"Unmotivated" is a pretty charged keyword you can find in mental health / self development subreddits. While every individual will ultimately have their deeply personal reasons for ending up in this unmotivated state, there are some pieces of general knowledge that can help you understand this unmotivated state.

I think a slightly better way to put it is, the "unmotivated" state is likely the result of two key misunderstandings about how life is supposed to work.

Unmotivated is a natural state we learned to shame

Let's think about hunger. Hunger is a natural part of a human being's sustenance cycle that complements satiety. When we look at unhealthy relationships with food, we find that we antagonize the natural states of hunger and satiety.

We think to ourselves, "oh my god, am I seriously hungry again? What a pig". When we're full, we think "I'm going to have to work so hard to lose all the calories I just devoured". We assign artificial classifications on our natural feelings to make them good or bad.

Our natural state has many of these binaries, and it all stems from the interaction between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. We see this in blood sugar regulation, inhale/exhale, exercise/fatigue, and so on.

The Core Misunderstanding

The unmotivated state is a part of our natural experience of life. We have times we're motivated, then we have times we're not motivated. But when we classify the unmotivated state as bad and motivated state as good, we're living half of our life in a good state and the other half in bad.

This is supposed to be like a 50/50 experience but reality is a bit different. When you're motivated you'll be too worried about losing the motivation and when you're unmotivated you'll be beating yourself up. After a few cycles of this you start internalizing this follow-up: 'Hmm, it seems like every time I get motivated it ends up not feeling great'. So your unconscious mind starts averting yourself from motivation itself.

And it all starts because of that shameful artificial classification. It's actually okay for you to be unmotivated, there is no problem with being in that state.

We mistake the feeling of motivation as a requirement for getting into action

When I present my conclusion from the above point, the #1 pushback I receive is this: "But how can I get anything done without being motivated?". And this is the second misunderstanding.

We think we need to feel motivated to do something. But if you sit down to think about it, anybody can totally do anything they're not motivated to do.

It's just that we don't want to do it. This is the actual problem that 90% of people deal with. You just don't want to do it! You never taught yourself or learned from elsewhere how to do something you don't want to do.

The thing is, this isn't something we really need to learn how to do. If I don't want to go to the gym, it's not a matter of "I don't know how to go to the gym". I already know how to go to the gym, it's just that I don't want to and I've never really taught myself how to do something I don't want to do with ease. I ONLY know how to do something I don't want to do with stress.

Underneath this thought pattern there's an underlying tradeoff.

  1. When we do something at the time of feeling like it, it's so easy, fun, and effortless.
  2. When we do something without feeling like it, it's so hard and stressful.

Because we are optimizing creatures of habit we naturally prefer #1. Sure, we may take a long time to do something or we may not be motivated in the time frame required to do the action, but when it DOES hit it's so easy and instant. Sounds a lot like a dopamine hit, doesn't it?

The choice, if you want to move your life forward regardless of motivation, comes down to this:

The Real Choice

Do I want to rely on something I can't control to live my life, or do I want to rely on ME, even if it may be challenging at first, to live my life?

There is no better option, it's just two options with different trade-offs. But too many of us think we need to be a certain way while being a different way.

To save a lot of headache, start by picking one lane. You'll rely on the chance-based motivation or time frames to get your work done, but as you're not doing the work you have a lot of free time to explore other things instead of getting stressed. OR you'll rely on yourself and experience a lot of resistance at first, but you're building a relationship with yourself that you can count on over and over reliably.