Pushing yourself is not the most effective way of sustaining motivation, because it makes hyperbolic discounting work against you.
Hyperbolic discounting says that the immediate results of a behavior have far greater effects on our brains than distant results. You probably already know the cognitive psychology explanation of this. (If not, Wikipedia explains it well, as does Daniel Kahneman in
Thinking, Fast and Slow.) But there is also a direct behavioristic reason for hyperbolic discounting: right after doing a behavior which has differing short-term and long-term consequences, you experience the short-term consequences immediately, and they exert their operant conditioning effects upon that behavior. However, the long term effects of a behavior can only condition it indirectly, via cognition -- you have to remember the last time the long-term consequence happened to you, or you have to imagine that consequence happening to you in the future. By this mechanism, a simulated consequence conditions your behavior.
I'm sure you can see how an immediate, real consequence of a behavior would often have a greater effect than a remembered or predicted consequence would -- simulated experiences aren't as vivid as real-time sensory experiences, thus their operant effects are usually nowhere near as strong.
Throw in some executive dysfunction, and it gets even harder to sustain motivation for tasks that provide no reinforcement in the short-term because it's harder to simulate past and future experiences consistently.
So how do you fix it? Work in a constant stream of reward WHILE you're doing the unpleasant task. Don't wait until after you're done to reinforce -- that's too late! Motivate yourself by instituting a steady, consistent short-term reward as long as you're continuing the behavior.
B.F. Skinner put a checkmark in his day planner every half-hour while he was working. (For those conversant in behaviorism, that's technique is called fixed-interval partial reinforcement.) Since I have ADHD and am loaded full of mirror neurons, I just take a blank sheet of paper and draw a smiley face on it as a reward for any work-related behavior, any time I start feeling ready to quit. This is a more advanced, effective technique because it delivers rewards only when needed -- if I'm already focused, there's no point interrupting the focus to draw a smiley face. But if I'm feeling overwhelmed or tired or bored, it's very helpful to reinforce each small unit of behavior for a minute or so, and then fade the reinforcement out over the next few minutes as my motivation returns.
It looks like this: I'm working on a paper, but getting really tired of it and feeling ready to quit. I look at my behavior modification paper, which is full of smiley faces. I draw a smiley face to reward myself for looking at the behavior modification paper, because looking at the paper is the first step to staying on track instead of quitting. I look back at my word processor, and think of a new sentence or paragraph I could start. I type the first word of it, and draw another smiley face. After finishing one line of text, I draw another smiley face. I continue rewarding every line until I've gotten through a whole paragraph. Then I start rewarding every 2 lines of text, then 3, then 4. By this point, I can usually quit reinforcing, and just focus. Problem solved. If not, I keep up the rewards by drawing a smiley face every paragraph. Also problem solved.
This technique, where you begin by reinforcing anything barely related to the desired behavior, then gradually fade out the reinforcement until the behavior is self-sustaining, is called "shaping." Shaping is the backbone of professional behavior modification both for people and animals, and anyone with executive dysfunction should know how to use short-term reinforcements to shape their own behavior. Hell, it shouldn't just be for people with executive dysfunction; if I had my way, psychological tools like this one would be taught to all high-schoolers.
Edited by jadamgo, 27 January 2013 - 08:26 PM.
