Motivation

What is motivation? According to wikipedia the word is defined as “the activation of goal-oriented behavior”. As I sit in my house looking at my google calendar, at all the meetings later this week, putting the final touches on my vacation schedule, noting the 7 overnight calls i will start the following month, I feel a mild anxiousness. Its not a full blown dread at the work that is forthcoming or even an anticipatory nervousness or performance anxiety. Rather is a dull agitated feeling in my gut that I am not doing what I should be in life. Its an uneasy sense that I am not going the right direction coupled with a mild frustration at not being able to find the right direction combined with a paradoxical nihilism of why finding a direction even matters. Either way I feel particularly lazy, unmotivated, stagnant.

So why is it that I feel like I am procrastinating even though I have nothing really to do? I suppose even though I am still undergoing my medical training, have made a ton of friends in my new program, I have gotten into a routine of having extrinsic goals set for me over the last 5 years to the extent that I have lost a lot of intrinsic motivation to set and execute my own goals. Its interesting, even doing laundry or cleaning my room as gotten to be a chore whereas presenting at a conference or turning in IRB proposals and setting up meetings for research have become routine.
It doesn’t help that in the midst of all of this, I am feeling my attention span get shorter and shorter as I get tired, have even less time as a resident and feel the pressures of the mid 30s modern day life start creeping up.
Hmmm, we’ll keep thinking bout this one

as I think back to why I decided on medical school now 7 years ago and the last time I had this uneasy feeling