How to stop procrastinating now, not later.
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00:00I think what happens when people procrastinate is they convince themself that there is good
00:14reason to delay.
00:15Oh, well, you know, I'm just not in a good mood right now to write this report or I'm
00:20a bit too tired.
00:22You know, I had a late night last night out so you know, I'll be in a better state of
00:26mind to finish this tomorrow or next week.
00:37Someone who's a procrastinator is not lazy.
00:39And they have impeccable homes and they alphabetize their spice racks and their mp3 collection
00:45and everything's all perfect and nice.
00:48But they're they're spending a lot of time doing things but they're not doing the thing
00:51they should be doing.
01:03One of the things that we know is that people who procrastinate tend to experience higher
01:08levels of stress.
01:10So there's a lot of stress associated with procrastinating because you're not meeting
01:13your deadlines or you're working on things the night before.
01:21So if you're prone to worry and anxiousness, then you might take something that's small
01:26and negative about the task and build it up into something that's really negative.
01:30And that may be enough to make you just sort of put that put that aside.
01:33If you combine that with impulsiveness, you kind of look over there and go, oh, that looks
01:37pleasant.
01:38That'll that'll make me feel better.
01:39If I do that, I'm just I'm going to go and do something that's going to make me feel
01:43pleasant.
01:44So I don't have to feel these feelings.
01:45The other factor, though, that's really key that comes up is perfectionism.
01:49There are perfectionists who do things who are trying to meet the standards of other
01:55people or society, or they get paralyzed by those thoughts and they put it off because
01:59they can't they think that they can't do it perfectly enough for other people.
02:09You're procrastinating because you feel bad about a task and then you get hard on yourself,
02:13which makes you feel worse.
02:15All that's going to do is make you procrastinate more.
02:17The research has shown that people who forgive themselves for the procrastination or who
02:21are self-compassionate towards themselves when they do struggle with procrastination.
02:26Those are the people that tend to procrastinate less and for subsequent tasks.
02:34Some 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.
02:57If you've got these negative feelings about the task, one thing you can do is try and
03:01find something positive about the task.
03:04So try and find something meaningful.
03:06You just push yourself to just sit down and start because often what happens is those
03:10tasks that we think that are really onerous and really scary and they bring up a lot of
03:14negative feelings.
03:15Once we get going with them, they're not actually as bad as what we think.