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Join trauma therapist and host, Lindsay Faas, as we work to grow our skills for self-direction in an effort to create routines and manage wellness while off work due to injury or mental health concern. Learn about the myth of motivation and tools to take steps in the right direction.
Created for First Responders and Front Line Workers to tackle the challenges of working on the front lines. Dig into topics on burnout, workplace dynamics, managing mental health, balancing family life...and so much more. Created and hosted by Lindsay Faas, clinical counsellor and trauma therapist. View the show notes, and access bonus resources at https://my.thrive-life.ca/behind-the-line.
We are continuing our series around being on leave and how we can support ourselves in recovering well while off work. Whether we’re off work for a physical injury or a work-related mental health concern, we discussed last week that the experience of being off work can be trying and difficult. People often find being off work more challenging than they expected it to be and rarely have a plan for how they will move through the time meaningfully. Without a plan and intention to ensure the best outcomes possible, we can be left floundering and this can either create or exacerbate things like depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and/or uncertainty and can magnify things like sleep concerns, meeting basic needs like nutrition and movement, isolating from relationships, and feeling detached from interests, hobbies and activities. Total honesty, without a plan, going off work can be a recipe for disaster – not because it needs to be, but because no one guides us through it. No one lays out for us the challenges we’re likely to face and the tricks for circumnavigating these with the least amount of friction possible. That is, until now. I hope that this series gives you tools that allow you to feel like whether you are in a time off work or considering going off or concerned that someday you may have to go off, that you will have the ability to walk that journey with awareness, foresight and capacity. I hope you’ll feel prepared for the stumbling blocks to watch for and feel equipped with tools to side step them or reduce their degree of impact, allowing you to use a time off work to focus on your actual job, which is to recover, and that you would have what you need to do that WELL.
On last week’s episode I named the most common concerns I hear about from the many clients I have served over the past many years who have been off work due to various injuries and mental health concerns. The very first challenge I called out in the episode was the difficulty we as people face with self-motivation. And that’s what we’re going to talk more about today. We’re going to talk about the difficulties involved in self-motivating and we’re going to find some ways to help ourselves acquire this skill so we can keep ourselves sane when no one else is holding us accountable to being out of bed or eating lunch or doing…anything.
This is always among the more fascinating challenges of being off work to me. We don’t tend to expect it. I mean, who hasn’t looked at a co-worker off work and thought, “man, must be nice to have nothing but time.” I know a ton of my clients have shared that their friends and family members actually say things like this to them – “dude, you’re so lucky that you don’t have to be anywhere”, “must be nice to get an extended paid vacation!” and other bullshit junk that totally misses the mark of what it feels like to be off work. I have had clients tell me that they thought it would be so nice to catch up on sleep and focus on themselves and just do what they needed to do to get better. They didn’t know to anticipate that it isn’t the same as a long weekend. The pressures of daily life – to take kids to school and sports, to go to more doctors appointments and meetings than they’ve ever had to go to before, to return phone calls and deal with HR and WorkSafe and all the other stakeholders – that all of that would feel like a full time job but with no clear job description or expectations. It’s this mixture of low pressure – no one needs you to show up by 8:30 each morning – but also high pressure as everyone needs you to prove that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing to get better.
The problem is, there’s no map. There is no job description that outlines the expectations clearly. There is no clear trajectory for how we get from here to where I want or need to be. There is no consistent accountability other than some random phone calls from the insurance provider wanting to know what you’ve been doing. It’s a lot of hurry up and wait, on repeat.
I shared last week that most of us have been trained from very young to experience motivation from external sources. The amount of time we are left in a day to do self-directed things is pretty limited, as kids and through adult life. We are told when to wake up, when to be to school or work, the tasks we do while in those venues, when we get to eat and even go to the bathroom. We are directed by adults or people in positions of authority, and with what little time we have left to ourselves we have to fit in the “must do” tasks like laundry and dishes, leaving us with just a little time to decide “what needs doing?” and “what do I want to do?”. Given that we’ve been directed by outside sources for most of our lives, being off work where no one has clear or specific demands of my day to day and hour to hour choices can feel extremely foreign. It can be nice for a bit – like an extended long weekend – but then it shifts and can start to feel laden with guilt, uncertainty, aimlessness, isolation, and so on.
The real need in this time is to develop and refine some skills around self-motivation. I’ve mentioned a book on this show a few times before, it’s called Atomic Habits by James Clear. In it, James studies and references high performing professionals, athletes and other “successful” fancy-pants kinds of people and explores how they harness motivation and habit formation skills to maximize their potential. What is fascinating about the stories he shares is that none of it is rocket science, but some of it can feel a bit counter-intuitive or in contradiction to some lies we’ve been sold. We’re going to use some of the pieces from his book to address our topic today, and I would highly recommend you check out his book if you’re interested in developing better habits and routines generally in your life. I’ll post to it in the show notes so it’s easy to find. I’m also going to post a link to James’ TED Talk on YouTube that I really enjoyed for those who are interested in personal growth and habit formation.
So let’s start with a really important awareness which is that motivation has been taught to us as a backwards myth. As we enter into talking about habits and training ourselves to have the internal drive to put things into action for our wellness while off work, we need to acknowledge that motivation is a word that’s going to come up. Really what we’re talking about today is internal motivation, self-directed motivation – how we choose to move ourselves to actions rather than wait for others to demand it of us or not do anything at all. Here’s the backward myth about motivation. We have been taught to believe that motivation is a magical unicorn that spontaneously shows up one day. We treat it the same as inspiration. It is this random thing that strikes and is awesome but then leaves and we sink. Here’s the backward part: motivation does not come before action. Motivation comes as the result of action. As we do a damn thing, we feel increasingly motivated to continue doing the damn thing. But it starts with the doing, not with the magical feeling of being motivated to do. And here’s the myth part: that we need motivation in order to take action. That we are somehow reliant on feeling this magical unicorn feeling as a prerequisite to taking an action.
In his book, James talks with many high achieving successful people in various professions and areas of life. Writers, athletes, business people… he asks them about what led to their success and consistently the feedback is not that they had some fantastic run of motivation. They didn’t have more access to the magical unicorn than other people did. They took regular, consistent actions that added up and added up over time to yield them the results they’ve achieved. What differentiates them from others? They didn’t quit when motivation felt hard. They continued to do the damn things, they continued to show up and take the actions, even when it was hard or they were tired or it got boring, and so on. They were committed to an outcome and prepared to put in the many repetitions of small actions to get them there, with or without the feeling of motivation to kick it off or keep it going.
This piece about motivation is actually extra important for us to talk about when it comes to being off work, especially if we’re off work for a mental health related concern or if being off work brings up some mood issues like depression. Depression and anxiety are the robbers of motivation. Depression and anxiety are self-maintaining liars that convince us that doing less will make us feel better, and yet this plays into their game, making them stronger and stronger and taking us into a deeper and deeper hole. I often talk with clients about the changes that need to happen to help put a stop of depression and anxiety’s influence over us and the stumbling block that often shows up in these conversations takes us right back to motivation. “I just can’t get motivated to get outside for a walk each day – I know it’s good for me and that I feel better when I do it but I just can’t seem to get motivated to get out the door.” I get it, I know that it doesn’t feel easy, and that in fact it might feel damn near IMPOSSIBLE when your mood has tanked to do ANYTHING, and yet this is one of the best ways to combat mood concerns. Nike had it right when they came up with their, “Just Do It” slogan. Whether you feel like it or not, whether it feels easy or not, whether you feel motivated and jazzed about it or not, doing the things is the only way through.
Ok, so we know that we can’t wait for motivation to do what’s good for us. Now, what IS good for us and where do we focus our efforts, motivated or not, to keep us moving in a good direction instead of sinking? Well, the first piece to focus on is benchmarks. If you think about the course of your life you have likely always had some benchmarks that marked the course of your day. When you wake up, when you eat meals, when you do certain activities, when you go to sleep. Likely these have, to some extent, been dictated by outside factors. At one time in life your parents told you when to do these things, then an employer told you when you had to be at work and you made the other pieces fall around that. While off work, the benchmarks often quickly fall to the wayside. Sleeping in until random times, having nowhere to go and nothing specific to do any given day, not participating in regular routines like getting dressed, brushing teeth and hair and preparing for the day within certain time parameters all become tempting.
Now, that’s not to say that we can relentlessly do hard things without some wins along the way. We are most likely to have successful outcomes when we experience small rewards that keep us in the game. Especially as we work to develop, implement and maintain new routines, it is important that we experience some incentives. Human brains are wired to engage with things that feel rewarding – which is part of why we tend to fall off of the bandwagon around routines and other kinds of personal growth changes pretty quickly – they feel hard and if they don’t come with some immediate and ongoing wins our brains struggle to stay in it. When off work and trying to develop an internal drive to do the things that are good for us, it takes effort and intention and just straight up work. It can be tiring and lack any sense of immediate reward or value. If we want to be able to do this well, we’re going to need to stack the deck in our own favor and this means coming up with ideas of what feel rewarding to you – big and small things – and finding ways to sprinkle these into your days and weeks.
So, priority number one is to set some clear benchmarks for each day. When to wake up, eat meals, engage in appointments, enjoy some down time, and so on. Identify the daily routines that you need to incorporate into your day, and give them timelines. It’s ok to flex them a little here and there, but the goal is to stick to these benchmarks and timelines as much as possible to give your brain the routine it craves. Brains love predictability and a feeling of control, and routines offer this in ways that really matter, especially when other pieces become so unpredictable and outside of our control when off work. Priority number two is to identify some big and small rewards that you can sprinkle throughout your days and weeks. Notice what brings a sense of reward to you and list it out. Think about what you can reward and match rewards to the behaviours you are trying to set up for yourself. For example, if I wake up by 8:30am every day this week, I get to reward myself with one sleep-in day this weekend.
Ok, so we have identified the benchmarks and we’ve got some rewards lined up to sustain our success – but how to we get going? James talks about making it easy for ourselves. He gives an example of wanting to develop a habit of playing guitar – which sidenote, would be a cool hobby to goof around with while off work. In this example he suggests that you leave your guitar in the middle of your living room, making it something you are more likely to stumble upon several times in a day. If we take this idea and extrapolate it, really he’s talking about removing friction. It’s about reducing the barriers to doing the damn thing, and elevating our chances of being successful. So, if we take the example from a minute ago about getting up by 8:30am every day of the week, our friction points are likely to be not getting enough sleep and feeling too tired to wake up, not having something to wake me up by the specific time I’ve identified, and not being accountable to getting up and out of bed. To reduce these points of friction we can make a plan to succeed – I can ensure that I go to bed early enough the night before so that I’m not as tired and tempted to sleep later the next morning; I can use melatonin or other sleep aids if I have difficulty sustaining sleep in an effort to have good quality sleep that allows me to wake up at my goal time; I can set one or multiple alarms to help me be successful at meeting my timeline; and I can let people around me know about my goal so that I’m accountable to meeting it – a spouse or kids can check in and make sure you’re up and moving, or even friends can be tasked with calling at a certain time to check in and encourage you. Another version of accountability can be scheduling something for early in the mornings so that you have to be up in order to meet the expectation of being wherever you need to be by a certain time, or find something really rewarding for you like a morning show or sipping coffee quietly with a book before your family gets up to be the incentive that gets you out of bed.
Ok, we’ve talked about benchmark activities and keeping ourselves incentivized but what about the rest of the day? What do we fill a whole day at home with??
Too often I hear things like video games and TV to be the answer to this question. I also hear about alcohol, smoking, and other substance dependence use as means to pass the time. While these things can have some value here and there, these are not activities that should be occupying the vast majority of our time when we’re off work. Now, let me say that I totally get why they are the go-to things. They are easy, they can feel rewarding, we tie them to our impressions of relaxation and that feels good for a bit. They are accessible, and given the kind of work you do they are also delightfully mind-numbing, which is often the thing we crave when our brains have felt overstimulated from the work and just want to disconnect from life. Again, in small doses a lot of this is fair and fine – but when we have a lot of time on our hands, these pieces do not tend to help us, they tend to sink us.
Productivity and a sense of being contributory and meaningfully engaged in our own lives and our family’s life is actually a significant human need. We crave feeling a sense of purpose, clarity of expectations, and a path from where we are to where we want to be. Work likely filled this for you and without that thing we go to every day, we can struggle to identify other areas that can bring this out in us. So, we get a bit lackadaisical and veer towards activities that ask little of us, but also give little back to us.
This is actually one of the reasons I so strongly encourage you guys to work at developing interests and activities that bring you a sense of meaning outside of your work even when you’re working – because these are the things that can float you if you are ever off work. It’s so much easier to just keep doing or do more of things you already have in place. It is so much harder to explore and consider what you might do when you are in the thick of it and needing access to something that brings a sense of purpose and meaning quickly. Having hobbies and interests can give us something to focus on that can be not only a great way to fill the time off work, but can actually be therapeutic for us in our healing and recovery. Rekindling our love for gardening, playing guitar, writing short stories, colouring, yoga, or whatever else you have enjoyed, or exploring and developing entirely new activities that bring something out in us, can be so valuable to our spirits. It can bring joy and calm and a sense of controlling something.
Now, obviously whatever activities you engage while off work need to be within the realm of safe given your injuries. I often have clients share feeling fearful of taking an art class or going to the driving range or other things because what if their insurance provider finds out and thinks that this means they aren’t as injured as they are? This is a fair concern depending on the situation, certainly insurance companies have had a track record of being adversarial around some of these pieces. That said, the research is also really clear that recovery requires that people feel connected to good and hope and calm and joy and purpose and productivity and meaning and so on, and that these kinds of activities are a life line. So making the argument doesn’t tend to be difficult. Having a care provider on your team who is willing to advocate for you with your insurance provider can bring some peace of mind. I know I fall into this role often where I will encourage clients to engage in whatever it is their interest is and will say that if anyone has a problem with it, tell them to call me, I say you need this to get better. Barring activities that would aggravate or cause reinjury the reasons to engage in hobbies and interests far outweigh any of the fears.
Mixed in to the basic benchmarks and the hobbies and interests will be a whole bunch of other stuff. This might include family responsibilities like chauffeuring kids around town, grocery shopping and doing laundry; it can also include the various appointments with doctors and counsellors and occupational therapists involved in your claim. These things can feel tiring and overwhelming depending on your injury, but are also hard to avoid. My suggestion around these pieces is two-fold. First, focus on what these things give you rather than just on what they take away. And second, plan them strategically. So, focus on what they give you. Remember a minute ago I talked about the need to feel productive and meaningfully engaged? This is a need we have, it promotes our sense of self-esteem and gives us a sense of anchoring to how we see ourselves in the world. We are doers, contributors, helpers, action takers. Tasks like running kids around and getting groceries may not look like anything fancy, but they certainly do make a difference. If no one did the grocery shopping it would be a pretty big problem! We tend to focus on what these activities take away from us – they are exhausting or potentially even anxiety provoking or triggering. If we let ourselves only perseverate on what these things take from us, they will be so hard to do and will likely feel harder each time. If we can recognize that they are difficult but also consider and tell ourselves the story of what they GIVE us – the opportunity to show up for my family, relieving pressure from my spouse, helping to support us even if I’m not working, the chance to get out of the house and get some fresh air or a change of scenery from my own 4 walls… - we can help these tasks to take on a different flavour. The second piece was to plan these activities strategically. Think about leaving some gaps around these must-do activities or follow them up with something fun or rewarding. Pair the harder things with something you enjoy to help reduce the friction. This is another tip from James’ book – pairing something hard with something we like or already do helps improve the likelihood that we’ll be successful at the hard thing. An example he uses is finding exercise hard but enjoying listening to podcasts or audiobooks. So what if I made my podcast or audiobook listening time happen when I’m at the gym? To do the thing I like, I need to do the hard thing – but when I do the hard thing I get to have the thing I like. So, if I like to have my starbucks coffee…which I do…but I hate getting groceries, what if I allow myself to get my coffee while I do my shop? Or I get to stop and snag the coffee as a reward for completing the hard thing of the grocery shop as I head home so I can sip and enjoy as the downtime following that harder activity? Thinking about and identifying the areas that feel hard gives us the opportunity to think strategically and intervene for ourselves differently and more intentionally. It can set us up for better success.
To recap – we are working on growing our underdeveloped capacity for self-directed decisions. When off work, we need to focus on identifying and giving timelines to benchmark activities, and then implementing these activities. We need to identify some rewards and plan in how we will use these strategically to incentivize the sustainability of our benchmarks. We need to identify and implement activities that bring some enjoyment (ie. hobbies and interests) to help fill out the day so we’re not sitting on our butts watching TV all day. And we need to do the everyday life tasks but in ways that are strategic and set us up for success. At the heart of it, this all boils down to intention. We need to look at being off work as something that will require our intention to shape and direct. If we go into it kind of hanging on by the seat of our pants, we are highly likely to feel like victims of this time rather than the authors of it. While there will still be much that will feel not in your control in this kind of off work situation, you get to claim with intention the parts that you do have control over. And if you walk into the process with all of this in mind and a plan in place, I promise that puts you a thousand steps ahead.
As we wrap up today I want to encourage you to please reach out and connect if you have any questions or feedback. You know I love hearing from you and shaping this podcast to echo your needs and interests. I also love hearing about what you’re working on and how you are using what we talk about on the show. You can find me on facebook and Instagram, @lindsayafaas, where you can follow me or tag me, or you can email me at support@thrive-life.ca.
You guys continue to totally inspire me. I am so grateful for your support and that many of you are keen to share about Behind the Line to others on the front lines. Your efforts to share are meaningful and are making a difference in the lives of others on the front lines, so thank you so much for sharing with those you know. Know that we can be found online on our website, on most major podcast platforms as well as on youtube. Click subscribe to get alerts about our latest episodes, or subscribe to our email list to hear from me about all the exciting things we have going on and coming up – you’ll find all the details you need in the show notes, along with links to our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help facilitate self-assessing burnout and related concerns. We make all of this available to you because the work you do matters, but more than that, YOU matter and we want to make sure you have what you need to keep up the good work at work, as well as in your real life outside of work. So use it, and share it.
Until next time, stay safe.