Procrastination
It's something that we all do. I know I have spent my fair share of time in procrastination-land. You know the scenario, you have a task that needs to be done by a certain time, you know you need to get er done, but instead you find yourself watching tv, scrolling through that time dilation sensation known as Tik Tok (I don't have that app for a reason!), or watching cat videos on Insta reels.
Adventures in avoidance rarely end on a happy note.
Because that's what happens, when you avoid an important task by procrastinating you usually end up in a less than ideal situation, then you mentally beat yourself up for being a failure, then you procrastinate some more, wash, rinse, and repeat.
The good thing is, you don't have to hang out in the procrastination spiral of perpetual unhappiness! YAY!
Today, during my morning self-cultivation time, I was reading the 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins and she went over the two types of procrastination, productive and destructive.
Productive procrastination is not a bad thing, and as a writer I recognized its description immediately. Basically, productive procrastination is putting aside something that you are creating in order to let it marinate in your mind a bit. Apparently this is part of the creative process and a necessary thing for creative greatness. That knowledge made me feel pretty good about the novel I have been working on in spurts for the last three years. I finished the rough draft of that novel before New Years and I haven't touched it since. After creating the initial narrative, I think I needed to toss it aside for a bit so my brain could work on the next task of the project, the editing...
Mel says it best when it comes to productive procrastination:
"My mind needed breaks and time to wander."
In a world obsessed with maximum productivity, it is easy to get caught up in what I like to call the crank it out whirlwind. We are not machines, we aren't capable of creating all the time, and if you force creation, well, the results will often resemble what comes out the back end of my cows.
In order to create your best you have to be kind to yourself.
So, if you are creating and you need to set your work aside for a bit of creative power boosting mind meandering, that's perfectly okay and even healthy! How cool is that!
And that brings us to the next type of procrastination: destructive procrastination.
Here's where I learned something that I didn't know:
"Procrastination is not a form of laziness at all. It is a coping mechanism for stress."
Hello lightbulb!! Just reading those two sentences made a whole bunch of how I lived my life make sense! Yay!
You see, I lived in a seriously emotionally stressful environment for most of my life, and how I coped with it was through withdrawing and not doing. Most of that is due to the fact that my prime motivation is peace-seeking. The problem with that is that I never got around to living.
Even though I knew avoidance would lead to negative consequences, I did it anyway because it was the equivalent of emotionally eating a huge bowl of ice cream for my mind. The problem with avoidance and overindulging however, is that you feel bad about yourself later. Not good for overall well-being.
So, how do you break the destructive procrastination pattern? Well, that's the cool part. It all starts with a simple action, to forgive yourself.
I get it. It takes courage to be kind to yourself, we are our own worst critics, but let me tell you, the sky's the limit when you start modifying how you view you.
For instance, this morning I really wanted to procrastinate writing this post. I am tired, worn out, had the crap kicked out of me this week, you get it, there's always an excuse.
Instead, I counted backward from five, said go, and got busy. My work doesn't have to be perfect, it's that I get started on it and DO it that counts.
Because at this point in my life, I'd much rather face the discomfort of modifying my behavior through learning new habits than stay in destructive patterns. I have lived the whole actions seeking stress relief = increased stress from action avoidance paradigm and I am fully onboard with having the courage to do, regardless of discomfort, rather than just repeat avoid and exist misery.
A favorite saying of mine for years now is to, put your actions where your principles are.
And with that said, if you are caught in a destructive cycle of task avoidance, the first key is to acknowledge that you are doing so, forgive yourself (BE KIND!), and then take action by making a new habit of doing. It's not going to be easy, growth never is, but action on your own behalf in order to better your own over all well-being is always, always worth it.
Now, off to novel editing land I GO!!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's never procrastinates but sure needs a lot of updates iPhone, the header and footer images were made in Canva.