Expert Health and Lifestyle Coach Shares Tips for Improving Our Relationship with Motivation

Whether you’re trying to start a new fitness journey or push past certain barriers to reach a new goal, you may feel you’ve hit a wall with your routine and are struggling to stay motivated.

It might be you’re no longer challenging yourself in the gym or avoiding exercise altogether because you’re struggling to find the get up and go you need to keep active.

Thankfully, leading health club brand, Total Fitness has partnered with renowned health and lifestyle coach, Milla Lascelles, as part of their Motivation Space campaign, to help increase motivation and tackle any barriers head on.

Milla has shared her top tips to help you feel more motivated and insights into how you can incorporate them into your everyday life – meaning you’ll be able to reach your desired goals quicker.

Understand Yourself

When setting new routines, it’s easy to procrastinate and say ’I’ll start tomorrow’ or ’next week I’ll be healthy’, but I always say just start from where you are today. It’s rather like ‘destination happiness’ when we say things like, ‘when I move house I‘ll be happy’ or ‘when I meet someone I’ll be happy’ – until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are, and will always seem slightly out of reach.

One thing I talk a lot about during meditation practices is us never being present. We’re constantly in the past or the future where fear and anxiety sit. If you need to get back on the horse, put the power back in your hands – it’s important to just stop and pause and use mindfulness to connect to your ‘why.’ Why do you need to make changes? A lot of the time we know what we need to do to feel better, but we just struggle to find the motivation to start.

Build a Routine You’ll Stick To

One of the best ways to help build and maintain a new routine, whether exercise related or general lifestyle, is to start small. As humans, we love to set ourselves up to fail. We start by writing huge to-do lists, they’re unrealistic and we never get through them, resulting in us feeling like we have failed. It’s incredibly important to start by ‘habit stacking’ on a really small scale and building from that. Habit stacking is when you build a new habit onto a current habit you do already each day, so that they are more manageable and often fit into your lifestyle without even thinking about it.

The more you do something in your everyday life the stronger that connection in your brain becomes. This can be something as simple as after making your morning coffee, sitting down for one minute and doing diaphragmatic breathing, or when you come in after work and take your shoes off, automatically drinking a large glass of water.

Incorporate Exercise

Maintaining a regular fitness routine can often be a great way to improve motivation, as we know that when we move our bodies, we release happy endorphins. There are a huge number of studies that show when people exercise on a regular basis, they experience a boost in mood and lower rates of depression. It’s called a ‘runners high’ for a reason, describing the feeling they have after a run as ‘euphoric’.

Exercise can boost self-esteem, help manage stress, and benefit your sleep, which in turn has a positive impact on your mental health. Self-esteem is the way we see ourselves, our self-worth and our ability to cope with life stressors, meaning when we physically move our bodies it has a positive impact.

Invest In Your Sleep Schedule

There are many different factors that affect people’s motivation. One of the main reasons is not having a restful sleep and falling into an REM (rapid eye movement) state, meaning even though you’ve woken up after eight hours of sleep, you may be feeling exhausted and totally unmotivated. There can be a host of reasons why you haven’t slept deeply – this could be alcohol related, coffee related, or even down to the electronic devices we use before bed – as the blue light from our screen time depletes our melatonin which effects our sleep. Additionally, if you experience stress in your life, you may be procrastinating which means you’re stuck in an avoidance mode rather than drive mode, which can also affect motivation. Perhaps you have a huge roadblock ahead of you and the reason you can’t get through it is down to fear? Again, feeling fear towards something can affect motivation.

As such, low motivation can make people irritable and angry. It can make someone feel unworthy and often they tend to beat themselves up about it. Low motivation may also mean you’re in self-sabotage mode so you turn to habits that don’t serve you. These habits may be scrolling too much, turning to processed junk food, not moving the body, which in turn will make you feel lethargic and perhaps anxious – lowering your motivation.

So, if you’ve found yourself struggling to get into the right frame of mind and your motivation is at an all-time low, try incorporating some of these simple steps into your routine to help you get back on track to setting and reaching your goals.