Stop procrastinating
With this fun technique
Happy Friday, Intentionalists!
It’s very human to put off tasks or activities that we don’t enjoy or that cause discomfort. However, procrastination becomes a problem when we leave things to the last minute and miss important deadlines. It creates stress and often many more problems than if we simply went through the discomfort of doing the task promptly.
We can also procrastinate over performing daily activities such as exercise or sorting out our financial paperwork. The short-term satisfaction of not causing ourselves discomfort will lead to long-term pain when our health fails, or our finances spiral out of control.
The solutions to procrastination can vary from tough love (Telling ourselves to ‘Just do it!’) to complex psychological analysis involving exploring our fears around doing the task and confronting any limiting beliefs we may have.
Neither approach is inherently bad, but may not be effective. We already feel a level of guilt about our procrastination so admonishing ourselves will only make us feel worse, and maybe even make us more prone to procrastinating. And too much analysis can add more work to what already feels like an overwhelming task to us.
So, you will be glad to know we have a very simple but highly effective technique to help you overcome procrastination. If you practice it, you’ll feel your ability to get things done skyrocket – and you may even find those daunting tasks become enjoyable!
We’re going to keep the prompts short today and dive right into the technique.
Ready? Grab your journal and a pen and let’s get started!
PROMPTS
1. What is the thing that you are procrastinating over?
Examples: Studying for an exam, taking up an exercise program, decluttering your kitchen, sorting out your paperwork etc
Hint: You might be procrastinating over various activities but pick the one that’s most impacting your life right now. Once you conquer it, you can apply the technique we’re going to teach you to other activities as well.
2. How is not doing this activity negatively affecting your life?
For instance, not exercising regularly might be causing you to gain dangerous visceral fat around your organs, to lack vitality and energy, not sleep well at night, etc
3. How would doing the activity positively change your life?
For example, regularly exercising would keep your heart and brain healthy, you’d have more energy, you’d be stronger and have a more resilient immune system, etc
STRATEGY
Part 1: Break down the activity into the smallest possible steps (around 10 is a good number)
For the sake of the exercise, we are going to take the example of procrastinating over taking a regular morning walk. Instead of waking up and getting going, you procrastinate by scrolling through your phone.
Before you know it, 45 minutes has gone by and now you have to get ready for work. No matter how many times you tell yourself you are going to go for a morning walk, it just doesn’t happen.
The ten steps might look something like this:
Sit up when the alarm goes off and get out of bed
Leave the phone on the nightstand
Walk down the hall to the toilet. Use toilet.
Go to the kitchen and drink a glass of water.
Feed dog or cat
Go to the bathroom and brush your teeth
Go to wardrobe and change into walking clothes
Put on sunscreen and sunglasses
Pick up house keys and step out the door
Do some stretches then start walking
Part 2. Use visualisation to teach your brain the new activity
We’re going to delve into a bit of neuroscience to tell you why this step is a game-changer. The reason you’re procrastinating is that your brain loves routine, habit and comfort. If you have created a habit of lying in bed and scrolling your phone, then you have actual physical structures in your brain wired to perform that habit each morning.
Routines allow your brain to conserve energy. When you suddenly decide to do something differently, you are forcing your brain to use energy to form different physical structures and that is tiring for your brain. So, it resists.
However, we can help our brain by actively training it to do the task mentally before we ask it to do it physically. This works very well because our brain can’t actually tell the difference between what we are visualising and what we are doing in reality. To the brain, it is the same thing.
We want to be very clear that there is a big difference between visualising doing the activity and just thinking about it. As you are already aware, your brain offers all sorts of random thoughts, many of which you dismiss. Just thinking about your new activity will not rewire your brain.
For visualisation to be effective, you must bring in your senses (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste) to create a virtual reality experience for your brain.
Using the example of going for a morning walk instead of scrolling, your visualisation exercise will look something like this:
I hear the chimes of my alarm and immediately sit up and pull the bedclothes aside. The floorboards feel cool beneath my feet. I leave my phone on the bedside table and make the bed. The birds in the garden are singing their morning song. Then I walk down the hall to the bathroom with my cat, Skipper, running in front of me and meowing eagerly for his breakfast. I use the toilet (you know the drill, we aren’t going to spell this one out for you). The kitchen is full of warm sunshine when I enter it. I open the cupboard door and hear the click of the latch as I take out a glass and go to the water filter. I hear the pleasant gurgling sound as my glass fills. The water feels cool and tastes refreshing as it slides down my throat. Skipper is eager for breakfast, and I take out a can of cat food and scoop the fishy-smelling contents onto a plate for him. Then I …
And so on.
It will take you a bit of time to create the visualisation in the first place, but once you practice it, you should be able to visualise getting out of bed and getting ready for your walk in three to five minutes. You would then practice this visualisation a couple of times a day in a quiet relaxed state to teach your brain what you want it to do automatically.
You can apply this technique to anything you are procrastinating over. You can also apply it to changing a habit or to enhance your performance in a certain activity. Your brain will automatically move your body to start performing the task you have programmed it for in a way that will feel quite miraculous. This simple technique is life-changing in its effectiveness.
Try it out and tell us next week how things went for you!
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FEEL GOOD AFFIRMATIONS
I know what my priorities are, and I focus on them
I follow through on intentions with ease
I love the satisfaction of completing important tasks
(Pick an affirmation and say or write it slowly ten times. And if you want to repeat all the affirmations, that’s wonderful too!)
KELLY’S SILLY BIT
We were talking about your brain offering random thoughts before so … well. Here are some random facts from my brain to yours.
A Great Dane named Juliana was a war hero in WW2 and was awarded 2 Blue Cross Medals. 1: She put out a bomb by weeing on it! 2: She alerted her masters to a fire in their shop, saving their lives. What a good girl!
In the 1830s tomato ketchup in the US could have been sold to you as a medicine that could cure all sorts of ailments like diarrhoea, indigestion and jaundice.
Abraham Lincoln is in the US wrestling hall of fame! He had a 12-year wrestling career, and it's said he dominated, reportedly amassing more than 300 victories and losing only once.
Vegemite is banned in some Victorian prisons, to stop inmates from using its yeast content to brew alcohol.
Love a Bloody Mary cocktail? Invented in the 1920s or 1930s, it was originally called Red Snapper and also The Bucket of Blood. It was potentially named after Mary I of England. Bucket of Blood, anyone?
If you were in 18th Century England and you had a pineapple. You were IT! People would carry them to show people how rich they were. Yeah, that’s not obnoxious at all.
Heard of a knocker-upper? No, not that kind. Starting from the Industrial Revolution people would be woken up by them. Their entire job was to knock on your window with a long piece of bamboo to wake you up in time for work. In some small pockets of England, this continued until the early 1970s.
The ancient Romans used stale urine as mouthwash. They thought it helped keep teeth white and free from decay and that the ammonia had cleaning and antibacterial properties. It was also collected from public urinals, to clean fabrics, including the togas worn by senators.
Do you have a great fact? We’d love to hear them! Pop them in the comments.
Be an intentionalist.
Belinda & Kelly XX
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