Homeostasis is used in biology to describe the tendency of a system towards equilibrium. When it is hot our body sweats. When is cold we shiver. But that force is not only biological. Believe it or not, there is a mental homeostasis that is at work on your mind. Your body and mind want to stay the way they are. It’s a physiological phenomenon.
Think about times when you are overflowing with confidence and motivation. We can agree that this is a good thing. But compared to the state your mind was in yesterday, this an abnormal state.
If you just let things go without putting them in check your life might be endangered. And so homeostasis comes in and starts to work on you. In the end you end up wondering what it was that you got so worked up about at all. Have you ever gotten excited at night time and scribbled down some goals, or a company plan, or maybe some poetry, and then woken up in the morning and taken another look at what you wrote?
When something is out of its normal bounds, homeostasis will try to pull you back to your normal state. This is of course not always a bad thing. It saves us a lot of trouble as well. Like when your boss says something stupid to you and you make up your mind to quit, and you run around the office telling every one how this will be your last day and all that. But once you sleep on it you come to work then next day just like nothing had happened at all.
Let’s say that you wake up and say to yourself, “I don’t know about this,” or, “I’m not sure I want to do that.” Take these little negative emotions, blow them up to absurd proportions and let them out. Say, “A little difficult? Ha! There is no way an idiot like me could do something like that!” or “There’s no way I want to do something like that!”
It’s a lot like high altitude climbing. If you just run up a mountain you will find yourself coming down with altitude sickness. To climb a mountain you need to climb in steps, allow your body to get used to the change and then continue on. Ironically, going slowly is the quickest way to change.
When you feel yourself getting really excited its best to try and calm yourself down. The amount that you shoot up will be the same amount you crash down later. It doesn’t mean that you have run out of motivation, or that you are a bad person, it is simply homeostasis at work.
In my book Shift I purpose many other methods and exercises that allow readers to understand motivation and how to control it and use it to an advantage.
Takumi Yamazaki
_______________
Takumi Yamazaki is a best selling author in Japan. He has authored ten successful titles in the category of business which have sold a cumulative total of over eight hundred thousand copies including the recently published, Shift: 13 Exercises to Make You Who You Want to Be. A self-made millionaire, Takumi travels around the world giving seminars on motivation. He presently lives in Tokyo, Japan.
-What do you think of the ideas shared above? Do you have any ideas that you would like to share on how to motivate others and best use that motivation? Please use the comments below to share.