r/GetMotivated

Hey everyone,
I’m a 22-year-old guy in my 3rd year of a 5-year BALLB program in India with a 7 CGPA. I’ve been feeling completely stuck and overwhelmed lately. My one-year LDR ended badly — I thought she was “the one,” even told my mom about her and bought gifts, but when I finally asked to meet, she ghosted and blocked me. It’s hit me hard.
On top of that, my body is skinny-fat and I’m not happy with how I look. I’m from a lower middle-class family — my mom has been on bed rest for 6-7 years, dad is unemployed because he takes care of her, and we’ve survived on my grandpa’s pension. I feel a lot of pressure to start earning soon.
My biggest problems are lack of consistency and discipline. I’m an average student, and with my CGPA, scholarships for LLM abroad look unrealistic in 2 years. But I desperately want to get out of India, build a good career in law, earn well, and transform my life. Right now everything feels negative.
I know I need to:
• Get over the breakup and stop ruminating
• Build a consistent workout/diet habit to fix my body
• Improve discipline and studies
• Figure out how to earn money (internships/jobs) so I can fund an LLM abroad
Has anyone been in a similar spot — broke, average academics, family responsibilities, heartbreak, zero discipline — and actually turned it around? Especially law students or people who moved abroad for masters.
Any practical advice, routines, resources, or stories would mean a lot. I’m tired of this version of my life.
Thanks.

Edit: I actually have a cv and few experiences but can’t seem to find any good paid internships. Trying for the tier 1 firms or in house internship but no results. I can send the cv if anyone got any referral :,)

Around 6 months ago I was genuinely just a normal person. I didn't even know how much time and energy was being wasted and spent doing cheap stuff like scrolling and junk food, I just used to live normally and i honestly didn't even care. Like i would pick up my phone when I wanted to, eat fast food whenever I wanted to, etc.

But then I don't really know what happened, maybe I got motivated or something and realised that I should stop junk food, stop spending my whole day on screens, get good sleep and basically improve myself. I seriously don't know how i came to this realisation.

And so I woke up the next day feeling excited to change my life, like a better lifestyle was waiting for me in the future. I had this app I had installed on my phone that tracks what habits you avoid, and the app literally hyped me up because it projected I can get clear skin and stuff in like a month by not faltering to the 4 habits I chose to avoid.

Now here we are like 6 months later and I have clear skin lol. And a physique I can be confident in. I cannot go one day without tracking my progress, tracking my sleep and workouts and stuff. I haven't eaten junk food in so long i don't even remember the last time I ate that stuff.

Just sharing my story, weird how your life can change out of the blue.
Let this post be that one wake-up call I experienced.

(I'm not advertising, last time I posted I got so much slander saying I was trying to advertise something. I'm not. : )

I’ve noticed that most people don’t suddenly become disciplined overnight. It usually seems to come from small changes, routines, failures, and consistency over time.

I’m curious what genuinely helped people here build more discipline in their daily life. Could be related to work, fitness, studies, sleep, screen time, or anything else.

Not really looking for perfect routine answers — more interested in real things that actually worked for you long term.

For me, getting sober nearly 16 months ago after being completely written off changed everything. Since then I’ve started rebuilding properly — gym, accountability, clearer routines, regaining my values and slowly feeling more like myself again.

Not overnight, but enough to realise real change is possible when you finally stop ignoring certain patterns. Now know that I can enjoy life without it. Love the fact I've done it my way and proved people wrong.

Interested what other people would honestly say theirs has been. Big or small.

researching. watching youtube videos.

reading reddit threads.

checking photo rules.

comparing timelines.

actual form completion time:

maybe 20 minutes.

my brain is a scam honestly.

For a while I genuinely felt like my life was slowly turning into one long I’ll do it later.

Nothing huge was crashing. I was still functioning. But every day felt weirdly slippery. I’d wake up already feeling behind, make plans in my head, promise myself today would finally be different then somehow end up wasting hours without even meaning to.

The confusing part is I actually cared. That’s what messed with me.

I wanted to work. I wanted to reply to people. I wanted to fix things I kept avoiding. But every time something felt slightly difficult or boring my brain would immediately go looking for an exit.

I’d open my phone for one thing and disappear for 40 minutes. Not even enjoying it half the time. Just switching between apps like my brain needed constant tiny hits of distraction to avoid sitting still for a second.

And the worst part was how automatic it became.

I’d literally catch myself unlocking my phone while already holding my laptop trying to work. Sometimes I’d refresh the same apps again even though nothing new was there. It started feeling less like a choice and more like some nervous reflex.

Even small tasks started feeling mentally heavy because my attention was all over the place all day.

For a long time I kept calling myself lazy because that’s easier than admitting your brain feels fried all the time.

What actually helped wasn’t some giant reset. I mostly stopped trying to fix my whole life overnight because that cycle was exhausting by itself.

I just started making it a little harder to disappear into distractions every few minutes.

Less random scrolling first thing in the morning.
Trying to finish one thing before bouncing to another.
Sitting through the uncomfortable urge to instantly escape boredom.

Honestly some days I still completely fail at it.

But my life feels less blurry now. Less like days are randomly vanishing while I’m half-aware of it happening.

I think for a long time I assumed I needed more motivation when really I just never gave my attention a chance to settle anywhere.

 Edit/Update: Thankyou for all advices, appreciate all the replies fr. One thing a bunch of people said that actually helped was to stop aiming for a full life reset and just do one small win early in the day. I also tried blocking real time slots on Google Calendar instead of guessing my day, and it weirdly keeps me from drifting.
But Jolt screen time is what actually gave me a reality check. I had zero expectations but damn… I chose my distracting apps, hit no-phone mode, and boom LOCKED. It gives me that tiny Pause before I open those distracting apps and it’s just enough to snap me out of scrolling loop. That one-second check in has Saved me from wasting hours without even realizing it. 

I swear I join so many subreddits, cringe at the content (or feel like its not benefitting me at all) and end up just leaving it. Can someone tell me what subs you actually stay subbed to for more than a week lol. Right now my feed is just politics and news and its affecting my mental health.

I just read a fresh news piece where heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk is preparing for his May 23 fight against Rico Verhoeven at the Pyramids of Giza. What caught my attention was the cognitive training as part of his preparation. Not the physical work, but the mental side. According to the British Psychological Society, cognitive training is an approach that treats the brain like a muscle and regularly exercises it through games or problem solving. Usyk uses bidirectional translation drills, getting a word in one language and having to respond in another at constantly increasing speed, to speed up his decision-making. He says boxing is not chess and you have to think quickly in there. What caught me the most was the framing. He openly says he does not enjoy training and does not enjoy doing this work every single day, but he knows that without it he will not show up in the ring in the shape he needs. Pure discipline without romanticizing the process.

Has anyone here tried cognitive training drills in your own routine, for work, sport, or just for mental sharpness? Curious what works for you.

Most of us know this cycle: things go wrong, we feel low, then a motivational video, podcast, or speaker gives us a temporary surge of energy. For a while, we feel unstoppable. But a few hours later, the same heaviness quietly returns.

In this discussion, Acharya Prashant questions our dependence on external motivation. If our energy constantly rises and falls based on what we hear, watch, or who inspires us, are we actually driven from within, or just reacting to outside influences?

He uses a simple image: water in a shallow plate changes with every gust of wind. In the same way, if our state is entirely dependent on external triggers, we remain unstable.

His point is not that motivation is useless, but that lasting strength may come from something quieter and deeper, a place within that does not collapse the moment the music stops or the speaker goes silent.

A difficult but honest question: if your drive disappears when the external push disappears, was it ever truly yours?

I used to think reading was only “worth it” if I could perfectly remember everything afterward. So I’d constantly start books, highlight half the page, save podcasts, bookmark articles, buy productivity books I never finished… then feel guilty a week later because I forgot most of it anyway. My knowledge felt extremely scattered. Lots of random insights, but no real system connecting them together.
What changed my perspective was realizing learning is less about memorizing isolated facts and more about slowly changing the way you think. Even if you forget most of a book, the patterns, frameworks, emotional shifts, and perspectives still shape you over time. Knowledge compounds invisibly.

Reading also stopped feeling overwhelming once I stopped treating it like school. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham explains that knowledge works like scaffolding. The more concepts you already understand, the easier it becomes to learn future ideas. That’s why people who read consistently seem to “connect dots” faster across psychology, business, relationships, creativity, communication, etc. They’re building mental frameworks, not memorizing trivia.

One thing that really changed how I learn was hearing Naval Ravikant talk about specific knowledge and mental models. He explains that real learning is not about consuming more information. It’s about building frameworks that help you see patterns across different areas of life. That idea completely changed how I approach books and learning.

The biggest shift for me was moving from “collecting information” to building a personal knowledge system. Instead of endlessly consuming random content, I started focusing on connecting ideas together across books, podcasts, research, and real-life experiences.

A few resources genuinely helped me:
The Extended Mind completely changed how I think about learning and memory. The book explains how thinking is deeply influenced by environment, movement, tools, conversations, and external systems, not just raw brainpower.

How to Take Smart Notes is probably the best book I’ve read on actually retaining and using knowledge long-term. The core idea is simple: don’t just collect highlights, connect ideas.

Ali Abdaal also has some genuinely useful videos on reading systems, active recall, spaced repetition,
and building sustainable learning habits.

I’d also highly recommend Obsidian if you read a lot. It’s probably the best tool I’ve found for organizing highlights, connecting ideas between books, and building a second-brain style knowledge system over time. Another tool I genuinely want to recommend is BeFreed. It’s a personalized AI learning app built by a Columbia team, and honestly it solved a huge problem for me: scattered and unfinished learning. I used to save endless books, articles, podcasts, and videos but rarely connected the ideas together into actual mental models. What I like about BeFreed is that it builds a focused learning system around your goals, interests, and current life challenges using books, research papers, expert interviews, podcasts, TED talks, etc, then helps connect the dots across them. It feels more like building your own thinking framework instead of just consuming isolated information. I also love that you can adjust the lesson depth, podcast length, voice, and learning style, so it naturally fits into commuting, workouts, walking, chores, or downtime.

I still forget most of what I read. But reading changed the way I think, communicate, focus, and understand people. And honestly, that matters way more than perfect recall.

Every time you constantly restart after setbacks,

it slowly affects your confidence in yourself.

That’s why sustainable systems matter.

The goal isn’t perfect discipline.

The goal is creating something realistic enough that you can continue following through consistently over time.

• lower friction

• repeatable structure

• fewer decisions

Small consistent follow-through rebuilds self-trust faster than intense short-term motivation.

Question:

👉 do you trust yourself to stay consistent right now?

The college semester is ending soon and it’s likely I won’t be home for the summer. Being a graduate assistant is rough sometimes along with likely being undiagnosed

On one hand I can do whatever I want and relax like what my mom and several members of my family plus friends told me to do but on the other hand I want to improve myself and get better. Fix some things about myself and clear things within my backlog

I hate sitting on my butt doing nothing but sometimes I’m prone to procrastination. It pisses me off when I do something and I realize how fast it took me as I could’ve done it days, weeks,months or years ago

All my life I’ve been on autopilot walking down a grey hallway. I feel numb to all my milestones as I feel like these things that I’m supposed to do and deserves no fanfare

Thankfully I’m not a doomer or prone to destructive habits but the call is getting louder some days.

I've been testing several other known verbal fluency techniques like word association and reading out loud, but they don't feel like they address the actual problem. But this testing lead me to a new discovery.

So what did I find? A method that works for me and takes only 3–5 minutes a day. It is short, and quite brutal. You will not only build fluency, but you will improve several other cognitive microskills as well. Trust me, I'm left-handed.

When I first tried this, I fatigued and yawned after the first 20 seconds. Now, only after a couple of days, I'm easily pushing 40–60 seconds. I already feel significantly more word flow during normal workplace chit-chat.

The Method (Modify to your needs):

• The Setup: Set a timer for 60 seconds. Do 3–5 reps per day. Ramp up, if needed.
• The Topic: Pick a skill you want to learn and narrow down a small section of it. (For humor, I use Mel Helitzer’s Comedy Writing Secrets. It works. Everybody says I'm laughable now.)
• The Action (Feynman Technique): Explain that micro-concept out loud to yourself as simply as possible. Imagine explaining astrophysics to a child. (Tip: Most kids won't actually listen to a lecture about astrophysics, so use an imaginary one).
• Optional Story Layer: Format it as a simple story: setup/conflict, escalate tension, and deliver a plot twist at the end. Great for practice with personal anecdotes.

Example: Let's say you want to practice the "Exaggeration Technique" from Comedy Writing Secrets. Start the timer and explain the technique out loud for 60 seconds. Do not stop, no matter how hard it feels. Keep talking. Say anything. No pauses.

Steer and strive constantly for a clear explanation, or just try to execute the technique itself. For example, explain to yourself why you desperately need that luscious, Brad Pitt-like wig from Temu to cover your male pattern baldness. That's a real conflict right there!

Strive and survive, that's all.

Why this works (I think):

It hits several points at once: precision, content, clarity, and fluency. The main point is verbal retrieval and speed: getting those nerves fired up to drag those elusive words out of your skull. You can always improve the content later.

According to AI, the cognitive load is huge because it activates several brain regions at once: the Prefrontal Cortex, Broca's Area, Wernicke's Area, the Hippocampus, and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex.

My question for you guys:

I'm really curious to see if there's even a small improvement in such a short time period. Would it be crazy to ask you to try this for just three days and let me know how it went?