#72: Why Would Anyone muddle around the middle?

😣 advice on navigating motivation dips

I’m writing to you on a Sunday for the first time; it seems fitting for this new format.

A few posts ago, I invited you to share motivation conundrums, and was delighted to receive thoughtful questions that I could have asked myself. So I wrote the answers that I need to read, too. Below is the first one.

As you know, I’m not a therapist or a behaviour scientist, and I am wary of prescriptions, especially ‘productivity hacks’. I am writing from years of experience as a professional writer, having weathered big transitions and motivation ups and downs, and having immersed myself in the subject of motivation for this newsletter. Please take what makes sense to you, ignore the rest, and keep asking questions.

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Sarah Miller, who writes Can we read?, a newsletter about children’s literature, asked:

I'm a highly disciplined person (not always a good thing) but I go through periods of low motivation, even burnout, just like everyone else. How do you keep a long-term project going through what Seth Godin so aptly called "the dip," especially if the "dips" come back around? It's less that I expect there *never* to be low points—that's not realistic—but more like, how do I care for my motivation when it's not as robust as usual? (Is there anything to do besides simply allowing it?)

Peter Scobas, who writes two newsletters—the hilarious This is bullshit and so can you and Psychology Onions—added:

I second what Sarah said above. It's definitely the less-finite, more open-ended projects that will mess me up. When I do feel less motivated or burned out, I'm also terrible at acknowledging that's just part of the process and being okay with not being 100% all the time.

Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash

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Dear Sarah and Peter,

Yup, that sounds familiar. If one of you, smart readers, has never experienced that sluggish feeling in the middle of a long and/or open-ended project, I’d like to bottle some of your fine mojo.

I see two sub-questions here:

1. how do I accept dips are a part of long-term projects?

2. how do I avoid dips, or get out of them when they happen?

My strategy would be to work on #1 first—if not only—because changing perspective feels more helpful and durable than trying to snap out of an ordinary situation.

What you call the “dip”, psychology researcher Ayelet Fishbach refers to as “the Middle Problem” in her book Get It Done. She writes:

While beginnings and endings are special, middles are ordinary; they don’t call for celebration. It’s during these ordinary times that our enthusiasm and motivation are the hardest to maintain.

Isn’t it liberating to know that this is a common, observable thing, and to give it a name? I also like the word “middle” because it feels less judgmental than “dip” (or “slump” or “valley of death”).

So, because I’m an agony aunt now, I invite you to give yourself some grace. We do get bored and listless, and even cut corners (literally). Can you see muddling around the middle as morally neutral, rather than a fault of character or a problem to solve? You are not a robot.

michellerial

A post shared by Michelle Rial (@michellerial)

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Onto #2. When a friend stopped smoking, we went to see several movies of his choice¹ to celebrate his first month without a cigarette—then his second, third, sixth, etc². This made sense to us because a big part of our motivation comes from human relationships. I now also see that, without realising it, we were using strategies that Fishbach suggests in her book:

Making the middle special

We sometimes slack off in the middle because middle actions don’t seem to matter as much. Can you pay attention to your actions in the middle, make them memorable so they will matter?

Shortening middles

… can you set monthly, weekly, or even shorter subgoals? By setting subgoals, you can minimize the tendency to cut corners in the middle by minimizing the middle itself.

(For instance, setting monthly savings goals rather than yearly ones, or chopping a large work project into weekly assignments.)

Using the fresh start effect

… a new year, a birthday, and a Monday are all beginnings you can use to celebrate a fresh start. […] Taking advantage of this strategy, and fighting the middle problem, is as simple as reminding yourself that today is the first day of the rest of your life.

I’m sharing these ideas as possible ways to reframe the middles, not as foolproof solutions. There is no secret sauce that will let us maintain an industrious state forever—frankly, my dears, that doesn’t sound like a fun way to live. You both use the word “burnout”, and you don’t say you tend to drop projects altogether or miss deadlines, so it sounds to me like you need more replenishment and lenience than fixes, if you’re to ride out the middles with a serene heart.

Also, read Four Thousand Weeks. Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. It will blow you away.

The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace of absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than to railing against it. […]
… And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.

💛

Is any of this helpful? If you have other ideas, be a pal and share with us:

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1. This is how I ended up watching all those Hobbit blockbusters. Clearly we both had ample childless time on our hands a decade ago; if this happened today I might go for a low-key celebration, like really earnest high-fives?

2. Think about the anniversary chips that celebrate sobriety milestones at Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step sobriety programmes. Or their “one day at a time” mantra: how’s 24 hours for a short middle?