Spring Motivation Is Here. Please Don’t Build Your Life Around It.
Why that fresh-start energy fades fast, and what to do before you blame yourself again.
I grew up in the French Alps, where spring is NOT subtle.
One week everything is cold and frozen, the next week the whole valley is aggressively alive.
Four seasons, dramatically different, so your body learns the rhythm whether you want it to or not.
Then I lived in Singapore for nearly 20 years, with tropical 30+ degrees year-round and no real seasons to speak of.
And yet every single March/April, something in my body would go “right, it’s spring, time to get serious!”
I would usually find myself signing up for something, building a new training plan, rethinking my whole nutrition, stacking super ambitious commitments on behalf of a body that was actually doing perfectly fine without them.
And now while travelling through Central America, I’m doing it again.
I’ve signed up for a half marathon in Mexico City in June and I have absolutely no business doing that given everything else on my plate right now.
But it’s spring, so apparently my brain thinks I’m invincible.
So if you’re currently 10 days into a new plan and starting to feel it wobble, hi 👋🏻
I know exactly where this is going, because I’ve been there a million times, and so has almost every client I’ve ever worked with.
And here’s the part that always breaks my heart a little: if they can’t stay consistent, they don’t blame the plan, they blame themselves.
Every single time. Without fail.
And it’s never the ones who weren’t trying hard enough.
It’s the ones who were trying the hardest.
✏️ Free exercise: The Bullshit Audit
Before you add another habit, look at what’s already draining you.
I made a free 20-minute exercise based on the first step of my MAKE SPACE Method™ to help you map your energy, spot your biggest drainers, and see what actually needs to shift before you pile more on.
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Motivation is not ability
One of my biggest pet peeves with the productivity bros is that they speak about discipline and motivation like a fuel you can top up, the way you’d add petrol to a car.
The logic goes: if you’re not doing the thing, you must not want it badly enough.
Want it more. Visualise the result. Read the book. Find your why.
My eyes are rolling back so far just writing this….
BJ Fogg, who runs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford, has spent 20 years demonstrating that this is total BS.
His model is super simple:
Behaviour happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt all show up at the same time. Take any one of them away and nothing happens. And the one that looks the most stable (motivation) is actually the most volatile of the three. It spikes, it crashes, and somewhere along the way it convinces you it’ll be there tomorrow. It won’t. By mid-May it’s gone and you’re standing there wondering what happened to all that energy.
Which means if your new habit depends on motivation being there, your new habit is going to fail, predictably, at the exact moment you most need it to hold.
Design is what keeps a habit running when motivation isn’t in the room.
As a digital nomad this year, I have to be super intentional if I want to stay fit, healthy and happy, because with a hectic travel schedule, flights, different food, and constant change, motivation is rarely available when I need it.
That translates to booking hotels or Airbnbs with a half decent gym in the building so I can train.
My gym clothes live in their own dedicated packing cube so they’re always ready.
My iPad has the training videos downloaded so I don’t have to think about what I’m doing when I get there.
None of this requires motivation. It requires making the desired habits as easy as possible so I don’t need to think too much about it (or argue against myself on why I should train in the first place)
I realise I’m making this sound like I’ve figured it out. I have NOT.
Last week I got AI to generate me an 8-week half marathon training plan, looked at week 1, immediately skipped to week 4 because, of course, “I’m probably already at that level,” and then haven’t actually gone for a run at all. Classic.
If your habit plan is “try harder,” your habit plan is a motivation plan. And motivation plans have a half-life of about 10 days. TOPS.
The double whammy
When you zoom in on the type of motivation that tends to show up in spring, it’s almost always the fragile kind.
Some motivation is autonomous: you’re doing something because it genuinely matters to you or you actually enjoy it.
Some is controlled: you’re doing it because of guilt, shame, or that creeping fear of being seen in summer clothes.
And an even-worse fear underneath it, of being seen as someone who “let themselves go” during the winter (this and bounce back are phrases I would very much like to retire forever)
The “getting summer-ready” version of motivation is almost always the second kind.
It works, but only briefly, and it spoils the actual experience of doing the thing, because you’re not enjoying it, you’re just avoiding the consequences of not doing it (shoutout to every January gym membership that was really just a guilt subscription with a locker).
So you’ve built a habit on fragile fuel, running a design that assumed motivation would always be there to keep it going. By mid-May the whole thing is out of juice.
Despite what the productivity bros, wellness influencers, and supplement-code fitness accounts are telling you, it’s not about willpower or motivation.
And it’s definitely not about you, or something you’re lacking. It’s about designing habits properly. Which means it can be fixed.
And the fix to design better habits is stupidly obvious once you see it: you stop raising the motivation bar and start lowering the ability one.
Let’s take movement, because that’s the big one in spring and also the one I have the most personal experience of getting spectacularly wrong.
Most people default to ‘exercise’ which actually has a pretty specific meaning if you look it up: planned, structured, repetitive, deliberate.
And it’s also, for a huge number of people, a word with genuinely AWFUL associations: PE class, bad gym experiences, fitness instructors who mistook humiliation for motivation, bodies that refused to do what the DVD told them to (if you just went ‘yep’ reading that list, we are the same person).
Physical activity on the other hand is a much bigger category: dancing in your kitchen, walking to get bread, gardening, playing with kids on the floor, carrying groceries up 4 flights of stairs because the lift is broken.
All of it counts.
Your body doesn’t need the movement to be branded as “exercise” before it starts benefiting from it.
If your version of “getting serious” is a form of exercise you already hate, you are forcing yourself to do something you hate, powered entirely by guilt, and expecting it to last.
You’ve designed something that requires a small miracle to happen 3 times a week. And then you’ll be surprised when the miracle stops?
Lowering the barrier isn’t the same as lowering your standards. It’s just what happens when you’re honest about how humans actually work.
Pick something you’d actually do on a Tuesday at 6pm after a hard day. Something that sounds like fun, or at least doesn’t sound like a punishment.
Rooted Routines
Instead of trying to insert a brand-new habit into your existing life by sheer force of will, you attach it to something you already do automatically. You borrow the prompt, the timing, and the willpower you’d otherwise be spending on remembering to do it.
If you’ve been following this newsletter for a bit, you already know how to do this:
After I [thing I already do every day], I will [tiny new thing]
After I make my morning coffee, I drink a glass of water while it brews. The first thing I do when my head hits the pillow is think about something I’m grateful for.
Nothing heroic. Just enough that the behaviour happens without you having to give yourself a motivational speech first.
One thing to try this week
If you’re mid-wobble on something right now (and if you started something in April, you probably are), try running it through 3 questions before you abandon it or, worse, try harder.
Is the motivation guilt or genuine interest?
Be honest. If the main reason you’re doing it is because you feel like you should, that’s controlled motivation, and it has about two weeks of shelf life left in it.Would you do this on a Tuesday at 6pm after a terrible day?
If the answer is no, the ability barrier is too high. Not your willpower. The design of your habit.What’s the prompt?
If the answer is “I just have to remember,” there isn’t one. Attach it to something that already happens.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot while traveling, my own routines dissolving and reforming every time we move Airbnbs.
Every single time I’ve tried to ‘get disciplined’ while travelling, I’ve failed inside 72 hours.
The things that have actually held over the past 4 months on the road have all been tiny things, things that work no matter where I am, anchored to something that’s usually already happening.
Making coffee or turning off the bedroom lamp at night turns out to be more structurally important than any amount of motivational self-talk.
Motivation is a lovely thing when it arrives.
But please, for the love of god, stop building your life around the assumption that it will.
With love,
Noemie x
PS: If this hit a nerve, start with The Bullshit Audit! It’s a free 20-minute MAKE SPACE Method™ exercise to help you map where your energy is actually going, spot your biggest drainers, and stop building habits on top of a life that’s already too full. Get it here 👉 https://unwritten.podia.com/the-bullshit-audit
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, podcast host and the creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™, a science-backed framework for sustainable habits and mental health. She writes on Substack about burnout, habit formation, and evidence-based behaviour change psychology for people who want practical tools without the self-help BS.