3 PM Motivation
How to make long lasting psychological changes
Kids these days call it “3 AM motivation”.
Basically, you get a surge of energy and agency to conquer the world, build generational wealth, get married, have a family. At 3 AM. It’s short-lived. Ephemeral. By the time morning hits and the adrenergic response subsides1, you’re back at your “baseline” self that has the same wants and needs, the same limits, the same comfort zone as always.
The question is, is there a way to reignite that feeling of limitless power and appetite for life? Well, yes and no. Chasing that kick, the high, is precisely what prevents you from establishing a different baseline for your normal experience. Instead of trying to become your 3 AM self, you can change who the 3 PM self is.
Psychological Shifts Don’t Last
The effects of a single traumatic event are acute immediately after and persist for a ~year… but then fade out rapidly. This might be due to things like the fading affect bias or just plainly metabolizing that one single experience.
On the other hand, complexes like C-PTSD are a result of constant exposure, for months and years, during which the traumatic experience became the norm. From that follows an important point:
Acute psychological shifts don’t last. Whether they’re positive or negative. We’re quick to return to our baseline, our regular self. Call it hedonic adaptation or a lack of neuroplasticity.
The reality is that there’s an obstacle between regular you and a new you. This is why the common advice of “step out of your comfort zone” or using cognitive behavioral therapy to cause transformation is pathetic to say the least. Personality is relatively stable and has a core attractor that pulls effort toward the center again and again. It’s not enough to do one brave thing; you need to do the thing that requires bravery as *if* it doesn’t require bravery. And do it over and over again.
Loose Insights
I’m sure you’ve experienced new insights not sticking.
You accomplish a great feat. Finish a challenge. You struggle, you overcome, you think deeply, and something appears. Something that fuels you and saturates your whole being with lust for life. Unfortunately…
After a few days, the confidence, the ambition, the certainty vanishes. The wave backwashes. What happened there? You thought you’ve finally figured it out, and THIS time, oh this time your memory was updated permanently and you’ll remember how now feels in the future forever.
But it didn’t happen. There are three main reasons why:
1) The energy to sustain your current baseline is less than the energy required to sustain the new baseline, so your body, like the efficient machine it is, chooses to conserve energy.
2) The insight was purely intellectual, without the corresponding somatic integration
#1 and #2 are correlated. Jung talks about unlocking more energy2 when big psychological complexes disappear because you were using that energy to keep them dormant in your unconscious. The new baseline can’t be integrated unless the energy to feed the baseline comes from somewhere. Without slicing deeper into your psyche and getting that unconscious “puss” out, there are no roots to water the blooming. Get it? If the “insight” simply satisfies the conceptual question mark of your epistemology, then it won’t last. If you’re just trying to solve your self-imposing riddles, ALL of your insights will remain on the surface, fugazi, nonessential. A spiritual emergence that goes away.
An obvious way to course correct is somatic integration. Reichian bioenergetics3 claims that your emotions are mapped on your body. I tend to agree. The unconscious is hosted, quite literally, inside your body and the first thing to try and do is experience with the body first (nervous system), without skipping directly to the next step of adding labels that tend to redirect you toward overfitting in your narrative/story about yourself. Neurogenic tremors can be useful to dislodge turbid emotions out of the way.
3) When you went through the experience that produced the insight, you were a different person; the person that would’ve had that insight.
This is your opportunity to do a lot of the work upfront:
The Fastest Way to Cause a Permanent Psychological Transformation
One of my exes had a serious driving anxiety. She’d panic every time she had to go somewhere or God forbid park in a difficult spot. But she’s a trooper so she never backed down. The common pop-psychology claims that she faced her fear every day, she stretched her comfort zone, she did the thing.
Yet, her driving anxiety persisted. Her body remained tense. She was mildly panicking every minute behind the wheel, and she did nothing to help herself; she rushed through her movements, she hyped herself up, and when she managed to park the car, yes she was proud but the sense of relief was overpowering. She was in survival mode so she was glad she survived.
I noticed it, as I’d noticed similar symptoms in myself in different situations, and one day I asked her to… calm down!
What I genius I am. But yeah, that’s what I told her: Instead of dissociating and mentally fast-forwarding every time you need to go somewhere with your car, take your time and really feel everything, every sensation. Then, take a big breath and relax while trying your best, not to survive, but to accomplish your goal. No need to get hyped up. Be normal and do the hard thing with your normal self, not some excessive, adrenaline-driven version of yourself.
There’s no reward for trying to survive. The reward comes when your effort is genuine, even if you fail. You aren’t allowed to half-ass challenging situations. You’re allowed to fuck it up, and you will, but you’ll fuck it up with awareness and not want behind excuses like “I just wanted to be over with it so I did my best.” Becoming too good at surviving comes with the downside that you’ll forever stuck with a fearful part of you that takes charge during hard times in order to survive.
This is something that I realized, very intimately, through my breathwork practice. When you hold your breath, the first thing you’ll notice after a few seconds is… panic. You can push through said panic and maybe even become better at “pushing through the suck”. Physically, mentally, neurologically, you’ll become great at holding your breath while you’re panicking without the panic ever going away.
(Buteyko, on the other hand, teaches you to “relax” (physically, mentally, neurologically) through the panic. What happens eventually is that a breath hold becomes relaxing. The very thing that caused stress is now calming)
TL;DR - The fastest way to cause a psychological transformation on the spot is be present and a) allow the sensations to build up and be experienced and b) do the thing not with some made up, fantasy version part of yourself but with your every day, normal self - this means relaxing into (accepting) the negative emotions without trying to cope.
By “hyping” yourself up or wallowing in self-pity, both reactions that hijack your normal cognitive functions, you deprive your normal self of growth. By arbitrarily feeding your system with adrenaline, physical side effects like burnout aside, you communicate that you’re in a dangerous place and only a “different” man, not you, can deal with it.
I hope the last part made sense. It’s hard to describe because it’s essentially a mental maneuver (that fortunately can be trained) that can be felt tangibly. Do it once and then it’ll be available forever.
Cortisol follows diurnal slopes. It’s highest in the morning, before you wake up, and the lowest after sunset. If you stay up late, showered with artificial blue light, you’ll get a second wind facilitated by cortisol, adrenaline, etc. That’s the biological explanation behind the 3 AM motivation.
Jung's conception is closer to that of a form of life-energy, neutral in character. He pointed out that psychic energy in the pre-oedipal phases of development takes many forms: nutritional, alimentary and so forth. Psychic energy can be used as a bridging concept between bodily zonal development and object relations.
“From the 1930s, Reich became known for the idea that muscular tension reflected repressed emotions, what he called 'body armor', and developed a way to use pressure to produce emotional release in his clients.”
**do the thing not with some made up, fantasy version part of yourself but with your every day, normal self**
This is such a illuminating point
Related: people will find social situations draining when they interact through a constructed self to maintain, potentially due to fear of rejection etc. Needing a particular emotional state to interact with others is draining. like needing alcohol to talk.
Another physical example: stretching by tensing forcing into the position sucks, vs stretching by being present trying to view the stretched position as normal. I like going into a deep stretch that's borderline uncomfortable, holding it for 40 seconds, and then noticing where i can now wiggle like it's a normal position I go into everyday.