Do you know the feeling of powerless anger because you have wasted too much time procrastinating?
According to stats, 80–90% of college students procrastinate. Procrastination (and how to fight it)is the topic of countless books, lectures, and courses. But many people see procrastination in the wrong way, says Mel Robbins, a motivational speaker, in her YouTube video. She presents a method to deal with it.
For me, it works every single time.
Procrastination is not your identity, it’s a habit
So don’t call yourself a procrastinator. You’re not. You only have a habit of procrastinating.
If it’s a bad habit, says Robbins, it’s possible to break it.
Every habit is a loop that consists of three parts: a trigger, a pattern, and a reward. You can distinguish the same three parts in the habit of procrastinating.
Let’s say you have to make an important phone call. It’s daunting, it’s stressful, it’s overwhelming. You start avoiding it by doing something else, like watching cat videos. It lets you forget about stress for a while… to make you feel even worse later.
Here are all three ingredients of a habit: Stress is the trigger. Avoiding doing something is the pattern. A little stress relief is the reward.
How to break the habit?
The simplest answer that might come to your mind is to do something with the trigger. Escape the stressful events and obligations. But the solution is not in the trigger. No one is able to remove stress from their life.
You can’t do anything about the trigger, but you can change the pattern of avoiding work.
Here’s how:
- Recognize the signs of stress. When you find yourself doing something for too long, like browsing social media, let it be the clue to realizing: I must be stressed out about something. Acknowledge the stress.
- Count out loud: 5–4–3–2–1. It helps to interrupt the habit that is stored in the basal ganglia (located in the middle of your head) and awaken the prefrontal cortex (at the front of your head).
- Work for 5 minutes. Yes, that short. And why? The explanation is simple: your problem isn’t work, the problem is avoiding work. As research shows, 80% of people who start working will keep going.
That’s an upside-down way of looking at procrastination
You realize there’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t have to work on your motivation. You don’t lack willpower. The problem isn’t your focus.
There’s only a bad habit that crept in and started taking control over you and your endeavors. But it’s easy to break it and the method is effective.
At times when I’m discouraged and feel as if immersed in a gelly, I count 5–4–3–2–1 and it works as if someone pressed a little switch in my head that gets me doing whatever I should be doing at the moment.
