Is anyone else realizing their ‘lack of motivation’ is actually their nervous system being ‘allergic’ to excitement and desire? Many people think they just suck at keeping themselves motivated, but this phenomenon reveals a deeper truth about why your nervous system is allergic to motivation, specifically the good kind. In reality, there are two types of motivation, and understanding them is the key to unlocking sustainable drive.
Prefer to watch? I’ve put my video below or if you’re a reader simply continue reading the post.
Understanding the Two Types of Motivation
To truly understand our internal drive, we first need to recognize that not all motivation is created equal. It’s not a single force but rather a dynamic that comes from two very different sources.
1. Pain-Based Motivation
The first type of motivation jumpstarts you into action. It’s that powerful realization that you are completely fed up and done with your current situation. Maybe you’re tired of how your body feels, frustrated with limitations in your business, or feel a lack of freedom in your life. This feeling fuels pain-based motivation. The current or past situation has become so painful that it drives you to create something different.
This is an extremely powerful type of motivation, but it is unsustainable long-term. Why? Because as you begin to make progress, you naturally move away from the painful situation or circumstance that fuels the motivation. As the pain subsides, so does your drive. You stagnate and feel like you just ran out of motivation.
2. Desire-Based Motivation
When pain-based motivation fades, we need to shift gears and connect to the second type, which is desire-based motivation. This is the drive fueled by your excitement and your genuine desire to create the life you love. It’s about pursuing the healthy, fit body, the freedom of a thriving business, or whatever your true goal is. This form of motivation is much more powerful and sustainable because it pulls you toward a positive future rather than pushing you away from a negative past.
Why Your Nervous System Is Allergic to Motivation (The Good Kind)
Unfortunately, most people don’t even make it out of pain-based motivation. They get stuck trying to exit the things they don’t want, and that becomes their only fuel. When they run out of that fuel, they often have to go back into the negative situation just to feel energized enough to keep going. This creates an endless, exhausting loop.
For those who do manage to break out of that loop and begin to connect with desire-based motivation, they often find a surprising roadblock. As they ramp up their excitement and passion for creating a life they love, they discover that their nervous system is “allergic” to it. Desire and excitement will likely be met with an internal allergic reaction.
Many times our nervous system becomes programmed to feel that it’s not safe to dream or to get excited.
During all the time you spent living in the past reality you’re now exiting, your nervous system was being conditioned to not feel safe in excitement or desire. It becomes stuck under the conditioning that survival mode is safer than pursuing what you truly want. This response gets amplified by every experience in your life where you’ve been disappointed or not allowed to have what you desire.
How to Recondition Your System for Sustainable Drive
To completely flip the lack of motivation you feel, we need to make two crucial shifts. This isn’t just about changing your mindset; it’s about re-patterning your body’s foundational responses.
- Shift from Pain-Based to Desire-Based Motivation: Consciously move your focus from what you are running away from to what you are joyfully moving toward.
- Shift the Nervous System’s Response: Teach your body to feel comfortable and safe while you walk the journey into what you desire and pursue your highest excitement.
This process is about quite literally reconditioning your nervous system to feel safe in a life that you love. It’s about creating a new baseline where excitement and desire are signals of safety, not danger.
Ready for a Deeper Integration?
If you’re still here, you’re likely ready for this level of deep, integrative work. I invite you to attend the training I’m doing for cycle breakers, where we break down where these distortions get stuck in the nervous system and the seven chakra system. We will then look at shifting both of these with the 13 chakra blueprint, reactivating and integrating the version of you that existed before this world stuck all of these programs into your system.
You deserve to live a life that you love. More importantly, you deserve to feel safe and energized as you walk the path to creating it.
