How To Overcome Procrastination

If there's something important that you want to do or a goal you'd like to work on but you just can't seem to find the motivation to even start, that's 'procrastination'.

Procrastination is not laziness. There can be several deeper reasons why we are choosing to delay taking action so it's important to explore those reasons in order to overcome our procrastination. I'll look at some of these reasons below.

Feeling Overwhelmed

If the thought of doing a task leaves you feeling overwhelmed, it's usually because you're trying to do too much at once or you've over-complicated it. Breaking the bigger task or goal into smaller bite-sized tasks will remove the overwhelm and allow you to feel like you're making progress.

It will also help to have short time limits during which you do a little of something each day or week, such as spending 25 minutes a day writing your book.

As you celebrate each accomplished mini-task, your brain will signal the release of dopamine into your system, making you feel like you are finally moving forward.

Worthiness

Sometimes we might not feel worthy of achieving a goal and so we sabotage things by not even starting. Deep down we really do want it but there's a part of us that doesn't feel deserving.

This is when it's a good idea to practice seeing yourself as having achieved the goal or task, perhaps through meditation during which you can build up your feeling of worthiness and iron out any resistance within the safety of your imagination.

Fear-based procrastination

Fear is one of the biggest reasons why we procrastinate. Fear of failure, fear of success and fear of judgement tend to be the major culprits. Becoming conscious of the fear is the first step, then we can try to soothe the fear with statements of reassurance until it no longer causes us to freeze.

Of course, there are many other reasons why we procrastinate such as not having a strong enough reason 'why?' we want to do something, we might intuitively feel the timing is off or we simply may not like doing something, which case we can either reframe the task to make it more interesting or we can delegate it to someone else.

If you have found a way to overcome your procrastination, let me know! 💜

Namasté

Gwen x