Why “you just need more motivation” is usually the wrong advice

There is a rather inconvenient piece of neuroscience that gets left out of most conversations about motivation. 

Your brain does not particularly like effort.

It is constantly making calculations about whether something is worth the energy it will cost you. That calculation is happening whether you're deciding whether to go for a run, finish a difficult piece of work, resist the cigarette you've promised yourself you wouldn't have, or get off the sofa when you are perfectly comfortable where you are.

And somewhere in the middle of all this sits a fascinating region called the anterior midcingulate cortex, or aMCC.

It doesn't sound particularly glamorous. It is, however, one of the more interesting places in the brain if you want to understand why some difficult things gradually become easier.

Researchers studying the aMCC have linked it to the evaluation and mobilisation of effort, goal-directed behaviour and what they call tenacity, continuing towards something when the reward isn't immediate and the effort is real. It sits at a crossroads between systems involved in motivation, movement, emotion, attention and our perception of what is happening inside the body.

Which leads to a rather different way of thinking about motivation.

Maybe the answer isn't to feel more motivated and maybe some of the experiences we routinely try to avoid are actually part of how the brain learns that effort can be tolerated, managed and worthwhile.

Your brain has a cost calculator

Imagine you're sitting at home on a cold Tuesday evening.

You had planned to exercise.

Your brain doesn't simply ask, “Do I want to be healthy?”

That is far too simplistic.

It is dealing with a much more immediate calculation: How much effort will this take? How tired am I? What will I get from doing it? What else could I be doing?

Is the reward worth the cost?

Neuroscience increasingly views motivation in this kind of cost-benefit framework. The aMCC is one of the regions involved in integrating information about effort, anticipated reward, bodily energy and goal-directed action.

This explains something most people discover the hard way.

Knowing that something is good for you does not automatically make it feel worth doing.

Your future health is a rather abstract reward.

The warmth of the sofa is extremely immediate.

The cigarette relieves the craving now.

The walk may make you feel better later.

The chocolate is in your hand already.

Your brain is not stupid for noticing the difference.

It is doing its job.

Then something rather remarkable happens when you keep going

Suppose you start exercising.

At first, everything feels effortful. You have to remember your kit. You have to get yourself there. You have to work out what you're doing. The movements feel unfamiliar. You notice every uncomfortable sensation.

There is a lot for the brain to process but repetition changes the equation.

Not because your brain suddenly decides exercise is wonderful simply because experience gives it better information.

Yes, let it sit a moment…experience retrains your brain.

You learn what the effort feels like. You learn that you can tolerate it. You learn what happens afterwards. You learn how long it lasts. You learn that the uncomfortable part doesn't necessarily mean stop. You become more skilled. The behaviour becomes more familiar.

OHH, now the brain can begin to make different predictions about the cost.

This is where neuroplasticity becomes much more interesting than the usual “your brain can rewire itself” slogan.

Neuroplasticity isn't magic. IT REQUIRES INTENTIONALITY AT FIRST and a little support.

It doesn't mean that every unpleasant experience automatically makes you mentally stronger. Nor does it mean that you should simply push through pain or distress.

It means that the nervous system changes in response to experience.

The aMCC is particularly interesting because researchers propose that it helps integrate the information required to decide whether effort is worth deploying in pursuit of a goal. Studies and reviews have linked its activity to demanding cognitive and physical tasks, persistence and goal pursuit.

In other words, challenge gives the brain something to learn from and that has a surprisingly useful implication for everyday behaviour change.

The goal isn't to make everything easy

We have become very good at designing lives around avoiding friction.

One click and the food arrives. One swipe and there is another video.

The lift is beside the stairs. The phone remembers everything.

Entertainment is available instantly.

And when it comes to health, we sometimes apply the same philosophy. If something feels difficult, we assume we need a better hack, a better app, a better supplement, a better motivational technique.

Let me break it to you, some amount of difficulty is unavoidable.

More importantly, difficulty isn't necessarily evidence that something is going wrong. Learning to lift a weight is difficult before it becomes familiar as well learning to tolerate a craving is difficult before it becomes familiar and learning to sit with the urge to reach for food, a cigarette or your phone can be difficult before the urge loses some of its power.

Learning to continue with something when you would rather stop is difficult.

The interesting question is not whether the experience is uncomfortable.

It is whether the challenge is appropriate and meaningful.

That distinction matters enormously.

This doesn't mean “push through”

There is a dangerous version of this idea that goes something like:

Discomfort is good. Therefore, more discomfort is better.

No!!

The brain isn't a boot camp instructor.

If you're injured, severely sleep-deprived, overwhelmed or in significant pain, simply forcing yourself through it isn't evidence of superior neuroscience. The aMCC doesn't give us permission to ignore the signals coming from the rest of the nervous system.In fact, one of its interesting characteristics is precisely that it sits within a network integrating bodily and cognitive information. Motivation involves assessing both the anticipated value of an action and the energetic cost of pursuing it.

So the useful lesson isn't “make life harder.”

It is:

Don't automatically interpret effort as a reason to stop.

There is a difference.

Here is where health coaching methodology shows its power in helping.        

Your brain needs experiences of “I can do this”

This is where the neuroscience becomes relevant to behaviour change.If every attempt at change is enormous, painful and unsustainable, the brain receives very little evidence of successful mastery. When, if you choose a challenge that is genuinely demanding while still achievable, something different can happen.

You experience the effort.

You complete the action.

You discover that the anticipated cost wasn't quite what you expected.

You do it again.

The brain gets another data point.

Over time, the story can shift from:

This is too much.

to:

This is difficult, but I know how to do difficult.

That is a much more useful form of confidence than telling yourself to “believe in yourself”.

It is earned confidence.

It is one reason I find the aMCC so fascinating. Researchers describe it not as a single “motivation centre”, but as a hub that brings together information relevant to effort, action, reward, attention and bodily state in the service of goals.

Your brain is, in effect, learning what you are prepared to work for.

There is a catch

The same system that helps us persist can also decide that something isn't worth the effort.

This is important because sometimes what looks like a motivation problem is actually a value problem.

If someone keeps telling themselves they should exercise because their doctor told them to, but exercise has no personal meaning to them, the brain has very little reason to value the effort beyond an abstract future benefit.

Change the meaning and you may change the calculation.

Perhaps exercise means being able to walk around a city on holiday without worrying about your knees and stopping smoking means being able to climb the stairs without getting breathless or perhaps changing breakfast isn't about “being good” but about having enough energy to get through the afternoon without raiding the biscuit tin.

The behaviour hasn't necessarily changed.

The reason for doing it has.

Motivation is not independent of value. The neuroscience of effort repeatedly comes back to the question of whether the anticipated outcome justifies the cost.

That is a much richer conversation than “How can I make myself more disciplined?”

Maybe we have been asking the wrong question

Instead of asking:

How do I stay motivated?

it may be more useful to ask:

What kind of challenge am I willing to practise?

Because every time we practise a behaviour, we're doing more than completing a task.

We're gathering evidence. Evidence about what we can tolerate, about what matters to us, about what gets in the way, about what becomes easier with repetition and eventually, perhaps, evidence about who we are.

That last part is where behaviour change gets particularly interesting. Research has found a substantial relationship between health behaviour, habit and identity: what we repeatedly do can become intertwined with how we understand ourselves.

You don't necessarily become someone who exercises because you finally discovered an unlimited supply of motivation.

You may become someone who exercises because, after enough experiences of effort followed by achievement, your brain has accumulated a different expectation of what you do.

The woman who once hated the gym floor can eventually become the person who feels strange when she doesn't train.

Not because every workout became easy. Because going became normal.

And that is a very different thing.

The more useful definition of motivation

Ok, so motivation isn't the feeling that makes you leap out of bed. Perhaps it is the brain's ongoing answer to a much more interesting question:

Is this worth the effort?

Sometimes the answer will be no. Sometimes you genuinely need rest.

Sometimes the goal isn't yours. Sometimes the challenge is badly designed.

And sometimes you simply don't feel like doing it.

But there are also moments when the answer is yes, and you go anyway.

You discover that the difficult thing was survivable.

Then you do it again. And again.

The brain learns.

Not that life should never be uncomfortable but that you can meet a challenge without immediately retreating from it.

That is not motivation as a mood.

It is motivation as a capacity.

The Ciao Change perspective

I don't want people to spend their lives trying to manufacture motivation.

I want them to understand their own brains well enough to work with them.

Sometimes that means making a behaviour easier or changing the environment. Sometimes it means finding a reason that genuinely matters and sometimes it means something much simpler:

doing the thing that feels a little difficult, safely, deliberately and often enough for your brain to discover that difficult does not mean impossible.

The strongest person isn't the one who never struggles, it's the person whose brain has learned:

“I've done hard things before. I can do this one too. What I’m doing is in line with my value of…”

Sources and further reading

• Shenhav A, et al. Toward a Rational and Mechanistic Account of Mental Effort. Annual Review of Neuroscience. 2017;40:99–124. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-neuro-072116-031526.

• Steimke R, et al. The Tenacious Brain: How the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Contributes to Achieving Goals. Cortex. 2020;123:12–29. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.09.011.

• Touroutoglou A, et al. Motivation in the Service of Allostasis: The Role of Anterior Mid Cingulate Cortex. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 2019. PMID: 31788441.

• Vogt BA. Midcingulate cortex: Structure, connections, homologies, functions and diseases. Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy. 2016;74:28–39. DOI: 10.1016/j.jchemneu.2016.01.010.

• Zhu L, et al. The relationship between habit and identity in health behaviors: A systematic review and three-level meta-analysis. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. 2025;17(2):e70017. DOI: 10.1111/aphw.70017.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only, even if and regardless of whether it features the advice of physicians and medical practitioners. This article is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice. The views expressed in this article are the views of the expert and do not necessarily represent the views of Ciao Change Ltd unless specified under “The Ciao Change perspective” section.