Final Motivation Post

There is no motivation without a motive and an incentive. Those are the must ingredients for the mixture of motivation. Many things I didn’t realize play are important factors regarding motivation. Motivation is made up of many different sources such as psychological, social, biological moreover, intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Self-regulation and self-control are closely linked to the super ego; the super ego is something psychological. Socially, we all want to be liked. So often we get motivated to do things to meet the social norms and expectations. In a biological aspect, the body asks of you to meet certain goals. The motivation to complete these goals can be internal sources such as hunger. The other motivation is extrinsic which is to attain the food.

I found it amazing learning of the influences evolution has on motivation. It all goes back to our human history. It is quite interesting to see how the past motivations have developed into common incentives and common desires across the world and have ultimately, become the current motivations. Sometimes we experience unconscious motivation when we don’t know the sources of our motivation but can be traced back to the past motivations. One common desire that we all have is to pursue and the access of pleasure. Hedonism is in all of us, we all want and seek satisfaction from doing things. In addition, there other universal motives that are shared due to evolution such as money, sex, and love. Even sexual interactions such as attraction is motivated by universal motives that are dated back to the past. The way we select our mates can coincide with the good gene hypothesis. The hypothesis states that we search for beauty because it signals good genes therefore, can produce healthy babies that can survive in the world.

Other things I found interesting during the course were how our internal factors are regulated in our bodies. We have a set point that regulates things in our body such as, temperature, calories, fats, and level of hydration among other things. Physiologically, our bodies are always running and at one point one may receive a negative feedback such as trembling because it is so cold outside. The trembling is your body trying to go back to the set point was your body temperature should be. When such changes in the body system occur from unpleasant to pleasant is called Alliesthesia.

Overall, the course on motivation was enlightening. So many factors are tied in to motivation, and it shed some light on how we all make decisions or goals, how we achieve them, and why those goals and motivations occur.