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March 26th, 2026
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

🧶 Rebuilding Motivation

You built the to-do list. You made the coffee. You opened the doc. And then you just… didn’t do the work. For three hours.

Some days, you wake up energized and ready to start work. Other days, even the projects you care about feel strangely heavy. You stare at your screen, knowing exactly what you should do, but the drive just isn’t there.

This cycle happens because motivation isn’t a stable state. Research suggests it’s closely linked to dopamine pathways in the brain, and dopamine doesn’t just respond to rewards. It activates when you anticipate something rewarding.

So when your brain stops seeing the payoff clearly, the engine stalls – even on projects you care about. This explains why motivation can feel strong one day and absent the next. But the good news is, we actually know quite a lot about how motivation works and how to rebuild it.

Psychologists have found that intrinsic motivation (driven by the internal satisfaction of doing the thing itself) lasts longer than extrinsic motivation (driven by external rewards like money or recognition), and that there are three ingredients that fuel it:

• Self-efficacy – believing you can actually influence the outcome.
• Curiosity – noticing a gap in what you know and wanting to fill it.
• Competence – the feeling that you’re getting better over time.

Brain imaging studies show these activate overlapping dopamine pathways, which means when one kicks in, it can pull the others along with it. To rebuild motivation, the question is: how can you create conditions where that happens?

Here are four simple ways you can reignite your motivation.

1) Fix your mood before you force the work. Trying to push through when you’re mentally drained rarely works. It just turns a slow day into a frustrating one. Step away for ten minutes. Meditate, go for a walk, talk to someone. It sounds unproductive, but resetting your mood makes it much easier to engage with hard tasks when you come back.

2) Track your progress so the reward stays visible. Competence is easier to feel when you can see it. Whatever the experiment you’re running, count the words you wrote, the days you showed up, the problems you solved. Even a simple streak on a calendar works to turn abstract effort into something concrete.

3) Share your commitment publicly. Intrinsic motivation is powerful on its own, but a light layer of accountability makes it stickier. It doesn’t have to be very public on social media. You can just post updates with colleagues or an online community. Learning in public can carry you through the days when internal drive dips.

4) Look for a question inside the task. Reframing the task as something you’re exploring rather than something you’re completing can make it easier to stay engaged. That’s because “I have to finish this” is based on control, but “What would happen if I tried it this way?” is based on curiosity, and curiosity runs on the same dopamine systems that power intrinsic motivation.

Motivation is simply a set of conditions, and most of them are smaller than you’d think. You don’t need more discipline or willpower to get unstuck – just a clearer view of the reward, a reason to be curious, and enough evidence that you’re moving forward.

🔬 Tiny Experiment of the Week

Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment to help rebuild motivation over a few days.

The update can be just one sentence about what you worked on or what you learned. Choose one person or one platform in advance so you don’t overthink where to share each time.

Want to dig deeper? ​​Get your copy of Tiny Experiments​.

👀 Into the Mind of...

PAUL EASTWICK

Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from Paul Eastwick, Professor of Psychology at UC Davis, whose book Bonded by Evolution explores the science of human connection.

1. One daily practice you can’t do without? Every day, I go for a long walk or a run with my dog, Fia. This routine puts me in the right headspace for the day, and so ideally, I get to do it first thing.

2. One idea that keeps you up at night? I worry about how companion AI chatbots are going to change the landscape of human relationships well before we can manage to conduct the relevant research.How can we design AI chatbots to provide the short-term benefits without the long-term risks?

3. One mindset shift that transformed your work? Ten years ago, I would have advocated that scientists should be exceedingly cautious when interfacing with the public about our work. However, I think in this decade, we’re seeing the opposite problem: the public has lost touch with the value that science provides. I want to be a part of the new cohort of scientists who are making our work accessible without overclaiming or oversimplifying.

Read Paul’s book

🛠️ Brain Picks

• A watch for more balance, focus and deeper rest. Based on insights from biology and behavioral science, Merivian is launching the first analog watch that visualizes your sleep-wake rhythm on Kickstarter. Check out the campaign.​
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Many thanks to our partners for supporting the Ness Labs newsletter! Want to appear here? Please email support@nesslabs.com to learn more.

🗓️ Community Events

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Reimagine your relationship to procrastination. In this workshop with Colley Joubert you’ll explore a new lens for understanding procrastination, one that views it not as laziness or lack of willpower, but as a basic coping mechanism.
​• Sketch what you read. Rachna Ghiya will guide you through hands-on practice sketching, learning, and discovering that you can think visually (even if you're convinced you can’t draw).
​• Learn how to trust your own taste. Join Gosia Fricze on Monday for a creative hour session to explore self-doubt in creative choices, examine where your taste comes from, and learn how to trust your own judgment more deeply.​
​• Improve your knowledge management system. Join the next PKM Collective meeting where we learn from one another through sharing how our systems work in the real world and give new PKM users a leg up.
​• Make progress on your project. Join Kathryn Ruge for our Monday ‘body doubling’ coworking session to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones.
​• Host your own workshop (anytime!). Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.

Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.