You Aren't Motivated Because of Black-and-white Thinking

Many struggle with knowing where to start. They may know what they want, or at least have some general sense of it, but cannot seem to motivate themselves to pursue it. While it's true that difficulty with beginning tasks is associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and major depressive disorder, being symptoms of both, and obsessive compulsive disorder, which entails analysis paralysis, it is also associated with the way we perceive the world and how we tend to learn about it.

Some people meaningfully struggle with conceptual overlap. This means that fuzzy categories scare them. To them, a thing is either a thing or it isn't. Very binary; very black-and-white. The world only makes sense when everything in it is neatly organized and categorized. So, if you're this type of person, it's easy to divide up your successes and failures. There are those things in which you naturally excel and those that feel impossible to complete. Missing the overlap between the categories, it then becomes just as easy to avoid engaging with the latter group. Why bother if you're just going to fail? In this rigid world, the question feels nonsensical because its answer is seemingly self-evident. Therefore, one ought to continue to only engage in tasks that feel achievable.

In treatment, this individual may tell you all about why one set of tasks is manageable and another isn't, believing they possess a perfect understanding of how things are. They will inform you of all of the ways they manage to motivate themselves to initiate and complete the manageable set while telling you why none of that can apply to the other set. Engaging in one set may feel more natural, automatic, routine and predictable. And the other may feel too open, chaotic and unstructured. Again, black-and-white thinking. One set is this; the other is that. Yet, how often is anything that bifurcated?

Please select this link to read the complete article from Psychology Today.