Is asking your teen to complete schoolwork a battle?
Have you noticed your teen has a tendency to procrastinate on their assignments?
Does your teen act like doing homework is a major chore?
Regardless of how hard you try to help them, it can be a challenge for teens to find the motivation they need to do their schoolwork, especially toward the end of the school year.
While many might attribute this to laziness or to poor study habits, there can be neurological factors at play. If your teen seems to have early onset senioritis, or they lack the motivation to complete the work they need to get done for school, it likely has something to do with their levels of dopamine.
Motivation and the brain
Dopamine is one of the main brain chemicals that helps influence motivation and productivity. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that sends messages between different nerve cells.
Dopamine is closely connected to the body’s reward system. While an individual’s dopamine levels increase when they receive a reward, they also spike when individuals realize they have the potential to receive a reward, even if that reward is down the road.
High levels of dopamine push people to work harder in order to achieve a goal and receive a reward (or to avoid negative, undesirable consequences). When people have low levels of dopamine, it is a lot harder for them to work toward a reward, especially if it will be challenging to earn and take a long time to receive.
In this way, your teen’s struggles to stay motivated have more to do with their dopamine levels and the way they perceive rewards than laziness or defiance.
Helping boost your teen’s motivation
With this information in mind, there are steps you can take to help your teen stay motivated. Here are a few tips you can use to help increase their dopamine levels so they can have the push they need to accomplish their goals:
Celebrate small wins
If your teen only ever receives praise or acknowledgement when they receive an “A+” on an assignment, it might make it hard for them to find the motivation to complete their work. Their brain will recognize that they have to complete a project and earn a stellar grade in order to receive a reward.
Try celebrating small wins by offering praise or congratulations whenever your teen completes an assignment or when you notice that your teen is trying their best. This will help make completing work and staying on task a rewarding experience, which will increase your teen’s dopamine levels and their motivation.
Create a checklist
Maybe your teen hasn’t completed their science project yet, but they have made an outline for the project or they have gathered all of the materials they need to get started.
When teens can check off these smaller tasks off of a checklist, it lets them see that they are making progress toward their goal, making it seem less far off than before. This will help increase their dopamine levels because they will feel like the reward of completing their project is getting closer.
By breaking down a larger task into smaller, more manageable goals, it can help teens stay motivated.
Choose to focus on results
Most runners probably do not feel great when they are training for a marathon or in the most strenuous part of a long run, but they are motivated to push through because their eyes are on the prize. They know that the feelings of joy they will experience when they cross the finish line outweigh any feelings of pain they experience to get there.
Encourage your teen to take this same approach with their schoolwork. While starting on a complicated assignment or planning the outline for an English paper might seem terrible at the moment, it won’t compare to the feeling they will get when they finish these assignments and earn a good grade for all of their hard work or when they get accepted into their dream college.
When your teen seems to lack motivation or wants to give up, remind them of the rewards that are waiting for them if they push through.
Consider adopting healthier sleeping and exercise habits
If your teen does not already get an adequate amount of sleep and exercise each day, this can also influence their ability to stay motivated.
Getting enough high-quality sleep each night and spending time exercising daily has been shown to increase dopamine levels which in turn boosts motivation.
The next time you notice that it takes your teen a long time to get started on a homework assignment or a paper for school, consider trying these steps to help spike their dopamine and encourage them to get their work done.