Increasing Motivation in All PIECES of Addiction Recovery

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this video on enhancing motivation in all pieces of your life. We're going to be talking about the six types of motivation. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In this video, we'll explore the basics of motivation. Learn how to enhance motivation in all six areas of your life. Physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive, environmental, and spiritual. And you'll learn how to use decisional balance to identify motivational roadblocks. So let's start out with what is motivation? Motivation is essentially your desire to do something, anything. When you wake up in the morning, you are either motivated or not motivated to get out of bed. When you go to work, well, obviously you're going. So you're motivated on some level to do it. Probably just to get a paycheck and keep a roof over your head, but you're motivated. Motivation is triggered by the expectation of reward or survival. So going back to that whole work thing, not every day at work is going to be be a rewarding day. But we need to do it in order to survive. We need to do it in order to get a paycheck to keep a roof over our head. So we do need to recognize that there are some inherent or internal sources of motivation. Motivation requires energy. Yeah, you can want to do something, but to be truly motivated, you also need to have the energy to do it. And it's really difficult for a lot of people who are depressed, who are. Have been anxious for a while, who are in early recovery from addiction or a variety of other things to get that energy. So we're going to talk about that, and we're going to talk about why motivation often is low for a lot of people in early recovery because their stress response system is miscalibrated. They don't have as much energy anymore. They've been running too hot for too long, and so now they're kind of cool, if you will, and it's hard to get the engine warmed up again. Motivation is often behavior specific. Watching porn, for example, being in relationships, your circadian rhythms. There are a lot of different behaviors that we engage in that have different levels of motivation. I have a lot of people who start treatment and we start talking, and they are motivated to work on, for example, improving their sleep, but not really motivated to work on exercising. Okie dokie, that's fine. You can't accomplish everything all at once. So let's identify what you are motivated to work on. Now, if somebody has to do something that they're not motivated to do, then we need to figure out how can we make it motivating? When somebody is diagnosed with diabetes, for example, sometimes they have difficulty getting motivated to eat right, to watch their blood sugar, and to regularly monitor what's going on with their blood sugar and give themselves insulin shots. We need to talk about the different types of motivation to help them embrace that and get past their resistance. Anything we do is a choice. Anything we're motivated to do is a choice to do one thing over another thing. And it's important to come to that. Motivation waxes and wanes based on your perceived return on your investment. If it seems like you are just giving it your all and you're getting nowhere, your motivation's probably going to go to crap. If it seems like you are making forward progress, even if it's slow, then your motivation will probably be maintained. One thing I've seen a lot in recovery is people tend to regress in their motivation. When it starts becoming painful, when they start going through severe withdrawals, when they start having to address some of the stuff that they have been locked away for a long time and it starts to feel really uncomfortable and unpleasant, they may regress in their motivation because it's too painful and that survival mechanism is coming out going, you know what? Maybe not. Maybe we don't need to go here yet. It's always a choice between two options. To address it or to not address it. When I worked in recovery in community behavioral health, I used to have a saying on my door. When the going gets tough, motivation gets going. And it was really important for my staff to recognize that when people started to show a lack of motivation or a loss of motivation, it was up to us to help them take a look at it and say, all right, where's the motivation gone? Why is this not rewarding? Why is this not motivating anymore? There are four basic stages of motivation. Pre contemplation and contemplation. I kind of squish into one. In pre contemplation, the person says, I don't have a problem. You can't tell me I have a problem. You can't make me change. I don't know where to begin, or change is just not even possible. In contemplation, the person starts saying, yeah, maybe there's a problem, but you can't make me make a change. And I still don't know where to begin, and I'm not sure if change is possible. So they're starting to contemplate the fact that maybe I need to do something, but I have no idea what to do. Preparation is when the person is getting all their proverbial ducks in a row. They recognize they've got a problem. They are starting to learn about the options that are available for change and getting everything ready. They're not ready to take that step in, they're not ready to go forward, but they're getting everything together so they have an understanding of what needs to happen and, and they're prepared when they want to. It's kind of like people who keep a go bag ready when they are, you know, if they, if they work in a particular job where they could get called up any minute, or if they're just one of those people who will spontaneously get a bug and decide to go on a vacation. And they are prepared, they have their bags packed, they know what they need to do, and they're ready to go. So the next stage, and this is where we really want to get people, is action. Action is where you're, you know that there's a problem. You have identified that there are options for recovery. You may not know exactly how you want to go about it yet, but you're ready to start taking those steps and action is when you start doing it. Now this can apply to things like exercise vlog for people who have never exercised before or who don't like exercising. They may be in pre contemplation. Then they decide that, okay, maybe come January 1st, I will make a resolution and I'll start getting in better shape. That's preparation. Action is when they actually start going to the gym and start taking steps to move toward their goal. Maintenance is when those behaviors are maintained. As I mentioned earlier, there are six types of motivation. Physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive, environmental, and spiritual. The more types of motivation that you have pushing you forward, the more motivated you're going to be. The more arguments, if you will, that you have for this new behavior, the more motivated you're going to be. Let's start with physical motivation. When you're identifying the sources of physical motivation, you want to figure out all of the ways that this change, whether it is sobriety or getting in shape or whatever it is. Identify all the ways that this change will improve your energy, your sleep, your pain levels, your health, and maybe even your libido. And some of your cravings and cravings can be food cravings. Cravings can be alcohol or drugs or some other addiction. But you want to look at in what way will this change positively impact my body and my biochemistry? As you start making basic changes, keep track of how it impacts your physical symptoms. Some People will even start out by keeping track of how their current behavior impacts their physical symptoms, how using porn or drinking alcohol or not going to the gym impacts their energy, their sleep, their pain, their health, whatever their presenting issue is. So then once they start doing it, they have a baseline and they can start to see gradual improvement. When we talk about change too often, and this is true of clinicians as well as the average person, too often we talk about all the reasons that we should change, we should do it, and we fail to acknowledge the benefits and the functions of the current behavior. Why we're doing is important to look at the physical drawbacks to the change and how to overcome them. If we're talking about exercise, then if you go in and you start exercising too hard, you can be sore and it can actually impact your sleep. Or if you don't exercise the right way, if you have poor form, you can get hurt. So what can you do to, to overcome that? Some people are intimidated by going into the gym because they've never worked out before. And one of the things they can do is work with a trainer and, or somebody who can help them or go online. There's lots of videos, real short videos online that help you learn how to use different equipment so you don't feel like you are looking completely lost and discombobulated. When it comes to stopping addiction, one of the main drawbacks is cravings and the withdrawal symptoms that a lot of people experience. And for some other people, they may also acknowledge, especially if they've been through it once or twice before that, going into early recovery, not only is it physically uncomfortable, but it also dredges up emotions and frustrations and guilt and all kinds of other stuff, stuff that is unpleasant. And you may be scratching your head going, well, why would I want to make that change? Basically, it's like cleaning out the septic system. Every once in a while, you got to clean out all that sludge, so everything works well, and so it is operating in a healthy, functional way. So examine the physical drawbacks to the change and how to overcome them. Interpersonal motivation. How will this behavior nurture relationships that are important to you? How will it help you feel better about yourself, and how will it free up some energy back to that physical again so you can nurture those relationships? And it could also free up some time. If you are not spending five hours at the bar, or five hours sobering up, or five hours sitting on the couch watching, you know, Netflix marathons or something, how much energy and time does that free up? So you can nurture relationships that are important to you, and that includes your relationship with yourself. And I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now like a relationship with yourself. That's mumbo jumbo. You got to know yourself. And at a certain point, I think a lot of us come to understand that it's important that we are our own advocates, that we are our own best friends, that we watch out for each other ourselves. And we say, you know what? That's not safe for me, or hey, this is something I want to do. We stop expecting mind reading. Oh, that's a whole different video. Who can serve as a support for you during this change? Interpersonal motivation is not just about improving your relationships with yourself and other people, but also calling on any supports you have right now that can help you during the change. Change, any kind of change, is difficult. Change causes crisis, and crisis causes change. Humans, we don't like change. It's a lot easier and takes a lot less energy to keep doing the same thing. Heck, think about exercise again or your car. We'll go with the car this time. If you drive 10 miles on a highway, you're going to use less gas than if you drive 10 miles through New York City. Because the stop and start and the stop and start and the changing of your pace is going to require a whole lot more energy. Doing something different different requires more energy. So who can serve as a support and who do you need to set boundaries with? Oh, my gosh. Interpersonal motivation. It also means it's important to look at who might drag me back into those old behaviors, who might enable me to continue engaging in those old behaviors, and how can I set boundaries with them? What are the interpersonal. What are the relationship drawbacks to this behavior and how can you overcome them? And it's important to recognize the drawbacks. Again, we're talking about the new behavior that you're afraid of. And in recovery from addiction, people often talk about a fear of rejection. They're told they've got to change people, places and things. And there may be people that they really love, that they really want to spend time with. And it can be anxiety provoking to think about having to set boundaries with those people. So there may be a fear of loss of friends, of risk, of rejection. If you are trying to get sober or trying to stop an addiction, you may fear that by soliciting support from people that are important to you that you can trust that they may reject you when they find out what you were doing. And you may feel self Conscious around others. When you are engaging in this new behavior, okay, how can you feel less self conscious? Can you. If you're going to a meeting, for example, can you get somebody to go with you? If you're going to a gym, can you get somebody to go with you? Sometimes the behavior means you're going to feel self conscious around others. And again, going to the gym, going to a meeting, going to church for the first time, starting to be more social. There are a lot of changes that we make that we see as important in our life, but makes us very nervous around others. Another one may be just making the change of communicating more effectively and setting boundaries. That is really scary for a lot of people. And unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever, however you want to look at it, that's often an early goal in treatment is to learn how to communicate assertively and set and maintain your boundaries. And I say unfortunately because I wish everybody had that skill from the time they were. From the time they were two. It's important to keep track of how well you're moving toward the people that are important in your rich and meaningful life, including yourself. Emotional motivation doesn't need a whole lot of explanation. How will this behavior help you feel happier, reduce or deal with anger, guilt, paranoia, stress and anxiety? How will some of those things be eventually reduced or eliminated in your life once you change and begin? Embrace this new behavior, Embrace the change and let go of the anger, the resentment, the addiction, whatever it is that you're changing from. What are the emotional drawbacks of this behavior and how can you cope with them? Well, I'll be honest and I said it earlier, I'll say it again. When you start making a change, it's difficult, it's hard, it's frustrating, sometimes it's uncomfortable. And you'll learn how to develop distress tolerance skills to help you get through it. But it's important to understand that every day is not going to be a cakewalk. And it's important to recognize that a lot of times behaviors that we're trying to change are behaviors that have a long term benefit. So sobriety, for example, has the long term benefit of helping you move towards your rich and meaningful life, whereas you were using it for its immediate benefit of numbing distress. Exercise may have a long term benefit. Sitting on the couch feels real relaxing. That's true. But getting healthier has the long term benefit of helping you have the longevity and the health in order to achieve the goals that are important in your rich and meaningful life. Be mindful of how this behavior impacts your Emotions and your mood, just pay attention. And if you find that you're getting irritable, be aware of that. That's okay. I said change causes crisis and crisis causes change. There are going to be days where you get irritable and you're like, is this really worth it? Think about the athlete who is learning a new technique. They're not going to get it the first time, they're probably not going to get it the fifth time. They're going to get progressively better. But some days it can feel really freaking frustrating because it doesn't feel like you're actually making forward progress. So recognizing when it is causing you distress and acknowledging and accepting that, as well as recognizing how this new behavior is actually taking a weight off of your shoulders from the guilt or the anxiety or whatever your emotional consequences of the old behavior were. In early recovery. Just a little side note, in early recovery, especially from addiction, happy may mean just the reduction of distress. There may be a period of several months, sometimes up to 18 months for people where the world seems kind of gray. Their motivation's low and there's just. There's not a lot of highs and lows. It's just blah. And that is really difficult to deal with. And I encourage you, if you're struggling with that, to talk with your therapist or talk with your doctor about it to see what may be done. Sometimes it can be because you have a nutrient imbalance like low vitamin D. I'm not saying to talk to your doctor to automatically get put on medication because medication only works in about 30% of the cases. Antidepressants. That is what I am saying is see what other options might be out there for you in order to work with your body to help speed up the healing process. Cognitive motivation, this is the one that a lot of people just focus on to begin with. How is this behavior going to help you focus your energies on what's important in your rich and meaningful life? How will this behavior help you eventually be more positive and optimistic? How will it help you think more clearly? And I'll give you a hint. If you're getting better sleep and you're less irritable, you're going to be able to think more clearly because you're going to be able to more easily access your higher order thinking. How will it improve your focus and attention? What are some distress tolerant thoughts that you can use? We talked about distress in the emotional motivation section. What are some distress tolerant thoughts? A lot of times when we're making a change and we start to get Frustrated, we start telling ourselves, this is too hard, I can't do this, or this is too painful. Those are distress intolerant thoughts. So what are some distress tolerant or encouraging thoughts that you can use? I've been through worse. This too shall pass. Whatever one works for you, or three or four or five work for you that help you recognize your strength, your power, your ability to get through it. And the fact that whatever you're going through, whether it's emotional or mental or physical, will likely improve in time in short order. Often when we're talking about cravings and panic and, and things like that. But it's important to use distress tolerant thoughts when you are intolerant. When you start telling yourself you can't, then it triggers a stress response and creates more anxiety and more anger and eventually low motivation. When I was a little girl, and it probably still exists somewhere, there was a book called the Little Engine that could. And this little train had to get up this big mountain and it had never gone over such a big mountain before. And so it kept trudging up the hill saying, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. And whenever I am doing something difficult, I still envision that, you know, I am way past being a little girl, obviously, but the symbolism in that was so important to me. There's another one, a book written by Dr. Seuss. Oh, the places you'll go. And you can find a, a narrative version of it without all the pictures and everything online. But it is an excellent tale of growth, of change, and for a lot of people, of recovery. So I encourage you. Look at those two. Yes, they are kids books, but hey, who cares? We all got a kid inside us. And sometimes it is that very basic wisdom that we minimize in terms of cognitive motivation. It's also important to have a plan for change. How am I going to do this if you just say, all right, I'm going to quit cold turkey and eventually the cravings will pass and everything will be fine. You're going to fail 99% of the time you're going to fail. I'll just. Sorry. You need a plan. You need to understand what's causing the behavior. You need to understand how to address the behavior. So you need to have a plan for change. I can't emphasize that enough. You also need a plan for relapse prevention. So you need a plan to help you figure out how to move forward. Just like you would do if you were trying to design a house or anything else. Make a casserole. There's a plan for that. You have recipes, so that's your plan for moving forward. And then you also need a plan for relapse prevention, a plan to stop yourself from backsliding. What things do you know that may trigger your desire to backslide? That may trigger you to sit on the couch, trigger you to get angry, trigger you to use again whatever behavior you're trying to change? And that relapse prevention is so essential in early recovery. You don't have all the tools you need to move forward. You may know what they are, but you don't have them. You haven't mastered them yet. So you need a stop gap that can help prevent you from sliding all the way back down into the valley once you start climbing that mountain. What are the cognitive drawbacks to this new behavior and how can you overcome them? Ruminations, cravings, and brain fog are three that are very common when you are changing something and even something like exercise when you are deciding, hey, instead of spending three or four hours a night watching Netflix marathons, I'm going to go to the gym for an hour. Well, while you're doing that, you may have ruminations, and your mind may be saying, don't you really want to go back and sit on the couch? Really, don't you want to do that? When people stop addictions, sometimes they will ruminate. They will think about the addiction, they will want the addiction. They'll have these obsessive thoughts. Sometimes when they stop the addiction, they get enough clarity where some of the stuff that they were trying to escape from starts coming out, and they start having ruminations of past traumas. If that's you, be aware of it and have a plan for it. It's not insurmountable, but you don't want it to come up from behind you and just kind of cold you. That's. That's not going to work. Keep track of how well you're moving toward the people and toward the things that are important in your rich and meaningful life. Why are we keeping track of that in cognitive motivation? Because you're looking for the benefits. You're looking for the objective benefits of how this is helping you in your life. Environmental motivation. How will this behavior help you feel safer or less triggered in your environment? And for example, if you are moving toward sobriety, how will sobriety once you get there, once you've got some good, solid sobriety, how will you feel less triggered all the time in your environment, how will you feel safer and not bombarded by all the stuff in your environment? What can you put in your environment to remind you to do this behavior? If you're wanting to go to the gym, put your gym bag in the car with you so you don't end up going home and that couch is just calling your name, going, come on, don't you want to sit down? Put the gym bag in the car. If you need to remember to go to a meeting, put the meeting schedule in your phone and have an alarm set for it. If you are trying to make a change because what you've been doing has been hurting your family, keeping a picture of your family front and center so you see it and you remember, this is why I'm doing this. Whatever it is you can put in your environment, and it's usually visual, but it could be any sense that can help feel, help you feel less triggered, more at peace, and more motivated. It can help you remember all the reasons you're doing this and prompt you to do it. It is hard to remember to do something new when you're changing a routine. It is really hard to remember to do that until it's become ingrained. Make sure you put reminders, alarms, whatever it is in your environment to prompt you to do the things you need to do, like mindfulness activities and going to counseling, going to meetings, calling your sponsor, calling your coach, whatever those things are. What must you remove from your environment that triggers the old behavior? And I was talking to somebody the other day who is addicted to pornography, and they said, yes, you know, I recognize that the computer is a big trigger for me, and I've put that in the living room so it is no longer as easily accessible. And we have put some controls on the router, so I can't go to those kinds of sites anymore. But my phone is my downfall. That's my Achilles heel. So we talked about parental control apps that they could put on their phone that would notify their accountability partner if they were looking at those types of things. Now, not everybody is ready to admit this to their significant other. So sometimes the accountability partner is your coach or your sponsor, and that's okay. Eventually, probably needs to come out, but that's one tool. Another tool is leaving the phone somewhere where you can't access it. Now, for this person, they said it was an appendage, and they just. They couldn't put it down. All right, if you feel that way, you're not motivated to ditch the phone yet. I get that. So let's figure out how we can make the phone safe. A lot of people say, well, I can even If I can't access things on WI fi, I can access them through data. Okay, how do we prevent that? And that's where the parental control apps come in. Can you get around those somehow? Probably. Can you get a second burner phone if you will? Yeah. There are a lot of things you can do, but if you really want to make the change, you're going to exercise some level of restraint. Spiritual motivation. Pretty straightforward. How is this new behavior more in line with your personal values? How does is embracing this new behavior making you more the person that you want to be? That's pretty straightforward. Now I told you we would talk about decisional balance. Because change causes crisis and crisis causes change. It's always a choice between the old behavior and the new behavior, which one is more rewarding. And the decisional balance is designed to help you identify and tilt. Tilt the scale in your favor, if you will. So humans always choose the most rewarding behavior. Using higher order thinking, your front of your head, and relapse prevention planning, you can purposefully choose behaviors that may not be as rewarding in the short term, but are much more rewarding in the long term. That means, okay, I am feeling angry and irritable and really stressed out right now. I'd love to have a drink or I'd love to go watch porn or whatever it is. However, I recognize that the long term benefits far outweigh the short term relief. When you lose your motivation or find yourself procrastinating, explore what are the drawbacks of the change that you're supposed to be making and look at it in all of those six areas. Physical, interpersonal, environmental, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual. What are the drawbacks to the change that you're supposed to be making? Because it's not easy, it's hard, it can be unpleasant. And how can you minimize it? How can you make it less unpleasant? How can you get support so it feels a little easier? And as I mentioned earlier, it's also important to acknowledge the benefits of the old behavior. And how can you minimize those. For example, I'm one of those people that I can really get into a Netflix marathon. I can become a couch potato pretty easily. However, I, I recognize that sitting on the couch for that long, you know, tends to make me more achy. I tend to put on weight and it so my clothes don't fit as well. It's not good for my health, which doesn't help me move toward my rich and meaningful life. So I'm looking at, yes, the relaxation feels great, but it doesn't Meet with my other goals and you know, the relaxation from sitting on the couch, it was great. How can I kind of merge the two? Well, what I do is I save my favorite show and I watch it while I am on cardio machines at the gym. And then when I'm finished for relaxation, I go and sit in the spa. That works for me, that helps me relax. But it's important to acknowledge that the old behavior served a purpose and you may miss some of the benefits of it. How can you make the new behavior more rewarding and so you miss the old one less? Motivation is not ever present in early recovery because your stress response system, your HPA axis and your dopamine system are not working properly. Motivation can be very difficult. It's not impossible, but very difficult. And one little tip for, or another little tip for motivation is to recognize that small successes increase dopamine. Every time you have a small success, your brain goes, oh, I did that. I want to have another one of those. So set small achievable goals because that will help increase your motivation. It will help increase your confidence and your belief that you can do it. Set small goals for behavior change. Ensure that there are short and long term benefits to the behavior. Keep giving the example of going to the gym. Well, the short term benefit, I get to watch my favorite show and then I know I get to sit in the spa afterwards. Bonus. And then long term benefits or continued health ability to achieve my goals, yada yada, but it's not miserable the whole time I'm doing it. Short term benefits for somebody who's giving up an addiction is potentially improved finances, improved relationships, being able to learn that they can handle distress. Sometimes it's a little unpleasant in the, in the beginning, but recognizing that you can do it once you've done it. Oh my gosh. People in early recovery often are so excited when they have those little successes. It's like, oh my gosh, I actually can do this. And that's the short term benefit. That increase in dopamine, that increase in self confidence. Enhance as many types of motivation as possible and have compassion for yourself. Focus on progress, not perfection.