Finding Energy/Motivation for Difficult Tasks

Now this is not only relevant to depressed individuals. Again I will outline a continuum. This continuum will represent how much individuals get emotionally overwhelmed when approaching tasks. At one end of the continuum, severely depressed individuals may be emotionally overwhelmed by even the seemingly most mundane of tasks. At the other end of the continuum, lies the individual who appears to have adopted a general life view that every task she is faced with can be achieved. She believes that it is simply a matter of doing x, y, and z for the task will be completed – ‘so don’t delay, dig in hard and get it done’.

Most of us fall somewhere in between these two ends of the continuum. The importance of this fact is as follows. Most of us get emotionally overwhelmed at the prospect of attempting certain tasks. Now let us consider a task that you wish you were doing regularly, but never seem to do. The fact that you are not doing this task regularly may not just be due to the fact that you are not finding the time to attempt the task. It may be that you are having a similar problem to the depressed individual who struggles to do even mundane tasks. The point is that it is not just the depressed individual who suffers from the problem of being emotionally overwhelmed by the prospect of a task. We all do. It is simply that depressed individuals are suffering from this problem in relation to far more tasks in their life than the average person. However I suggest that the mechanism is the same in both cases: its just happening a lot more often and in relation to a far wider range of tasks for depressed individuals.