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What would you like from therapy? How would you like life to look different? Its an important question I ask my clients when they first come to see me. We need to establish some direction, and to check if that direction is realistic. The most common answer? ‘I just want to be happy’. Happiness is a subjective emotional state. When studied, humans are notoriously poor at predicting what makes us happy. The World Happiness Report looks at 6 factors which contribute to our life evaluations. These are: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption. These factors appear to influence an individual’s evaluation of their own happiness. If you want to move to the happiest country on earth, book yourself a ticket to Finland (the top 7 are all held by northern European countries). Australia ranks 12th on these dimensions. Not bad. Pipped at the post by our cousins in New Zealand who come in strong at 8th place. Ancient Greeks had two concepts for happiness… Hedonic happiness (happiness derived from pleasure), and Eudiamonic happiness (happiness derived from meaning and purpose). My interest is in the Greek concept of Eudaimonic happiness. Meaning and purpose doesn’t need to be an all-encompassing passion… you don’t need to write a novel or solve a major world problem. Some days, my meaning and purpose is very granular and simple… I was kind to that person, or I shared my resources in a helpful way. By no means am I dismissive of hedonic happiness. Pleasurable activities, play and spontaneity are part of a well-balanced life, essential ingredients for emotional wellbeing. However, if our goal is to achieve a sense of hedonic happiness most of the time, our expectations may fall short… the reality is, if you check out a feelings wheel, we are simply far too emotionally complicated to sustain a happy emotion all the time. Typically, we measure happiness by checking how satisfied a person is with their life. Knowing your values and making decisions based on those values may be one protective factor in being able to score highly when someone next asks you how satisfied you are with life. For me, a healthy goal would be to maintain a sense of peace in life, regardless of where the happiness needle spins to on your feelings wheel. 
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Motivation is the process that moves us toward goal orientated behaviour. When motivation is low, there can be all sorts of issues… loss of self-esteem, frustration, and just not getting sh*t done, to name a few!
Motivation can be extrinsic (external incentives) and intrinsic (personal, internal incentives eg: joy/curiosity, fear). Whichever form it takes, the loss of motivation, stuckness and peaking of motivation are all perfectly normal human experiences. This may not impact you too much as you go through life, however for some people, loss of motivation, or even feeling hyper focused on a goal can be really impairing. There are loads of strategies to deal with this, but for the purpose of this blog post, I’m going to keep it simple. Here are a few steps to assist when motivation is feeling out of balance, or when you are feeling overwhelmed.
Breaking it down…
If you experience chronic low motivation, you may need to seek advice to assess whether this is mental health related, as issues such as depression, anxiety, and attention deficit can play a significant role in motivational dysregulation. Be kind to you, Ange Extra resource: The Pomodoro Timer Recently, a client said something quite disturbing to me. I hear a lot of fairly disturbing things during sessions… life is full of suffering and hardship, and so it is difficult to shock me. Here is what she said that made me jolt back in my seat… “I’ve seen a lot of counsellors, but none of them have ever been kind to me about my story, I’ve always been judged”. Um... say what? As a counsellor, part of my job, in fact a very big part of my job, is to model empathy and kindness to clients. And why is that important? So that they can potentially offer it back to themselves. It can be nearly impossible to move forward in life when there is a harsh and judgmental voice inside your head, criticising you and demanding of you. Offering kindness to others can sometimes open a small gateway for their own self compassionate voice to be heard. And when we speak kindly inside our own heads, we encourage ourselves to move forward in an engaged way with life, without dragging around the burden of our self-critic. So, speak kindly to you…you need the encouragement not just from others, but also from yourself.  Humans have an incredibly evolved and complex brain. In fact, there are still many discoveries science has yet to make regarding all the different ways our brain works. One thing we do know though, is part of our brain’s role is to protect us, and it does this in several ways. One way is by using certain chemicals and hormones when we are in danger. (note: our brain doesn’t always discriminate between ACTUAL danger and IMAGINED danger). These chemicals do many things, one being that they activate what is called the sympathetic nervous system. This prepares our body to fight, flight or freeze in response to the threat. Our sympathetic nervous system moves blood away from our limbs, and towards our large muscles (helping us run, and limiting blood flow if we are superficially cut), suppresses our appetite and sexual drive (who wants food or sex when they’re being chased by a lion?), increases our heart rate and capacity for oxygen, and increases our perspiration. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of energy and coordination! Additionally, these chemicals also suppress our more complex thinking and memory skills, so that we can react quickly, rather than contemplate. During a traumatic or stressful event, all these actions are occurring in your body. So, what happens after that? Well, you also have a parasympathetic nervous system… and this system activates after the sympathetic nervous system, to calm everything down and conserve energy. Appetite may return, blood flows back in to the limbs, breathing slows… everything starts slowing down, for what some call the ‘rest and digest’ period. During this time, a person can feel more tired and ‘foggy’ than normal as the body tries to restore order. Here is a simple (but not comprehensive list) of things that are normal physiological experiences during and after a stressful or traumatic event: During event:
After event:
Remember: you are a unique physiological & emotional being, so your responses may be varied, according to the individual differences within your own system. If you are struggling with these symptoms, remember they are normal responses, but if they continue for an extended period, you may want to consider getting additional support through your GP, counsellor, psychologist or trusted health professional.  I love Mel Robbins. She's blunt and to the point, which seems to make what she has to say all the more clear. In this Ted talk, she shares her thoughts on how the four letter 'f' word impacts our decisions to really become who we want to be. And best of all? The odds of YOU being born, are 1 in 400,000,000,000. That's 1 in 400 billion (so many zeros!). So surely, it's time to get on and be YOU. Check out the talk here. Photo by Levi Saunders on Unsplash 
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