Masud Husain
Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.
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Motivated and apathetic people are indistinguishable when the reward is large; the whole difference between them shows up over small rewards.
We find that everyone is willing to work for high rewards. But the difference between motivated people and apathetic people is at the level of the low rewards. Apathetic people are more inclined to say, "Nah, I don't think this is worth the effort, so I won't do that option."
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Motivation is not a personality trait but a biology, and when that biology fails a person can lose motivation entirely.
it was only about 15 years ago I started beginning to be aware that there may be a an important biology underlying motivation and when that biology goes wrong, it can lead to loss of motivation and even pathological apathy.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Apathy and depression are different conditions, not degrees of one thing: a person can lose all motivation while remaining perfectly happy.
there are some people who have pure apathy, no depression like David. And there are other people who can be depressed, they can be sad, they can be hopeless about the future, but they don't necessarily lose motivation. They can have pure depression.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
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Every action a person takes is the output of a reward-against-effort calculation the brain runs, and most of that calculation happens below awareness.
We were talking about reward versus effort. And essentially that's a very important way I think that we make a decision. Much of that could be subconscious.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Apathy is not a quieter brain but a costlier one: apathetic people burn more energy simply deciding whether an action is worth it.
It's showing us that apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision. They have a bigger activation energy barrier to overcome because when they're making that decision, the brain is consuming more energy. It's consuming more glucose when it's doing that.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
There are only two levers on anybody's motivation: change what the reward means to them, or lower the effort of getting started.
You can either increase the reward or change it in some way in terms of something that's meaningful for the person or you change the effort required to accomplish maybe part of the task or perhaps start you know just initiate the task and often starting can be a huge motivational pull.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Planning a day or a week in advance works because it pays the brain's decision cost once rather than dozens of times.
Every decision has a cost in terms as we've seen the brain having to put in invest fuel to make that decision. So if you're having to do that every time you make a decision, that can seem very burdensome. Whereas if you did it once in a big way where you planned it out for the day or the week, maybe the costs in terms of the activation energy required for the brain is much lower for you if you do that.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
You do not have to finish a project to be rewarded for it: being told 'well done' for one piece is itself a motivational pull that keeps the work moving.
It would also help if your manager said, "Well done for getting that bit done." Right? That's that's also a motivation pull to think, "Yeah, actually I don't need to get the whole piece done to get the reward of somebody identified that as a positive thing to have done."
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
The same physical effort can be re-valued as less effortful inside one person's head, mid-task, with nothing in the physics having changed.
And I think what you've said is within the individual, you can change your subject evaluation of the same effort you're running on the Gobi Desert, right? It's the same effort you've been putting in for miles and miles. And suddenly you have subjectively valued this thing as less effort
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Finishing is as much a part of motivation as starting, and the two are separate capacities: plenty of energetic people never complete anything.
You have to persevere. And that's the other really important part of motivation. You know, we know a lot of people who start things and then we also know the non-competers, the people who are always so energetic but actually don't finish, right? So, it's almost as important to be able to finish and complete as initiate actions.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Generalising particular failures into 'I am bad at everything' is the route from lost motivation to clinical depression.
if you do for some reason generalize maladaptively to thinking this didn't work and I tried this, this didn't work, and I tried this and I'm really bad at this. That can lead not only to loss of motivation, but what we might call clinical depression.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Ambition does not equate with happiness: in the Harvard aging cohort it was the people who lived average lives who reported being happiest.
But when they looked at the happiness levels of these people, it was the average person who actually would self-report the highest levels of happiness. So ambition doesn't necessarily equate with happiness, which I think many people would agree with with that.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Being told to be realistic about your ambitions is how ambitions fail; the boundaries people accept about what they can do are the ones that stop them.
If I had thought in those ways, it probably wouldn't have happened. I just didn't think that we should have these boundaries to what you can do.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Personality is not fixed: the self is the product of a society of cognitive modules, and take one module away and the self changes.
So, I think the key point here is the self is not immutable. It's something that can change. People might think my personality is this way. It can never change. Well, your personality is the product of your society of mind.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Keeping a social network, staying curious and having a sense of purpose protect against dementia about as much as blood pressure and exercise do.
Those include that having that sense of purpose, making sure that you have a network of people, that you're socially connected as your age, and also remaining curious, open to new ideas. Those factors turn out to be almost as important as some of the physical things we do.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
The evidence that scrolling social media delivers dopamine hits is not really very strong, whatever the popular story says.
One is yes, I agree with you that this sort of behavior, doom scrolling, etc. occurs, but I think the evidence that there are dopamine hits when you're doing this isn't really very strong.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Dopamine drives wanting rather than liking: the pleasure of actually getting the thing runs on opioids instead, which is why an addict can want what they do not enjoy.
And the evidence suggests that wanting pursuit of a goal is mediated or modulated at least by dopamine whereas actually the liking the pleasure you might get from an outcome is not that seems to be related to uh opioid neurotransmitters in the brain.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Dopamine does far more than drive the motivation to act: it is also central to working memory and to executive control.
Dopamine in the human brain isn't all about motivation to action. There's dopamine in other parts of the brain. We know from some really classical work by Patricia Goldman Rakit, for example, that dopamine is important for working memory, short-term memory.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
The slowness of Parkinson's disease may be a failure of motivation to act rather than of motor control, which is why a patient can still run from a burning house.
So it's a different way of framing why is there a reduction of action? Why is there bradicynesia, a slowing of movement in people with Parkinson's disease? That's really interesting. It doesn't just have to be about motor control. It could be the motivation to act just as we said with David, right?
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
A stimulant taken to sharpen an already-high performer is more likely to make them worse, because the dose-response curve is an inverted U.
If you start from a low baseline of performance, you might get some positive boost. It's quite small, but you might get it. But if you are actually quite a high performer, then you risk getting worse. with this is called the inverse U-shaped curve.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
ADHD is a real condition and over-diagnosed at the same time; the two claims are not incompatible, because the line marking normality is a judgement call.
But I also think that this is not mutually incompatible with the view that there's also overdiagnosis. And I think we need very careful ways of making diagnosis because the conventional way is you take a history from a person about what the problem is.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
There is little evidence anyone can train their attention to be better in general; what works is removing the things that take it.
So I think although there might not be a great deal of evidence that you can intrinsically train your attention to do better generally what you could do is to cut out things that are distracting for you.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Alzheimer's disease and dementia are not the same thing: a fifth to a third of people whose brains carry the pathology never became demented.
Alzheimer's disease does not necessarily equal dementia. people can have Alzheimer's disease and not get dementia. So, we found this out from post-mortem studies. People have been followed as they age. Uh they've donated their brains and it turns out that perhaps 20 to 30% of these individuals who never had dementia have Alzheimer pathology.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
Apathy in an otherwise healthy older person doubles their risk of Alzheimer's, which means the disease changes behaviour long before it touches cognition.
What we find is that those individuals who score highly on just self-reported questionnaires for motivation, if they score highly for apathy, they have twice the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than people who don't.
How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain Said 24 Aug 2026
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