The Truth About Procrastination No One Tells You

“You’re not avoiding the work, you’re avoiding how it makes you feel.”

All Emotion has Positive Intent part III

Welcome to the last part of your helpful “negative” emotion series, where the goal is to teach you all about how there is no such thing as negative emotions.

Understanding Procrastination

Today we’re going to discuss procrastination, and this is a big topic to cover.

So many times I hear people describe themselves as “procrastinators” but what you don’t understand is you heavily identity with a defense mechanism designed to help protect you from difficulty. Which may be a big reason you do struggle to get into a state of taking action and accomplishing tasks.

Procrastination is designed to help us with stress management, the funny thing is, it usually makes our stress worse.

How many times have you sat there and said, “I’ll do this later I really don’t want to do it right now” And then later comes and now you’re EVEN more stressed because you have the same amount of work, with double the pressure and less time to do it.

Well this is why we tend to see procrastination as a negative thing, because of the negative results of added stress we tend to experience.

My Experience with Procrastination

Mind you just because there is positive intention to help you avoid heavy stress, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a perceived negative outcome.

I remember back in college I used to get a paper assigned to me, usually like a 10 page paper or so, and I would have this assignment in my hand about 2-3 weeks before it was due.

Hell if you remember college over 10 years ago, you remember we got those giant paper syllabuses that would tell us every assignment that was due and when before the semester even got underway.

Despite having all the prepared-readiness at my disposal to know what I needed and when it was due, I still would wait for the night before to start.

Not just the night before, but the night before at about 10pm, for a 8am class.

As you may imagine it wasn’t the best quality work that would be submitted.

I would struggle and stress, and funny enough, procrastinate EVEN MORE, since I was now really heavily stressed by this looming deadline of my morning class.

The Cycle of Stress

The typical evening would be, start researching the topic at 10pm, with multiple 5min distraction breaks, begin writing the paper around 12/1am.

Stare at the clock intensely as time flew by with little progress. Stress. Write a little more. Stress again. Walk away and take a break, as you can imagine this was inefficient.

I’d follow this pattern until I eventually completed my paper around 5am or 6am.

At which point I would go to the gym, and then workout before class. And then chug a few energy drinks and well, that’s what you can do at 19 years old.

This was my cycle of stress and dis-ease in the school environment.

Yet I continued to perpetuate this behavior over and over for a few months during my college career. Always feeling stressed, behind, worried, and unable to get myself to do what I needed in a timely fashion to make sure I was ahead of the curve and avoiding stress.

If you’re anything like my college self, you may also feel helpless to defeat the power that is your procrastination.

It may feel as if you will always be a slave under the yoke of stress and worry, never knowing peace and productivity.

Why Procrastination Happens

If you’ve gotten this far, you may be wondering how does this even help, and more importantly how do you get out of this loop from hell?

Procrastination is your best friend when it comes to regulating the stress response.

In the short term we adapt to our high stress levels by deciding that we will take a delayed action and put off heavy stress until a future timeframe.

It becomes our emotional regulator in times of hardship, however if we don’t learn how to transmute or transform the way we utilize procrastination, or more appropriately how you specifically can change, then you will continue to make decisions to put off stress, only to experience more later.

Motivation and Purpose

One major thing I’ve learned about procrastination is that it can mainly be a motivation problem causing our high stress levels.

I don’t believe people are procrastinators, I do however understand that some people aren’t clear, intentional or inspired on why they are doing what they “Should” be doing.

This creates massive resistance and stress, and ultimately a lack of desire to take action.

For example, if I told you to meet me at 4:00am to go for a run in the middle of the woods, and you dislike me, running, and the woods, you’d be dreading and putting off that run.

However if I told you to meet me at 4:00am, and I’ll give you a billion dollars, your dream house, and the keys to your dream car, I’d bet you’d be camped out over night wherever the meeting spot is.

You'll probably set 10 alarms to make sure you’re on time. Heck, you may not even be able to sleep because you wouldn’t want to risk being late.

Action Needs Purpose

Action without purpose is pointless and if we find actions that we are attempting to take to be pointless then we will continue to do what we can to put off what we see as low reward, and high stress.

I’d encourage you to identify what it is in your life that you keep putting off and then identify if it’s an issue of purpose and motivation or something else.

Let’s say you are the person that understands there is massive purpose behind what you’re attempting to do, yet you still struggle to complete it, or even get started.

One other major issue you may be coming up against is this, you’ve built it up so much in your mind, that your body has absorbed that stress and you’ve physically created an energetic block in your body.

You may even experience almost a form of paralysis whenever you think about the idea of getting started.

Breaking the Paralysis

If this is you, Nike said it best, you need to learn to “Just do it”

To which I’m sure you’re scoffing and thinking “Wow Vin, I wish I thought of that simple solution” knowing you full well have.

However let me explain something to you about this, to workout that paralysis in your body, it’s important to get out of your head and take a small incremental action towards the work you are attempting to complete.

Whenever you think of something you “need to or should do” you have about 5 seconds to take an action before the brain starts turning on and coming up with the reasons you SHOULDN’T do the thing you just thought of.

Being able to build a reflexive muscle of thought to action is extremely important in being able to overcome procrastination.

Practical Ways to Overcome Procrastination

To combat your procrastination set yourself up for success by intentionally creating opportunities to act.

A few ways you can do this is by:

1️⃣ Change up your environment, research shows we condition behavior by actions repeated in an environment. The space you’re in currently may not be supporting your desire to change things up.

2️⃣ Get items or things that you need to take action ready before the time to execute.

3️⃣ Don’t allow yourself to deviate, if you say you’re going to do something take action even if you don’t feel like it in the moment.

4️⃣ Plan your day properly to give yourself enough time to do what you need to.

Closing Thoughts

Procrastination is meant to help, but the effects can be detrimental if you don’t set your self up for success.

I hope these tips will help guide you on your greater journey to productivity and success, and as always let’s go change our lives!