Staying motivated in school
Staying Motivated in life is something a lot of people, or maybe even everyone struggles with at a point in their life, whether it's for school, work, or just finding purpose. I know from experience that if you have no motivation in life, that will make everything 100x harder, which can cause a chain reaction and ruin a person mentally. Finding motivation is hard but once you do it makes life easier and you will have a better quality of life. In this science blog im going to talk about ways to find motivation and stay motivated. This seems like a pretty bland topic, but surprisingly a lot of people struggle with everyday motivation, a lot more than you think
Motivation and depression
Motivation is a pretty broad topic to write about, but the thing I struggle with the most is staying motivated in school, and apparently, it's not only me, according to the Mayo Clinic of health 44% of college students suffer from depression, and anxiety just from all the stress that comes with school. I bring this statistic up because a lot of people with depression have a lack of motivation in some way, and 44% is a pretty big percentage, if everyone in school was strongly motivated by something I'm sure that percentage would drop a lot.
School Motivation
Earlier in my life, my point of view with school was it’s hard to stay motivated for something when you have no guarantee anything positive will come out of it. I learned the hard way after a while and realized this isn’t the greatest mindset to have especially if I'm going to go to college. I realized this the hard way in high school when work started piling up and I just wouldn’t do much about it because I had no reason to other than the fact that I had to. At a point in my life school caused so much stress I wouldn’t even go most days, that quickly changed when my grades dropped, and I wasn’t able to participate in the first couple of weeks during track season. Reality really hit me after that couple of weeks and I had to find my “why” or I knew I wouldn’t be successful in school if I didn’t. Once I found my why I feel like it changed me completely and made me become a better student entirely. I got assignments in on time and ensured the quality of the assignments was pretty high. All of this rambling brings me to my main topic and what I wanted to blog about and that's writing motivation
Writing Motivation
According to Flower and Hayes (1981), writing is composed of planning, translating, reviewing, and revising. During the planning phase, writers form an internal representation of the knowledge that will be used. Writers make a lot of decisions that influence what is written. In effect, they exert agency over the writing process, as they decide to undertake the task, determine how much effort to commit, formulate their intentions, determine their ownership over the writing task, and decide what cognitive resources to apply. These facts just show how much time and thinking goes into writing, and without writing motivation doing all of that is probably the hardest thing ever. Writing is one of the hardest classes not because of workload specifically, but just because it’s so hard to write a good paper, especially when it’s about a topic you have 0 to no interest in. This is why I think that if you’re actually into what you’re writing that will boost your motivation to turn in a good paper just because it doesn’t necessarily seem like “work” but something you wrote on your own and because you’re interested. There are a few ways you can get into what you’re writing about if you don't necessarily know much about the topic. The most obvious way would be to just do more research on it and try to really understand the material, once you understand the material you’ll find it way easier to write about a topic, which in a way that can make it “fun” or more exciting. Another way is to just try to embrace the topic and assignment instead of just treating it like it's irrelevant and just more work to do.
I think finding motivation is something everyone should be able to do, but sadly not everyone can. I think that finding you why is the step in the right direction for finding motivation, after finding you why will remind you of why you’re even in college and what you want in your future which will hopefully push you in the right direction. Motivation comes in many different types of forms for everyone so if you can’t find out your why may be thinking about what your future will look like will spark some motivation. That played a huge role in my motivation for college because I know I'm not just taking all of these classes and doing all of this work for no reason, but because I know I want to be successful in the future, and a college degree really makes those chances higher. Since this is really intended for college students I know anyone reading this can relate, not many people go to college for no reason at all.
So as you can see I think motivation plays a huge role in someone's life and if you can find a motivator strong enough you won’t be stopped and will be able to make it past all the bumps in the road that show up during college. Even if it takes weeks or months to find a motivator you should never stop trying because once you find it you will have a successful college experience.