. Dietrich Bonhoeffer again, writing in his time from the darkness of a Nazi prison, understood something profoundly important about motivation, even in those difficult circumstances. He said we often wait to feel motivated before we act. But in the kingdom of God it is often the other way around. Action is seen to precede emotion. When we choose to take up responsibility, not as a burden, but as a response to God's grace, he provides the strength in doing whatever it is we need to do. This aligns with Ecclesiastes chapter 9, where it says, Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your heart. This isn't a command to be a workaholic, by the way, it's an invitation to just be present. Whether it's washing a single dish or making that one phone call, do it as an act of worship. And by doing so you are telling the spirit of heaviness that it no longer owns your hands and feet. And if you're struggling to move on, think about grace-brace productivity. Remember that God loves you and His love is not tied to your billable R's or your productivity score. You are loved still even while you're lying in bed, and you are loved when you're out there feeling like you're conquering the world. At the end of the day, self-condemnation is a lousy fuel. It burns dirty in the engine room of your mind and leaves a lot of suit on your soul. Grace, however, is the clean, pure, high octane fuel. It says I'm going to get up today because I'm a child of God who's been given a life to live, not because I'm afraid of being a failure. If you feel overwhelmed, don't look at the mountain in front of you. Instead look at your feet and take those advantages and disadvantages thoughts, the things you're avoiding, and you might find that the short-term discomfort of just starting and taking a step forward turns out to be far lighter than carrying the long-term depression of just staying still. So let's think about some appropriate motivation techniques to begin to help us move forward. Now by thinking this way, we're immediately called to confront a sort of psychological paradox that every struggling person I suspect knows in their heart. The more people try to help you, the more you want to dig in your heels sometimes. So in this segment, we're going to look at addressing the well-meaning encouragement of others and how it can often feel like a physical assault and how you can use a higher level of communication strategy called a disarming technique to actually protect your autonomy and keep your momentum and your agency in moving forward. It's all about reclaiming your power when you feel people are nagging you. We've all been there. Maybe we've spent a few hours staring at the ceiling and you've finally convinced yourself I'm gonna get up now and I'm going to take a shower. But just as your feet touch the floor, a spouse or a parent walks in and says, About time you need to get up and stop being so lazy. Suddenly that shower now feels like an insult. You want to just get back under the covers just to prove your point. If you've ever wondered why you're sabotaging yourself just despite someone else, then it's important to understand you're not being crazy, you're experiencing a fundamental law of human nature, a sort of physics of resistance that naturally rises up when people speak to us this way. There is a deep psychological and physical reality at play here. Now in actual physics, Sir Isaac Newton's third laws of physics states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But also when someone else exerts pressure on you, your brain perceives it as a threat to your free will and autonomy. Psychologists call this psychological reactions or a psychological resistance. It is the instinctive urge to protect your freedom of choice. When someone should you or musts you, your brain treats their advice like a sort of cage. To prove that cage can't hold you, you do the opposite of what they say, even if what they were saying was actually a good thing for you to do. This is the tragedy of those helpful friends, the ones who are trying to force you into healthy action. Inadvertently they trigger the very resistance that is keeping you stuck. But as Proverbs 15 reminds us, a gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word might stir up anger. So in context of motivation like this, a harsh must do just tends to stir up a stubborn no in us. Let's look at this through the case study of the habitual hibernator, Lottie. I want us to think about a young woman I discussed in my book, Lottie, I called her. Lottie had struggled with depression for years and had become what she herself called a habitual hibernator. She would sit in front of the TV for months, in fact, paralyzed by the sheer weight of her life. On the rare occasions she tried to venture out, her mother, who was somewhat domineering and desperate to try and help her, would hit her with caustic remarks Get up off your backside, Lottie, and do something. Now for Lottie, these words weren't encouraging. They were psychological bullets. She felt bullied and oppressed. Every time her mother pushed, Lottie withdrew further. She was caught in the exact conflict that the Apostle Paul describes in Romans 7 15. For I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Lottie wanted to go out because she felt forced and nagged, she ended up doing the things she hated, and she in fact stayed in. It's all about using disarming techniques to put yourself back in the driving seat. So how do we handle the people in life who are trying to run us? It almost feels like. Well, you can use one of these disarming techniques. This isn't about arguing or even being passive aggressive. It's about agreeing with the truth that's being stated while reclaiming the credit for your action for yourself and the way you respond to it. It's a way to settle a conflict quickly so you can get back to work on your own recovery. Imagine that same scenario. You've decided to get up and someone barges in to tell you to do exactly what you were planning to do. Instead of snapping back at them or lying down, you can disarm them by agreeing with the logic but by asserting your own agency. Let's think about this. The accusation you need to get up and get moving, like your friends all do. The old response might have been one of resistance Leave me alone, you don't understand how I feel. But the disarming response, the one that gets you your agency back would be to say something like you're right, I was just thinking that myself, and I've decided it's time to get up and get moving. Okay, another accusation you should really go for a walk today. The old response, the resistant one, I'll go when I'm ready, stop nagging me. But the disarming response, the one in which you claim your personal agency, I agree. A walk is a great idea. I actually decided to head out in twenty minutes. Do you see the shift? By saying I just thought of that myself, or I've decided to do that because I know what's right for me. By positioning it this way, you take the wind out of their sails. You aren't, you see, now obeying them, you are agreeing with the truth but on your own terms. Thereby you maintain your dignity, you keep your autonomy, and most importantly, you actually get to do the thing that you know will make you feel a little better. This is about responding by having a strategy instead of immediately being defensive. But this also aligns perfectly with the wisdom of Jesus when he spoke about settling matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. When someone is trying to draw drag you into the court of your mind with their expectations and demands, don't waste your precious emotional energy fighting a battle of wills with them. Simply settle it and agree. Agree with the part of the statement that is true and reclaim your power to act independently and then move on. The disarming technique turns a potential explosive situation into a very quick resolution. It allows you to stop fighting with your family or your friends and instead focus on fighting your depression. You are the one who's in the driver's seat of your life and you don't let someone else's nagging trick you into crashing the car just to prove that you're the one who's steering. So today, if someone seems to be trying to push you, then don't push back. Disarm them, reclaim your decision, reclaim any truth in what they say, but then reclaim your decision to act. You can find that when you stop using your energy to resist others, you suddenly have a lot more energy to help yourself. You see, by doing this, we're moving from defense now to offense. If the previous techniques that we've discussed so far in our series of podcasts were about stopping the attacks of that inner critic, today's episode is more about reclaiming and putting yourself back in the driver's seat. And to do that, we're also going to look at why another motivator, fear, is a terrible motivator, but how we can use what I call the theatre of the mind to build a new identity. We're going to go beyond fear and take three steps into that new identity. Now, I'm sure in our lives most of us at some points have tried to motivate ourselves using fear. We might tell ourselves if I don't quit smoking I'll get cancer, or if I don't lose weight, I'll have a heart attack. But here is the cruel irony of the human brain. Fear tactics usually backfire. When you scare yourself, your anxiety level spikes. And what you do then is you become anxious, and when you're anxious, you reach out for comfort. That very cigarette, that very snack, or the very bed, the very thing you're trying to avoid. To move forward, you actually need to find a bigger, better stick to hit yourself with. We need to actually understand and have a new creation vision of ourselves. So now we're going to To walk together through, I think, a helpful three-step process to move from paralysis to self-directed power. Step one is to build the architecture of benefits into your life. Most of the time, most on what we focus on is what we're giving up. I want to focus on what you gain by making good decisions. Start always by listing the benefits of the change, not just the medical ones, but the spiritual and the emotional ones too. Instead of quitting something, think about becoming something new, a new creation. If you quit smoking and get fit, then you will be able to run, dance without being out of breath. You will also honor God by taking care of the temple He gave me, 1 Corinthians 6 verse 19, and you will experience the fruit of self-control that is described in Galatians 5. When you make lists like these, you aren't just making a to-do list, you're actually writing a sort of manifesto for your future life and self. You're deciding that your body and your time are too valuable to be wasted or abused. Step 2 utilizes the theatre of the mind. Psychologists give it the fancy title of neurological renewal. But Paul talks about this very thing in Romans 12, verse 2, when he talks about the renewal of the mind. I want you every night before you go to sleep to enter that theatre of your mind. Now don't just think about your goals and those challenges that you want to try and address. Actually rehearse them. Close your eyes and envision yourself being the person doing the things that you aim to be able to do in the future by making those small changes. Perhaps see yourself hiking that mountain. See yourself playing with your children or grandchildren. Imagine yourself waking up with energy. Picture the sunlight. Feel the cool breeze in your hair as you walk or run. Hear the sounds around you. Now this is more than just the power of positive thinking. It's about trying to create a sort of identity shift in your mind, seeing yourself as that new creation the Bible talks about. You are beginning to respect the effort that you're going to make. I have the strength and the right to enjoy my life fully. Just as Proverbs 23 says, as a person thinks in his heart, so they are. If you train yourself and your heart to see a person who has already overcome in Christ, then your feet and your hands will eventually surely follow. Now for some, an important step is to push the child's ghost off the diving board. Now what I mean by that is we all have ghosts from our past. Imagine a child on a diving board, paralyzed by fear. A parent might stand there for thirty minutes, pushing, coaxing, pleading until finally that child jumps. Now that seems like a victory, doesn't it? The child will feel fine, excited even, but underneath a dangerous seed may have been planted. That child may have learned that I can't do things on my own. I actually need always to be pushed. Many of us are living our lives as adults still today standing on that sort of emotional diving board, waiting for someone else to do it before we can finally move. We've developed what some called learned helplessness. We focus on the times we've failed and we forget the hundreds of things we do every day without being prompted. What some people find really helpful is to create a sort of initiative log, your proof of life. This is an attempt to break this reliance on other people telling or encouraging you to do things. It's about using a variation of the counter method. Instead of counting negative thoughts now, I think it's helpful to go beyond that and create a sort of initiative log of the good things. Now tally every single action that you took without having to be pushed. Even the smallest things. Did you brush your teeth this morning without someone telling you to do it? That's a tick. Did you answer one email on your own? That's a tick. Did you choose to make yourself a drink or just refresh yourself with a glass of water? That's a click. You see, like David who talked about strengthening himself in the Lord in the book of Samuel, you're actually building a case for your own capability. You're proving to your brain that that diving board ghost is gone. You aren't someone who always needs to be pushed, you are someone who can take the next step on your own. When Jesus spoke to the paralyzed man in Mark chapter two, he said, Get up, take your mat and walk. He was calling him to an act of immediate, self-directed faith, and he's calling you to do the same. Now I know what you've been thinking. This won't work for me, but you need to challenge that hypothesis. But I want you to challenge it and to be scientific about your life. This I will fail perspective is just a hypothesis. It has not, in fact, been tested. In Corinthians chapter 2, Paul tells us that we must take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. So test that lie, keep that log, rehearse that vision. You might find that the real truth is far more liberating than the predictions that your depressed mind has been making. So in the final segment for this episode, I want to look at one final technique, the power of the fifteen minute rule. A technique that helps you defeat the giant of procrastination one slice at a time. You see, when we're depressed, even a molehill can look like Mount Everest. But we don't just need more willpower to tackle removing such a molehill. Sometimes we need just a smaller shovel to gradually remove it, one that we can work with more effectively. We all face the giants in life. Maybe it's that project, maybe it's a pile of laundry or that difficult conversation that looks absolutely massive, and it often feels safer just to stay under the covers. But procrastination isn't usually actually about being lazy at all. It's about feeling overwhelmed. When your brain sees a task as a giant, it triggers the freeze response. Today we're going to learn how to defeat that giant by doing something counterintuitive. We're going to stop trying to kill it all at once and we're going to slice it into fifteen minute pieces. It's all about the science of just starting. You see, the hardest part of any task isn't the work itself. It's the transition from doing nothing to doing something. Psychologically, there's a fascinating recognized phenomenon called the Zygerneck effect. It suggests that our brains have a natural urge to finish what we started. The tension of an unfinished task is actually the thing that keeps it at the forefront of our minds. The problem with procrastination is that we've never created that positive tension because we haven't ever started. The fifteen minute rule is a way to trick your brain into starting. You tell yourself, I'm going to do this, but I'm only going to do it for 15 minutes. After that I have full permission to stop. By lowering the barrier to entry, so to speak, you bypass the fear response. Once the timer starts, the zyderneck effect often kicks in and you find that the impossible task is actually quite manageable. Some people even report that once they started, it was easy just to keep going. But if you do this, then please remember, make sure you stop and pause for a minute and enjoy the win before you begin again. The Bible backs this up when it tells us not to despise small beginnings. Virtually we can fall into the trap of thinking that a small move, because it isn't big, doesn't count. We want to part the Red Sea again, but God often starts by just putting a small staff in our hand. Zachariah also gives a profound piece of advice when he says, Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lloyd rejoices to see the work begin. You see, God isn't a factory foreman looking at your output for the day, he is a father who simply rejoices in your faithfulness and in the little things in life. When you commit, whether it be to fifteen minutes of cleaning, fifteen minutes of work, or even just fifteen minutes of prayer, you are being a faithful steward of the energy you do have at that moment, rather than mourning the energy that you don't have at this point in time. You are honouring those very small beginnings and they are the things that God promises to bless. To make this work best, it's helpful to become a sort of task slicer. If your goal is to clean the house, that would be the giant win. But then if you don't finish, it can become a loss in your mind. But if your goal is just to clean the kitchen for 15 minutes, then set the timer and you can really do this and have the win. So set a literal timer. Don't just watch the clock. Use your phone or some sort of timing device, something that creates a container and an endpoint for your effort. Also, then commit to stop. This is crucial. To trust yourself, you must know that you can quit when the buzzer goes off. This removes the endless work dread cycle. And then finally, step three is to celebrate that slice completed. When the 15 minutes are up, acknowledge the win. You have taken a bite out of the giant. And like I said, most people find once they are 15 minutes in, the momentum carries them further. They'll maybe set a goal to do another 15 minutes in the future. But even if you stop, you have successfully broken that cycle of passivity. You have proven that you are the one in control, not your procrastination. So, as we wrap up this episode today on motivation, remember, motivation isn't a feeling you wait for, it is in fact a byproduct of action. So don't wait to feel like moving, move and let your feelings catch up. And your challenge for this week? Choose one giant thing in your life that has been looming over you. It could be anything, it could be that messy room, a stack of bills that need addressing, an exercise routine that needs re-establishing. Just today, commit to the 15-minute rule for that one thing today and set the timer and work at it with all your heart, as Ecclesiastes say, but just for those 15 minutes. Then once done, log that as an achievement, an autonomous action in your log of initiatives that you've achieved today. Thank you for being with me today. Next time in the Renewed Mind, we're going to look at the social connections and all these, how to stop being strapped in that isolation cycle and learn to let people back in without feeling overwhelmed. I'm Jeremy McCandless. Today, stop waiting for the lightning bolt, just pick up that small shovel for just 15 minutes and know that the Lord is watching what you do and He's rejoicing even in the smallest of starts. There's a full list of resources and sources for this episode 8 in the episode notes wherever you get your podcast from. There's also a call to action where you can choose one other task you've been avoiding and invite God in to help you begin it, and to begin not with pressure but with purpose, and like I said, to do it one slice at a time and no longer be a victim to your masturbation. Thanks for being with me. You can reach, connect, or support me in the production of these podcasts by following and subscribing to me on Patreon. Thanks for being with me today.