What gets your juices flowing? What do you do regardless of reward or recognition? No-one's asked you to do it, no-one's paying you to do it, but you do it anyway, because it makes you happy.

If there is anything at all, you have hit the gold standard, you have nailed intrinsic motivation, a doorway to life satisfaction, meaning, purpose and flow.

The ability to be make ourselves happy, independent of anyone else, or any external factors (like wealth, geography, a network of contacts etc) is a bonafide superpower.

It is perhaps the single most important skill we will stumble across in our lives.

It can give our lives meaning, when perhaps things aren't going our way - and give us the necessary fortitude and willingness to persevere, even if we are not receiving validation for our efforts.

It's the polar opposite of obligation.

This is something we do purely because we want to, because there is something about this activity that means something to us, that has value. 

It allows us to experience that feeling of autonomy in a singular area of our lives, even when we lack it in others.

And it means we can actually have thrilling inner lives even if we appear to be living distinctly average outer ones.


The Work Of Edward Deci

Intrinsic motivation theorist Edward Deci first realised this as a kid, as most of us do (and as he discusses in the first video, below).

He recognised that there were certain classes at school that gripped him, while others left him cold and no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't muster up the same levels of enthusiasm for them.


Natural Inclinations

He had stumbled across the idea that we have natural inclinations towards certain topics or activities which become a key factor in successfully meeting key psychological needs.

He ascertains that it is the honouring of these principles that can lay the pathways to the areas of our lives that are essential to our psychological well-being: feeling happy, experiencing life satisfaction, feeling that we are valued, that we are good at something, feeling a sense of control of our lives and having a sense of purpose:

The 3 Requirements

There are three key requirements that need to be met in order to achieve this, he explains and it's the third that raises eyebrows:

We need to feel competent or effective, we need relatedness and we need autonomy:

The Problem With Control

On the other side, "controlled motivation" is about doing something because we feel we have to, whether that pressure comes from other people, society-at-large, material gain - or even ourselves. And needless to say, it's not a great place to be in.

Feeling controlled, micro-managed, coerced with rewards (even if it is with attractive sums of money), in a job we don't like can make us lose interest, sap our motivation and make us money-oriented.

And that can hammer us psychologically, says Deci in the second video (also below):

So the next time we feel that drag, that sense, at best, that we are swimming against the tide, we need to ask ourselves:

1. Are we just in it for the money?
   
2. Are we doing this for recognition?
   
3. Do we feel obliged or coerced to do this in some way?
   

We all have areas of our lives where the answer is "yes" to some of these questions. And it's not a question of radically changing everything if it's not practical.

But if there are any areas of our lives where we can feel that sense of freedom (even if it's a hobby), it's an important question to ask.

It could be vital in safeguarding not only our happiness - but our mental and physical health.

No-one said we always have to be perky.

While there are obvious benefits to releasing negative emotions, like having a good cry, there are also quite a few advantages of being in a stinking bad mood.

Here are just a few:


1. Effectiveness

From Big Think:

In other words, it means people in a bad mood "get things done".

The story continues:

We don't faff around, in other words.

(N.B. The effect is more pronounced amongst people who are used to bad moods - i.e. it doesn't distract them when a black cloud hovers over them, unlike happy campers who are not as used to low spells and so are more likely to be derailed by them.

According to social psychologist, Joseph Forgas, bad moods make us likelier to stick at things.

From The Conversation:

As Forgas adds in the same article, we are also a lot better at remembering stuff:

And we are also a lot less biased, Forgas says:

From The New York Times (referring to a study led by Forgas):

"A 2006 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology tested subjects on their ability to detect a lie. Subjects who were put in a negative mood by watching a short film about dying of cancer were far more likely to detect lies than subjects who were put in a good mood by watching a clip from a comedy show."

And finally, in undoubtedly the most important finding of all, the act of embracing our bad moods (rather than pretending we don't have them), can literally save our lives.

From the BBC (referring to a 2010 study of patients with coronary artery disease, which looked at their relationship with expressing anger):

Having a sense of purpose in life does a lot more than give us a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, according to a few key research studies.

Aside from putting the brakes on late stage cognitive decline such as Dementia and Alzheimer's, feeling our lives have meaning and purpose has been found to act as a buffer against heart attacks and strokes.

We could literally be extending our lives by finding what really makes us tick.

From Science Daily, referring to a Mount Sinai study in the US:

From NJ.com:

And from NPR, referring to the findings of the JAMA Current Open Study:

Summing up the importance of having a life purpose is cardiologist Alan Rozanski, who was involved in the Mount Sinai study, quoted in the NPR story: