Avoidance motivation

I remember lying in bed this morning thinking about challenges I’m facing, and these thoughts triggered a feeling. I tried not to label the feeling as dread or resistance. Instead, I tried to hold onto the feeling, telling myself, “Let this feeling motivate you.”

At a particular moment, the feeling of a challenge meets my own sense of self-efficacy, and that begins an iterative process to define my emotional response. And that starts to shape my physiological response even more. The anxiety response is, in part, my cardiovascular system becoming constricted and less efficient. Thus, the initial sense of challenge in my mind cascades into avoidance-motivation, while in a different mind the challenge might cascade into approach-motivation.

Of course, how I react to the challenge then feeds back into the system. Avoidance itself teaches me I cannot overcome the challenge. Whereas if I approach the challenge, I might still experience a setback, but that in itself teaches me I can manage the setback.

At a certain point in time, resistance and grit have the same shape, but they diverge based on interpretation.