Day 10: Motivation

What motivates you? There are 2 types of motivation. One is the positive motivation which is the one I like to use. This type of motivation, as the name suggests, is to have an incentive after the completion of a goal. The other type is the negative motivation. Negative motivation is where you punish yourself when you broke a rule or when you did not do what was expected. Is like reducing spending money after eating something sinful for example. 

I myself find positive motivation more useful than the negative one because the positive one makes you feel good and gives you "energy" to move on. Whereas for the negative motivation, it may backfire on you because it does not make sense to torture yourself further when dieting/exercising is difficult to your mind. 

Why do people not exercise even if they do know that it is good for them? Technically, the health benefits that people get out from exercising should outweigh the time and energy required to do these exercises. However, people think of short term benefits rather than the long term ones. These people do not think that exercise will make them happy and feel good in the short term because is tiring, is a waste of time. They would rather do something that they think will make them happier or have more benefits to them (eg. working). This is the economics of motivation. 

To get people motivated, government or health authorities have make sure to educate people about the health benefits of exercise. However, there are still people who does not listen. Then, they proceed on to scare tactics (negative motivation) where they post gory pictures and statistics to force them to live a healthier lifestyle. To many people, these scare tactics does not work at all because of the overwhelming advertisements of the many unhealthy food to encourage people to eat. These lead to having some governors to lobby for Soda Tax. 

We are smart but we are eating to die unlike the animals who eat to live. Why are we, the smart animals, doing this to ourselves? This is what many people should actually question themselves. 

Till next time! Bye!

|ser|