Hi, Freelancer.
I've been in the same situation as you and many-many others. There were different things that helped me in this situation. But there were key beliefs that really pushed me through.
I'd say, what you are going through when starting new activity and then dropping is a widely spread phenomenon.
I don't know how it is called properly, but it is based on the way how we estimate the efforts needed to reach a goal. Shamou's note on diets reminded me about it. So I'll use diets as an example.
It's Monday morning and we start a new diet and the exercise regimen. We are determined and vigorous. Everything is fine. The next morning we jump on a scale and lo and behold! We've lost some weight! We are happy and stick to it. The next day we've lost some more weight!
But something else is already happening at the back of our mind.
We think - right, I want to lose 30 pounds. Today, I've lost a pound. So 30 divided by 1 means that in 30 days I will reach my goal! Yahoo! Let's do it.
At the very same moment something else is happening well outside our attention, or consciousness. We do not know about it, but it is destined to make our projections fail in a most spectacular fashion.
Our body, having detected the drop in the calorie intake and the increase of strain kicks in the compensation mechanisms. I'm not going into details here,
the guys in Health&Fitness forum will do it better. The key idea is that our organism always tries to stay in balance. And if something shifts this balance, the organism invariably answers with counteraction.
In a few days the progress rapidly slows down. Something that was easy, suddenly becomes hard. And it
really does. It is not an illusion, it is not the willpower that's failing. It just became harder to achieve the goal. Suddenly, we are looking not at a month, but at a year of effort needed to achieve the goal. The motivation drops and we come to a crossroad.
There are two ways out of this crossroad. First is to give up and go back to whatever we were doing before the diet. We gain back the lost weight, and return to the starting point.
The other way is to continue our efforts. But not in a simple "toughen it out" way. No. If we go harder at this point, the counteraction will also increase.
Instead, we have to figure out what counteraction we are getting exactly, and how to work around it. In case of the diets and fitness all plateau-breaking techniques come to help.
And if we do that, and succeed, then something amazing happens. Our performance rapidly increases. It may even surpass the linear projections we were making. It can go into exponential growth. We may end up two month later, not having lost 30 pounds, but instead having reduced body fat percentage and having put muscle on. And this way we would reach the new stable state that is more fit then we could ever hope for. And the body will consider this new state its default and protect it from changing. Which will require us to repeat all the process if we want to develop further.
I've used the example of weight loss, but, in fact this scenario is one of the most fundamental things in human life. It applies to learning, social life, business, development of the people and countries. You see it everywhere you go.
It was a real breakthrough for me when I've learned about it. The plateau will come with certainty. It won't be the end of the day, but the beginning of the real thing, Just knowing it was the real eye opener.
Suddenly I was in control. Is wasn't about bad me, It was about diagnosing the problem and finding the solution. This is something I'm good at. This was about being smart and not working hard at all. Suddenly there was a round-abouts, instead of dead-ends.
I've acknowledged that some tasks are hard. Most of the tasks are harder then we think they are in the beginning. But they are easier then we think about them in the middle.
I hope that will help you, Freelancer, and everybody else, to make some more sense out of this world.
