Stress is the puppet master
The root cause of procrastination and not being able to break bad habits.
The “puppet master” idea comes from stress being the root cause of people not being able to break bad habits. Hence, we have this overarching control lever that constantly limits our wellbeing.
You’re more likely to do the things you don’t want to do when you’re stressed out. Psychologically, our bodies don’t like stress, so they make everything possible to avoid it. This is why, for example, we tend to always go for immediate gratification because we convince ourselves that delaying the dopamine intake will prolong a stress level we are not willing to live with.
Bad habits are exactly a result of this. The fear of experiencing stress determines the failure of compromise, even if it’s for our own good.
A perfect example of a bad habit that stops many of the possible good habits is procrastination and it being the outcome of a false sense of perfectionism. We tend to think too much about the possible wrong results of our actions that we end up not doing anything at all.
Procrastination = Uncertainty + Fear + Inertia
The most precise definition of stress I can think of is the following:
Stress happens when there are decisions to be taken that aren’t or when there are actions under our control that we don’t do.
That’s it.
I tried to think of personal stressful situations and this definition covers the root cause in the vast majority of them.
Decisions are hard because they always have ramifications. Depending on the individual overthinking level, people usually go deep into the linked chain of possible effects of taking a certain decision. Another difficult aspect about taking decisions is that usually they are not binary and moreover, the possible options are not completely opposite and they require complex comparisons, pros and cons lists, visualising the different possible outcomes, summing up to a lot of effort and energy that results in stress.
It also ties up directly with the second part of the definition above and the notion of uncertainty.
Fearing too much the unknown causes the reluctance of building a roadmap of actions that will slowly uncover what we don’t know. It’s easier said than done, but any small step in any direction is better than not moving at all. If the step is in the right direction we are one step closer from the destination. If the step is in wrong direction we learn from it. Any step back is not an empty reset, it always comes with more experience that helps us move towards the certainty we seek. Uncertainty doesn’t mean only not knowing what is good, but also not knowing what is bad.
When undecided, always take the decision that causes change.
Circling back to bad habits in general, because of the effects of stress, it is very hard if not impossible to just break them. Even if we stop doing something we know is wrong for us, there are people stating that those old bad habits are still there, they never die, we just temporarily hide them. So, we need to do two things in parallel: break the old bad habits and, in the same time, build new good habits. By doing this, we don’t just break the bad habits, we slowly replace them with new better ones.
Understanding what stress is is very important. Think about your personal experiences and whether or not they are in line with the definition I mentioned as the most general one I could think of. By pin-pointing the meaning of the things that negatively impacts our lives we can start working towards removing them.
