Why Did You Stop Doing the Thing You Loved?

Are you motivated intrinsically or extrinsically, or both?

Make a quick list of the things you loved doing as a kid: drawing, building, roaming the neighborhood with your friends, asking “why” forty times a day (this one might be hardwired but you get the idea). Now ask how many of them you’d still do if nobody paid you, praised you, or gave you a grade for them.

Fast forward to adulthood. For me, when I check my calendar on Sunday night to plan for the upcoming week, there are the things I get to do and the things I have to do. The patients I’m curious to see, and the form that has to be filed. The paper I want to write, and the one that would be “good for my career.”

How are these childhood and adult “funs” (and chores) linked?

Back in the early 1970s, Edward Deci and later his longtime collaborator Richard Ryan built a whole framework, Self-Determination Theory, around the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Here’s how they are defined. Intrinsic motivation is when the activity is its own reward: you do the thing because doing the thing feels good. Extrinsic motivation is when the reward sits somewhere outside the activity: you do the thing to get a paycheck, a grade, a gold star, a flat stomach. Carrots and sticks live in the extrinsic pile. Playing in the woods as a kid lives in the intrinsic one.

So far so good. Now let me complicate it, using my own dinner as an example.

For most of my life, eating healthy sat squarely in the have-to pile. I grew up in Indiana with a mom who made sure I ate my vegetables, so you’d think it would come naturally, but for years my reasons for eating well had very little to do with the food itself. Picture three versions of me at the dinner table.

There’s the version that eats the salad because he wants to look a certain way: lean, fit, the guy who has it together. The reward there is entirely outside the food. It lives in other people’s eyes, in the mirror, in comparison. Notice how that one feels. There’s a low hum of pressure to it, a sense of it could always be better because someone is judging you.

Then there’s the version that eats the salad to keep his energy up. This is the one I stumbled into when I started paying attention: what I ate at lunch ran a straight line to whether I crashed at three in the afternoon or made it through my last few patients on my clinic schedule intact. The reward is still outside the eating. It’s the energy, the not-crashing. But it’s my reward, tied to what I care about rather than borrowed from someone else’s approval.

A close cousin of this functional version of eat healthy = optimal energy is the eat well = self-care. When I think of the best ways to take care of myself, I show kindness to myself and my body by eating healthy food. Eating junk food falls more on the self-indulgence side of the spectrum than self-kindness. Fast food says convenience is more important than health.

At its extreme of these 2.5 versions is a relatively new term that was recently introduced to the mental health lexicon: orthorexia. Orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with eating only foods that a person considers pure, clean, and perfectly healthy, to the point where it severely disrupts their daily life and emotional well-being. This could be driven both by the external rewards (e.g. social media likes when we post a picture of our meal), and the internal ones (e.g. higher energy levels).

And now, a third version: enjoying cooking and eating this food. The smell of garlic hitting the oil, the taste of a good meal made well. Here the reward isn’t downstream of anything. The food is the reward. That one took years to sneak up on me, and it’s the one that added to the eat healthy = sustained energy + better emotional balance made eating well feel like a no-brainer, because just doing the thing felt good.

So which of those is intrinsic and which are extrinsic? If we want to get technical, the textbook answer is that only the third is truly intrinsic (the food is its own reward) and the other two are extrinsic. But what happens to “wanting to keep my energy up” when we zoom in a little more. We tend to think of wanting to be healthy as one of the good, inside reasons. By the strict definition, it’s extrinsic: you’re eating one thing to get a separate outcome. Yet it feels pretty different than the wanting to impress others version feels (scenario #1), doesn’t it?

That’s because the intrinsic-versus-extrinsic line, useful as it is, hides a second distinction that may be what is important. Deci and Ryan saw this too, and stretched the binary into a spectrum that runs from motivation that’s fully controlled (I do it because I’d be ashamed not to, or because someone’s watching) all the way to motivation that’s fully autonomous (I do it because it matters to me, up to and including doing it for its own sake). Keeping up appearances and keeping my energy up are both technically extrinsic. But one is controlled and one is autonomous, and that difference tells you whether the behavior will last, and how you’ll feel while doing it, far better than the intrinsic-or-extrinsic label ever could.

Sorry, I know our brains don’t like nuance, but there it is. And it is kind of important.

Which means that sorting your life into two piles is likely missing something that helps us tap into motivation in a sustainable way. The more useful question then, is where the reward comes from, and whether it runs out.

If you’ve read my other work, you know I think most of what we do runs on one ancient piece of machinery: reward-based learning. Trigger, behavior, reward, repeat. Your brain — in particular a region behind your eyes called the orbitofrontal cortex — is constantly comparing the reward value of your options and steering you toward whatever paid off best last time. Same system whether you’re a sea slug learning where the food is or a person reaching for their phone out of boredom. Run motivation through that equation and the whole intrinsic-or-extrinsic question turns into something that may actually be useful: where does this reward come from, and does it wear off?

Extrinsic rewards come from outside, and outside rewards eventually wear off. Termed habituation, our brain adjusts to whatever it’s getting and then needs a little more to get the same hit. There’s an old image for this in some Buddhist texts, the hungry ghost: a creature with an enormous belly and a throat as narrow as a needle, eating forever and never full. Constantly hungry for more. You needed one compliment, now you need another, and another. The raise felt great for a month. You swapped in cute puppy videos for your old habit and pretty soon you needed more of them, and cuter ones (+ kittens!).

Intrinsic rewards work differently: they come from inside, and they don’t keep our bellies rumbling and growling for more. Being honest, living a life of integrity (see my previous articles on this), being kind. All of these are intrinsically rewarding and have a different quality to them. They don’t share that urgy “more” hunger that feels driven and contracted. Instead, they feel more open and expansive.

Curiosity is the cleanest example of an intrinsically rewarding motivation I know. You can’t get to the bottom of being curious. There’s always more to be interested in, and being interested feels good on its own, no delivery truck of more required. It’s the kind of reward your brain will keep choosing, because it doesn’t leave you hungrier than it found you.

One of my favorite quotes about curiosity: “Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity.” Boom.

Which is what makes a relatively famous study in this corner of psychology very interesting (and somewhat unsettling). In 1971, Deci sat college students down with a puzzle called the Soma cube, an absorbing little three-dimensional brain-teaser that people tended to enjoy for its own sake. He paid one group a dollar for every shape they solved and left another group unpaid. Then came the critical part of the study: a “free choice” period, where the experimenter stepped out, the puzzles sat there next to some magazines, and nobody was paying or watching. The students who had been paid spent less of that free time on the puzzles than the ones who never were. The money had quietly moved the motivation for doing it from the inside to the outside, and once the money stopped, so did most of the interest.

There’s your answer to the question in the title, at least some of the time. You stopped doing the thing you loved because at some point an external reward got bolted onto it, your brain updated the reason from “because I love this” to “because I get paid for this,” and then the pay became the point.

As with most science that isn’t a slam dunk, the finding has been fought over (more nuance!): in the 1990s, Eisenberger and Cameron argued the effect had been overstated, yet a large 1999 meta-analysis from Deci and colleagues mostly held the line while spelling out the fine print. Where it nets out is this: the effect is real, but conditional. Unexpected rewards don’t seem to undermine motivation. Plain encouragement, a “nice work,” tends to boost it. It’s the expected, tangible, do-this-and-you-get-that kind of reward, dropped on top of something you already loved, that does the damage. So this isn’t a case against ever being paid. Instead, it’s a warning about one specific way the wiring gets crossed (and how we might accidentally be training ourselves and others away from doing things that we love).

I crossed that wiring myself once, on purpose, at a fork in my career, though I didn’t have the words for it then. When I was finishing my psychiatry residency and deciding what my first lab at Yale would study–mind you, a very important decision that I didn’t want to screw up because it would possibly set the stage for the trajectory of my career–I had a respectable path teed up: my PhD was in molecular biology, mouse models of stress, and the sensible (conservative) move was to keep building on it.

But I’d also started meditating to deal with my own stress and anxiety, found it really helpful, and gotten curious about whether the same thing could be studied scientifically. There was no career path there. When I floated the idea to a colleague, that I’d pivot to studying mindfulness and have to learn translational neuroscience, clinical trials to fMRI, more or less from scratch, he told me flatly that I’d “kill my career,” alluding to the perception that I was about to go off the deep end to study the mystical world of rainbows and unicorns.

I remember telling myself that I’d rather kill my career doing something that I was really interested in, than follow the established path and build on the research that I had already done.

That sentence is the whole point, but it would be easy to tell this as “follow your passion and you’ll be vindicated.” The field did blow up over the next decade, but that was as much luck and timing as passion and hard work (both are important). Plenty of people follow their curiosity straight off a cliff and the field never shows up to catch them. The point here isn’t the payoff. In fact, the payoff is beside the point, a side effect or side “benefit” that followed my path of following my passion. That’s what intrinsic motivation looks like: you’d make the call even if it never paid off, because the doing is the reward in itself.

Yes cliche for a reason: journey beats destination.

Curiosity is also what keeps my clinical work from going stale. I try to walk into each new patient, and each new session with someone I’ve seen a hundred times, with what Korean Zen calls “don’t-know mind”: a deliberate letting go of any assumptions that I already know what’s going on or how this will end. It keeps me curious and present, and it keeps me from treating a person as a problem to be solved, a box to be checked, or an encounter to be billed.

Do I think about money? Of course I think about money! Who doesn’t? But when those thoughts pop into my head, I can bring my own awareness to those moments and compare what I get from going down the money thought train vs. staying present with my patient. The money thought train takes me away from actually performing well at my job because I lose the connection, miss key insights, and generally give off a vibe of not being in the room (even if it’s over Zoom). Being present feels SO MUCH better: I’m not lost in the itchy never-enough money brain thinking which drives restlessness, and more importantly, it’s easier to truly sit and be curious when I’m present. Being constantly curious also keeps me from getting burned out, because I’m approaching each day fresh, instead of looking at my calendar and wondering how I am going to make it to the weekend.

To be clear, the trouble isn’t extrinsic motivation humming along in the background, quietly keeping the lights on. The trouble is when it takes center stage and hijacks a moment that was supposed to be about something else.

I’ll stop short of one tempting overclaim, though. Staying curious does seem to keep me from burning out. That’s legit. But curiosity is not armor against a broken system. You can be the most intrinsically motivated clinician alive and still get ground down by an impossible caseload. Intrinsic motivation lets good work nourish you. It can’t fix bad conditions on its own.

So what’s the point of pointing out any of these differences between different types of motivation? Try taking an inventory. It’s the same habit-mapping I teach for anxiety loops, just pointed at a new target. For a day or two, walk through your hours and notice, for each thing you do, where the reward is coming from. Not to grade yourself; there are no points for being more intrinsic. Just to see the shape of your days and how they are being driven.

The trick is to skip the labels and go to the felt sense, because “intrinsic or extrinsic” turns out to be too imprecise, a noisy way to sort things. Paying for groceries is extrinsic, necessary and feels fine. Creative work can feel terrible while you’re in the thick of it (especially if it is driven by a deadline or other extrinsic motivations). So don’t ask which pile it goes in. Ask the hungry-ghost question: does this feed me, or does it just feed the loop? Does the motivation feel driven, contracted, restless, never-enough, that narrow throat that never fills? Or does it feel nourishing, the kind of reward that leaves you steadier instead of itchier? My lab has spent years confirming what you can check in your own body in about thirty seconds: contracted states like frustration, impatience, craving and anxiety reliably feel worse, more closed-down, than open states like curiosity, kindness and connection.

And watch it run both ways, because you can tip too far in either direction. We love to talk about the people who are too extrinsically driven, chasing money or status until the thing they once loved curdles into a job (there are way too many movies about this). But you can lean too hard the other way too. The person who only does what interests them, and lets the dull-but-necessary things rot (taxes, etc.). I’ve seen too many patients find out the hard way that “I only do what fascinates me” is more akin to addiction than a formula for sustainable happiness. A life that runs purely on what feels good this minute isn’t free. It just sounds appealing at the moment.

You don’t have to burn the extrinsic out of your life and live on pure curiosity like some sort of motivational monk. Plenty of what you do for outside reasons is fine, even good; the rent gets paid, the dishes get done. All I’m suggesting is that you look, closely and from the inside, at where each reward is coming from, and whether it sustains you or just leaves you reaching for the next one. Most of us never have. So look. Hmmm — what’s really driving this one?

Judson Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and professor at Brown University. He is the author of Unwinding Anxiety (NYTimes bestseller), The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit and The Unwinding Anxiety Workbook. He co-founded MindshiftRecovery.org which provides free support for people with any type of addiction.

If you are struggling with anxiety, Dr. Brewer’s Going Beyond Anxiety program brings together his research and clinical experience to help people build effective skills to reduce anxiety and cultivate calm (www.goingbeyondanxiety.com).

Copyright © 2025, Judson Brewer, MD, PhD. All rights reserved.

References

Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18(1), 105–115. [from memory — verify volume/pages]

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668. [verified]

Eisenberger, R., & Cameron, J. (1996). Detrimental effects of reward: Reality or myth? American Psychologist, 51(11), 1153–1166. [from memory — verify]

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. [from memory — verify; the standard one-stop cite for the framework]

Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129–137. [not used in this draft; on hand if you want the preschool/markers example — from memory, verify]