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