Stay Energized to Help You Achieve Your Goals

It’s so easy to be unmotivated to do anything or to achieve goals. Being motivated is a little bit tougher. That’s because when the rush of desire fades or the excitement wanes, staying pepped up enough to be your own driving force is an uphill climb.

Motivation is the force that propels you to change your life. Without it, you just don’t have the energy. That’s why you can stay in bed and hit the snooze button repeatedly. Or skip the gym. Or not bother moving from your current employer to a new career.

Mental Motivation Is Key to Successful Energy

If you’re on the journey toward your goals or life changes, you want to be sure that you stay energized so that you don’t lose traction. You do that by making sure that your mental motivation doesn’t lag.

Because if that happens, you start to think that what you want isn’t as appealing as it was when you first imagined it. You’ll start to rethink the changes and what you want - even if it’s something that you do truly want.

You’ll start to waiver and you’ll question yourself. Then the next thing you know, your motivation has disappeared as quickly as the last candy bar at a chocolate lover’s convention.

You can’t just sit there and let that happen. When you lack the mental energy to move forward, you’ll know it and the second it occurs, you have to take action right then. Otherwise, it’ll continue and you’re going to fail at what you want.

The first thing to do to keep that mental energy is to make sure you love yourself. That might sound a little like give yourself a mental hug and that’s exactly what it is. When you’re chasing what you want out of life, it’s too easy to tune into the thought of failure.

It’s too easy to let fear grow and grow until it’s the size of Mount Everest and the next thing you know you’re running for your life in the opposite direction of the change that you wanted.

So when the doubts come, when the motivation lags, give yourself a mental hug. Say to yourself, “I’ve got this.” Follow that up by thinking or saying more things that give yourself a little compassion.

It might be something like, “I’m really talented” or “I believe in myself.” When you practice mental hugs, it strengthens your mental energy and in turn your motivation. That’s because you’re reassuring yourself, which is exactly what a supportive friend would do.

They would tell you that you’re good enough and they would say things to lift you up. So do that for yourself. Be your own friend. Next, make sure that you have the right focus.

Everyone screws up. You’re going to as well. Probably a lot. That’s what happens when you try to change your life. But if you’re not careful, focusing on what goes wrong is really going to do a number on your mental energy.

Recognize when something goes wrong. Accept the failure but never accept defeat. When failure happens, let it be something that happened and is in the past now. Don’t drag it around with you. That can be mentally draining and you’ll lose your motivation.

What Causes People to Lose Mental Energy

The symptoms of mental energy loss are varied, but if you have it, you just feel so wiped out. It can sometimes make you think you don’t care about what you were doing and you just want to give up.

Sometimes mental energy loss can be confused with emotional upheaval such as depression. But loss of mental energy is not the same thing. It’s caused by mental fatigue.

And mental fatigue is what occurs when you just push and push and you don’t give your brain a break. This happens when you’re studying too hard such as cramming for an exam.

Or you work from morning until the time you fall into bed at night. It can also happen when you’re dealing with a crisis that has no resolution. Your brain goes around and around trying to think up a way to solve the problem because that’s the way a brain is wired.

But when your mental energy starts to lag, it affects every area of your life in everything that you do. You’ll experience decision block. No matter how much you try, the solution seems to elude you.

This is why at successful businesses, team leaders will suddenly call for a break in the middle of a brain storming session. It gives everyone’s mental energy time to regroup.

Low mental energy can often manifest itself by not caring about your future goals because the motivation that you had is gone and you just can’t find it.

It can also affect you emotionally. You might experience sudden bursts of anger or you might find yourself bursting into tears for no apparent reason. You have to guard against mental energy loss.

You have to make sure that you’re not always having to come up with a solution. You can’t continually make choices or decisions one right after another. The decision-making center in your brain is wired to only handle so many choices and when it’s constantly faced with having to make to one, it goes into overload and you end up feeling overwhelmed.

This can happen in any area of your life. Getting bombarded with needs can drain your mental energy. Your needs and the needs of others can do this. This is why caregivers end up with burnout.

They’re having to continually make choices and do hard mental things. It’s even tougher when it’s making decisions for a loved one. The more things you have to spend mental energy on, the more drained you’ll feel.

This is because overwhelm makes the stress hormone kick up production. Your brain starts trying to figure out which thing you need to spend the most mental energy on and because you can multitask, you end up having that energy divided into too many things.

So, then you can’t achieve your goals because you can’t focus. Your brain can’t produce the mental energy you need to focus all on its own. You have to be your own gatekeeper if you want to be productive.

Stop trying to spend your mental energy on too many things at once. You can’t think about how you’re going to boost your career value when you’re also trying to figure out how to get the car fixed or the plumbing repair taken care of and the kid is sick and the in-laws are arriving without much advance warning.

Practice the mental door to keep yourself from getting drained. You do this by only dealing with what has to be dealt with in that moment. Everything has a time. So what you do is you practice mentally pushing away what doesn’t have to be dealt with at that moment.

But be warned that sometimes everything can feel like an urgent thing. You have to be wise enough to be able to determine if that’s true or not. You have to stop mentally avoiding things that you know need to be dealt with.

That might be quitting the job, ending the relationship or whatever. The more you avoid it, the bigger chunk it bites out of your mental energy. This is especially true when it comes to making changes in your life.

Even positive changes can cause your mental energy to lag. So then you don’t feel pumped about the future or reaching your goals. Experts call mental energy drainage mental fatigue when it lasts for long periods. And if you don’t take control, you can sabotage your life and your success story will never be written. And that would be a terrible thing.

Take Charge of Your Mental Energy

You must be in control of the motivation that you have toward your future. When you know what you want, you can run after it with everything you’ve got. But that’s a sure way to burn out, too.

You can end up so mentally exhausted that you lack the energy and willpower to take another action step because you can’t focus. When you’re trying to change your life and you’ve got goals to achieve, your focus can’t just be on the goals even though that’s the end result.

Your focus has to be on making sure that the steps you do take don’t zap your energy. You need that well to stay as full as possible because if it doesn’t, even though you might be making progress, it won’t be your best effort.

Think back to the times in your life when you’ve just been so drained of mental energy but you had to take care of something anyway. You weren’t your best self and you know it.

You ended up short-changing the person you were dealing with or the project or task you were trying to do. This is why you’ll sometimes end up telling your kids to just go somewhere and play and to give you some peace and quiet.

You’ve allowed your mental energy to evaporate. It’s also why you develop the feeling of brain overload and can’t for the life of you figure out how to solve even the simplest of problems.

When the mental well is empty, there’s just nothing you can do at the best of your ability. Your mental energy is what your attention draws from. So when it’s running low or dry you’ve got nothing left.

No matter much you want to pay attention, you just can’t. You can’t focus, so you can’t move forward. You are effectively stalled. If you’re to reach your goals and that is your desire, then you must be in charge of your mental energy.

The mental energy that you have starts to lose its gusto the moment you step foot out of bed. You suddenly get hit with a ton of stuff that you have to do just to get out of the door or to get ready to start work for the day.

You have a lot of things you need to take care of with your weight loss plan. Things with your relationship need to be handled and there are a dozen things that are work related clamoring for a piece of your attention.

That’s life. It’s also a prescription for failure if you’re not very careful. Some people think that if they can just knock out the hundred and one things they need to take care of, then they’ll have the mental space to work on either a big job or have the ability to work on that goal they have that means a lot to them.

That might be a personal thing like writing a book or working out or spending time with someone you love. Here’s a hint for those of you who are struggling with this mental energy loss right now: the longer you put off doing something that drains your mental energy, the more it’ll get drained.

That’s why you have to put your goals first. When you get up, take care of what it is that you want in your life. Otherwise, all those little things crowd around you taking a bite of mental energy here, a bite there until you just can’t take another second.

You shut down. And that happens because it’s your brain’s way of protecting you - of saying, “Hey, you’ve had enough. Let’s do something mindless now” and that’s why you turn to watching TV or reading a book or going to bed.

Your brain wants to stop making all the choices, and to stop trying to figure stuff out. It’s why sometimes after a really tough day of mentally handling stuff, everything seems harder and you feel emotionally all over the place.

There is always going to be something demanding your mental energy. You can count on that. But just like your bank account, your mental energy is not limitless. When you reach the end of your rope, you can’t accomplish anything else.

Your Mental Energy Can Stay Energized

You can be excited about your future and keep your energy pumped up. It really isn’t that hard to hold on to your energy and to remain motivated. When your mental energy remains high, you’ll be amazed at all the things you can accomplish.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your mind doesn’t feed on the negative. That’s because the negative stuff acts as a giant leech and sucks away mental energy. You have to practice being positive.

But more than that, you need to practice an attitude of gratefulness. Be grateful for what you have already in your life as well as for the things you don’t have yet. Your current job might not be the career that you want, but it pays the bills and when you get the new career, life is only going to improve from there.

When you’re grateful, it gives you an improved attitude. This attitude is the one that you need because then you think, “I’ll get around this obstacle” rather than the immediate thought of, “I knew this wasn’t going to work.”

An attitude of gratitude allows you see hope, which boosts mental energy. Take time every day to practice positive energy. Positive energy develops from positive thinking. You can test yourself the next time that you’re feeling drained by focusing your mental attention on something that’s positive.

For example, your day at work might have been terrible, but now you’re home and your dog is funny and warm and loyal. It’s still sunny outside and the sky is blue. Do that kind of thinking and then look at how it’s made you feel like your batteries were recharged.

Check your thoughts, too. Make sure that you have room to think about things that are funny or inspiring. These help to boost your energy. The way to do that is to find things that helps to motivate you in that area.

If it’s weight loss, think about success stories. If it’s something with a relationship, think about the good in that relationship and the reason why working on it is your goal. When you think about things that motivate you, it causes your brain to start thinking about how you can accomplish what you want in that area.

You’ll notice that as your mental energy grows, so does your physical energy. Just like your body needs a refresh time after a hard workout, so does your brain. When you’ve spent time working on something that takes you closer to your goal or you’ve put in a heavy decision-making time, then you have to relax mentally. Take the time to practice something like a mantra or meditation. This helps your mind to relax as well as helps you to stay energizes.