How to finally stop procrastinating

Brut America

Changing your mentality can keep you from procrastinating — here's how.

Transcript

00:00I think what happens when people procrastinate is they convince themselves that there is

00:13good reason to delay.

00:14Oh, well, you know, I'm just not in a good mood right now to write this report or I'm

00:19a bit too tired.

00:21You know, I had a late night last night out, so you know, I'll be in a better state of

00:25mind to finish this tomorrow or next week.

00:36Someone who's a procrastinator is not lazy.

00:38And they have impeccable homes and they alphabetize their spice racks and their mp3 collection

00:44and everything's all perfect and nice.

00:47But they're they're spending a lot of time doing things, but they're not doing the thing

00:50they should be doing.

01:01One of the things that we know is that people who procrastinate tend to experience higher

01:07levels of stress.

01:09So there's a lot of stress associated with procrastinating because you're not meeting

01:12your deadlines or you're working on things the night before.

01:17If you're prone to worry and anxiousness, then you might take something that's small

01:25and negative about the task and build it up into something that's really negative.

01:29And that may be enough to make you just sort of put that put that aside.

01:32If you combine that with impulsiveness, you kind of look over there and go, oh, that looks

01:36pleasant.

01:37That'll that'll make me feel better if I do that.

01:39I'm just I'm going to go and do something that's going to make me feel pleasant.

01:43So I don't have to feel these feelings.

01:44The other factor, though, that's really key that comes up is perfectionism.

01:48There are perfectionists who do things who are trying to meet the standards of other

01:53people or society, or they get paralyzed by those thoughts and they put it off because

01:57they can't they think that they can't do it perfectly enough for other people.

02:08If you're procrastinating because you feel bad about a task and then you get hard on

02:12yourself, which makes you feel worse, all that's going to do is make you procrastinate

02:16more.

02:17The research has shown that people who forgive themselves for the procrastination or who

02:21are compassionate towards themselves when they do struggle with procrastination.

02:26Those are the people that tend to procrastinate less and for subsequent tasks.

02:33Some of the research suggests, though, too, is that not only do procrastinators have difficulty

02:40envisioning their future selves, but if you can get people who are prone to procrastination

02:45to stop and think about that future self in a more concrete way, it can actually reduce

02:52the procrastination.

02:56If you've got these these negative feelings about the task, one thing you can do is try

03:01and find something positive about the task.

03:03So try and find something meaningful.

03:05Just push yourself to just sit down and start because often what happens is those tasks

03:10that we think that are really onerous and really scary and they bring up a lot of negative

03:14feelings.

03:15Once we get going with them, they're not actually as bad as what we think.

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