STOP PROCRASTINATING NOW! Understand PROCRASTINATION to start!

Who never spent hours procrastinating instead of doing what it needs to be done? For sure it happened to you in the past, and will happen again in the future because, sometimes, is really hard to avoid!

If you always do it, I’m sure you recognize that’s a big problem in your life! If you want to stop procrastinating, there are some things you need to understand before you start working on an action plan, and I will talk about it today!

Procrastination and laziness are not the same thing. Procrastination happens when you keep leaving for later what you need to do, and you distract yourself with a more relaxing and non-productive activity. Laziness is more about a lack of action, or a desire to do nothing.

To deal with it, you have to become aware of what causes procrastination, you need to understand the pain and pleasure principle and how to use it to discipline yourself, and also the power of your inner dialogue!

What Causes Procrastination

The first thing I would like you to understand is that procrastination is a habit that happens as a stress response! Which means it’s an automatic behavior where you avoid doing things that are going to produce the stress hormones, like cortisol, and you chose to do something that gives you the happiness hormones, like dopamine.

Your brain and your mind work in autopilot! So, if you want to change your response, the first thing you need to do is to identify what’s causing it! Once you become aware of the stress factors that are causing procrastination, the second thing you need to do is to redirect and change your actions!

You have to force it! It’s a mistake to expect that willpower and motivation will come out of nowhere, they won’t! Willpower is about training your mental muscle in your prefrontal cortex, and motivation is about your vision and your reason to do something! You have to work to develop them, otherwise they will not show up! So don’t wait until you feel like doing something because there are good chances it will never happen!

The Pain and Pleasure Over Time

The second thing I would like you to understand is the dynamics between pain and pleasure over time, in the short and long run! Some things that give you a lot of pleasure right now might result in a lot of pain later. Other, you may perceive as being painful today, but might bring you a lot of happiness in the future.

For example, if you eat everything that you enjoy every day, probably you will struggle with your health and your physical shape. But, if you work to change your eating habits and do small sacrifices every day, can you imagine how would you feel when you achieve your ideal health and body shape?

Procrastination itself is another example because it gives you immediate stress relief, but it causes much more stress later!

See what I’m talking about? In the short run you get small doses of pain or pleasure, and in the long run, you get bigger ones! And usually they are inversed, small daily pleasures might result in huge pain and suffering, and small daily sacrifices might result in long lasting wellbeing!

Now that you understand this, you can use this knowledge to discipline yourself!

How to Discipline Yourself

If you check the meaning of the word discipline, you will find that it’s about training obedience using the principles of punishment and reward, which means, pain and pleasure!

Think about children, do you really think they will stop playing video game to do the homework by themselves? Probably not, right? But if you say they can play video game only after they finish the homework, for sure they will finish quickly because they want to get the reward!

Now, let’s say they already started playing video game, you can’t make them stop and you are frustrated because they didn’t do their obligations, what would you do? It’s very likely that you would punish them and leave them without video game for some time, right?

Well, I know that educating a child is quite different nowadays, but this principle worked very well in my childhood. I was born in 81 and I use it up to this date with myself because I know it works! The generation might have changed, but one thing remains, you have obligations in life and you need to get them done, regardless of what you like!

You mind is like a child, you need to control it! And these principles can help you a lot with it! So how can you apply them? Actually, it’s quite simple! You just need to create mental scenarios of pain and pleasure, in the short and long term, and bring them into your mind when you need them. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s imaginary!

Of course the mental scenarios alone are not enough, there’s another important factor that you need to enforce discipline, the way you talk to yourself in your inner dialogue!

The Importance of your Inner Dialogue

In any kind of personal development work, you need to have a very strong and convincing inner voice inside your mind! The only way to develop and fortify this part, is by practicing inner debates with yourself in a way that it wins the majority of the time! To do that, you need very valid arguments to make the primitive part of your mind shut up and obey!

To use the reward and punishment system, bring a possible future scenario into your mind and say something like:

• You might enjoy what you are doing now, but see what will happen later, you will feel very bad for not having done what you need!
•  Let’s make a deal!? You can take your obligations out of the way, and once you finish, you can relax doing what you like without the feeling of having things to do!

You can use this principle in pretty much everything that you need in your life! I will give you another example, let’s say that you are working to have a better career, you can create two scenarios about the future:

• In one of them you get what you want, and you are very successful and happy with your professional life!
• In the other one, you are stuck in the same position where you are right now.

At any given moment that you need to discipline yourself to work on your goals, just bring them into your mind, and ask yourself which one do you prefer? Once your mind chooses, then you can argue with it about what needs to be done, or what you need to stop doing!

If everything that I’ve covered today made sense to you, you are ready to work on an action plan. I have some more posts to help you out!

How to INCREASE and IMPROVE your MOTIVATION! (5 tips)

DEMOTIVATED? Why motivation DISAPPEARS after a while?

How to INCREASE and IMPROVE your WILLPOWER! (3 simple exercises)

My secrets to have COMMITMENT, DISCIPLINE and CONSISTENCY in life!