Surely you are familiar with this
Every day you literally have to lift your head from the pillow, which in the morning seems even softer, warmer and more comfortable. Having hastily drunk coffee, we are forced to freeze in the rain, standing at a public transport stop. The bus always trudges along as if it is running on the last drop of gasoline. When we enter the factory entrance or open the office door, we realize that we are late once again. Trying not to think about what the boss will say, we try to collect our thoughts and start doing something, but our mood is already ruined for the whole day. We have absolutely no desire to take any active actions, and time seems to have frozen in place. What should I do? How to force yourself to work if you don’t want to work at all?
Finding the essence of the problem
There are a huge number of reasons why a person begins to look for any effective ways to force himself to work if he doesn’t want to. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is gather your thoughts and try to figure out what is happening inside you. The best thing is to take a pen and a piece of paper on which you can write down everything that does not suit you. This will help create a superficial idea of what exactly is preventing you from concentrating on work. If you have excluded all the points you wrote down, but no significant changes have occurred, then you need to dig deeper.
Working in your specialty is not a joy
I don’t want to work in my specialty: what should I do? We choose the specialty for which to study at school or adolescence. We often follow the path suggested by our parents, without taking into account the child’s inclinations and desires .
As a result, disappointment - the chosen type of activity does not please you or there is no ability for it at all.
A person can work in a position he doesn’t like until retirement, guided by what he learned, spent time and money.
Another fear is change. You don’t know how to change your life, job, company, you’re afraid of change, you doubt what if it doesn’t work out, you make a mistake, and there’s nowhere to go back.
Work is one of the areas of life that should bring pleasure and money. If it does not satisfy you, then the only right decision is to change it . It doesn't matter how old you are.
You can always take additional retraining courses or even get a second higher education.
Think realistically about what is stopping you - fear, uncertainty about the future - work on your emotions .
The further you go, the deeper the fears and the more difficult it is to start life again. If you don’t like your job, change it , you have nothing to lose except your bad mood, fatigue and eternal dissatisfaction with what is happening around you.
Roots of problems
For most people, the word “work” evokes negative emotions, which are usually associated with an unsuccessful first experience. Perhaps there are those who, as teenagers, thought that studying at the institute was a waste of time. You can often hear something like this from young people: “Why spend years studying rules and formulas that only confuse your head and are not at all useful in adult life? Moreover, they don’t pay for it!” People begin to think about how, after graduation, a good job will appear and life will no longer resemble “Groundhog Day.”
But after receiving a diploma and getting a job, new complaints arise: “I can’t find a common language in the team, I don’t see the point of working hard for pennies, I’m doing uninteresting work, I’m turning into office plankton,” etc. Such complaints almost never arise out of nowhere. place. If you look at each one separately, the claims will seem completely justified and fair. But in reality, the root of all troubles must be sought elsewhere. The main mistake you made: you couldn’t learn to deal with routine. Previously, it was study for you, but today it is work.
It seemed to you that work would be radically different from boring classes, that life would completely change the dynamics. But, as a rule, both of these activities are a real routine that drains the last of your strength. It’s as if you find yourself in a vicious circle that negatively affects the psyche, destroying it with its monotony. You would like to strive for something more, but you stand motionless exactly in the center of this vicious circle, not knowing where the exit is or how to stop the system that uses your potential only for its own benefit. It is very much like a clockwork mechanism, within which you are a small cog.
Professional burnout?
Well, now we come to the most terrible and dangerous. How do you understand that you are burned out at work, and why did this happen? Let's understand the terms.
Interesting!
Psychological burnout (PB, sometimes you can find the synonym “chronic fatigue syndrome,” although it is not entirely correct) is emotional and physical exhaustion, accompanied by apathy, avoidance of social contacts, low self-esteem, cynicism, and changes in the usual lifestyle.
In part, the symptoms of PV are similar to depression, but the latter is a more serious disease, which often requires drug treatment.
Maybe I'm already burning out: where is the line?
Psychologists have made several suggestions why we lose interest in work (and, as a result, in life):
- constant increased stress at work
- fast pace of life and poor quality rest, lack of proper recovery
- tense atmosphere in the team
- lack of motivation and encouragement from colleagues and management
- It is also believed that there are people more susceptible to burnout: those who take everything to heart, impressionable, emotional
- working with a large flow of people
But, one way or another, all these reasons can be reduced to three defining ones: poor quality rest, lack of positive assessment from management and poorly organized work process. As you can see, whether we burn out at work or not depends on many factors, and they are not always under our control.
Although we need to be completely honest and say one disappointing thing - PV is almost inevitable in our lives. No matter where we work, there is a very high chance that one day we will get tired of all this and will not have the strength to change. The only question is when this will happen. It is possible to avoid burnout, but under almost ideal conditions, when you are lucky with your job, have good management, and have a good balance between work and rest. But let's talk about everything point by point.
How to understand what has hit you?
Oh, this state cannot be confused with anything. Here is just a small list of symptoms:
- constant fatigue even after a weekend, vacation, after just an hour of work
- decreased performance
- apathy, bad mood
- constant irritation, anger, even hatred towards colleagues
- cynicism towards work and people
- problems with concentration, inattention
- It’s difficult to start even simple tasks
- physical illness, problems sleeping and eating
- heightened sense of inferiority and dissatisfaction with the work done
- anxiety and nervousness
Note!
With PV, these symptoms appear en masse, and not individually. This cannot be attributed to laziness and “bad” character.
With such a set it is very difficult to live normally. Almost the entire way of life and habitual rhythm changes, all areas of life suffer. If you neglect your condition, it will develop into a severe psychological disorder.
What measures to take against burnout?
Do you recognize yourself and want to take action? It is urgent to rest and do it right. No correspondence at work, documents, conversations with colleagues. Do only what you love. Ideally, change your location completely, for example, go to nature, turn off your phone and not take your laptop.
Turn cons into pros
By immersing yourself in such a routine, you have the opportunity to test your own resilience and willpower. Remember that a person who fails to become a good “cog” will never be a good manager of the whole mechanism.
So, if you are looking for ways to increase your productivity when you don’t feel like working, first of all, learn how to cope with your responsibilities flawlessly. Use monotony to your advantage, because this is a great opportunity to hone your own skills. Prove to everyone in the world that no one can do your job better than you. If you are an agronomist, then become an indispensable worker who, for example, significantly increased the yield in the entire region. If you are a manager, you simply must make sure that a potential client becomes real and is ready to buy even a bucket of snow in winter.
Situational restrictions
If an employee fails to complete a task on time, this is usually attributed to bad character traits. Management perceives this as lack of will, laziness and irresponsibility of the employee. But is it?
Psychology professor Devon Price believes that the reason people procrastinate isn't because of a lack of conscientiousness. After all, character traits, intelligence and willpower do not always determine an individual’s behavior.
According to the scientist, work productivity is largely influenced by situational restrictions. What it is? There are various psychological obstacles that significantly impair work productivity. Experts believe that the following factors may affect performance:
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- low self-esteem;
- fear of failure;
- fear of a large amount of work;
- depression and other mental health problems.
For example, a student puts off preparing for a session until the last few days, and then gets a low grade on the exam. Teachers may blame him for laziness. However, depression or other mental health problems may be the cause of poor academic performance. Not every young person is ready to talk about his condition to his classmates and teachers.
There are also cases when applicants for an academic degree give up working on their dissertation. At first glance, it may seem that the reason for this is laziness. But in fact, a person experiences fear of a large amount of work and possible failure. These psychological factors are completely removable.
Creative
If such arguments seem like some kind of sarcasm to you, then you are deeply mistaken. Using the example of one Russian janitor living in Omsk, it can be argued that selling snow and using a creative approach is a fairly profitable activity. In 2015, this man was selling snowmen via the Internet. At that time, there was a relatively warm, snowless winter in Siberia, so the man had no problems finding buyers. Become such a “Russian janitor”, learn to realize your own potential to the maximum and get from it not only material profit, but also pleasure.
Who am I?
The most common mistake teenagers make is the wrong choice of a future profession. This is what most often leads to depression and thinking about what to do if you don’t want to go to work. Where should this desire come from if, for example, you spent six years at college, after which you got a job as a public sector employee, and deep down in your heart you dream of a career as a federal agent or stuntman? Every day you sit surrounded by a pile of documentation, understanding practically nothing of it, while an exorbitant amount of energy is concentrated inside you, which could be spent on stunning stunts and become a real movie star. But you continue to waste your time, looking for ways to force yourself to work when you don’t want to do anything at all.
Procrastination
Psychologists rarely use the term “laziness.” If a person constantly puts off important things until later, then experts call it procrastination. This condition creates big problems in life and at work.
At the same time, the person realizes the importance of completing tasks. But he is not in the mood and everything falls out of his hands. Even if such an employee takes up the job, labor productivity becomes extremely low.
A person experiences a feeling of guilt and shame for missing deadlines for completing a task. If a boss reproaches and condemns an employee, this causes severe stress, which seriously reduces self-esteem. As a result, labor productivity falls even lower.
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How to get out of this situation
First of all, there is no need to make sudden movements. It is necessary to analyze the current situation, to realize what exactly brought you to the idea of what to do if you don’t want to work. Try to listen to your inner voice and imagine yourself working in the direction that you like. If you are sure that everything can be changed radically, think about how to get the desired specialty quickly and with minimal material losses.
It's best to take a vacation. You will have enough time to make an informed decision that will not be based solely on emotions. Perhaps you will come to the realization that you simply lacked a banal break. Once you gain strength, you will no longer think about drastic changes, such as changing your profession. Also remember that in any case you will have to work hard (if, of course, you want to earn good money). If you change the type of activity, then only to one that will bring you true pleasure. Maybe you really understand something as well as any professional, and with a diploma in your hands you will have a chance not only to prove yourself, but also to receive fair payment for your knowledge.
Why don't you want to go to work?
Since you are reading this article, then you most likely want to know about some obvious reasons that cause a certain aversion to work. From time immemorial, this phenomenon had a brief description - laziness. Modern society calls it a more elegant word - procrastination. But all these are just labels that do not provide an explanation at all to the question: “What to do if you don’t want to work?”, and also do not reveal the essence of the problem.
The whole problem is deep in our consciousness. In the psyche of every person there is a kind of reserve of energy from which we receive the necessary resources to solve a particular problem. The moment you begin to think about taking an action, your brain makes a detailed forecast of the future outcome. To make it clear to you how everything happens, we can give an example. Let's say you are about to cross the road in the wrong place and look around. Your brain instantly processes the information received, makes complex calculations and gives you a fairly accurate forecast of the likelihood that you will end up under the wheels of a vehicle.
If you are constantly busy with something that is not interesting to you, and also do not take your immediate responsibilities seriously, your brain does not bother much when calculating the forecast, giving out incorrect parameters. The result is poor results and a pessimistic mood. This prevents you from focusing the next day, and so on and so forth. The necessary energy is released, but the efficiency factor is zero, and you begin to think what to do if you don’t want to work. The only option is to drink coffee in large doses in order to somehow force yourself to act.
In focus
Many people absolutely cannot bring themselves to work, shifting even the most important tasks to the next day. They are afraid to turn to specialists for help, trying to figure out on their own what to do when they don’t feel like working at all. If you have exactly the same problem, then try to learn to focus your attention not on the process itself, but on achievements. Don’t sort through your whole work day, but imagine that you have already completed all the duties assigned to you and are standing in the office of your boss, who is scattering compliments. Think about how he praises you and gives you an example to other employees who, unlike you, are not able to achieve positive results. This kind of exercise will awaken your interest in the work process.
Also, don’t be shy about leaving a variety of “motivating carrots” on your desktop. You can even come up with your own motto, write it down on a piece of paper and hang it in an empty space. This will help you for a while get rid of the obsessive thought of what to do if you don’t feel like working.
Summing up
We hope that the methods mentioned in the article helped you understand how to start working when you don’t want to do anything at all. Remember that these types of problems arise due to:
- lack of motivation;
- negative emotions;
- unclear or uninteresting work;
- physical fatigue.
Before you throw ashes on your head, try to find the root of the problem, and by eliminating it, you will no longer think about what to do if you don’t want to work. By applying some of the techniques that were given in our article, you can increase your productivity, relieve internal stress, and also look at the world from a completely different perspective. Perhaps you have been minding your own business for many years and the time has come for drastic changes.
Computer game tester
Here it is, the ideal job for those who are forced to find time and hide from the boss in order to complete the next level of their favorite game right in the office. That's it, you can no longer hide, but turn your hobby (which at your current job is called idleness) into a profession. A game tester should simply go through them from beginning to end, record all the problems that arise and (attention, the most time-consuming part!) write a report. That is, in addition to a passion for games, you also need to have the ability to express yourself more or less clearly.
