THE WELLNESS EDITION NO. 7 - Procrastination
LET'S TALK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION
Procrastination, I am sure everyone has heard of it or experienced it firsthand. But what exactly is procrastination? Well, the verb procrastinate is described by Merriam Webster in the following words;
"to be slow or late about doing something that should be done : to delay doing something until a later time because you do not want to do it, because you are lazy, etc."
The definition mentioned above is the one for English learners but I also found one on Merriam Webster that puts it this way "procrastinate implies blameworthy delay especially through laziness or apathy."
Now that we talked about the definition, let's talk about procrastination itself! I used to procrastinate a whole lot in the past in pretty much every aspect in my life; studying, cleaning up, running errands...well you get the bigger picture, right? I can proudly say that I greatly improved here, of course I still procrastinate a bit from time to time but it is nothing like in the past. And believe me, I feel so much better since I stopped procrastinating so much. I think it is something that I learned while working different jobs in the corporate world where we had lots of time pressure and pressure in general. In the work-life procrastination is never an option unless your aim is to piss everyone off around you. Well, when I was still in school and university, I procrastinated quite a lot because it 'only' affected me. And I think here we come to the core of procrastination. Procrastination is nothing else than self-sabotage in my opinion.
SELF-SABOTAGE
Self-sabotage deserves a blog-post on it's own but just to mention it here briefly. We sabotage ourselves whenever we feel we are not capable of something is my theory. Instead of possibly failing in something we do not even take the risk to fail by not getting started at all. In the past I could spend hours just being in bed thinking about everything that I still have to do or want to do while not doing anything at all, of course that was slowly stealing all my energy and self-esteem. So now I try just to get started ASAP in order not to fall back into the self-destructive self-sabotage routine. We have to change what we do daily in order to develop new routines that are better for us and our wellbeing. Procrastinating certainly won't help us to feel better or to reach our goals.
HOW TO STOP PROCRASTINATION
Well, I am not an expert neither a psychologist. I can only speak from my experience. I would suggest, do certain tasks/errands every day so you don't feel overwhelmed at a certain point when you don't even know anymore how and where to get started. Don't put too much pressure on yourself either but just try developing a new routine that won't let you procrastinate anymore so much. Changes don't happen overnight, they take quite sometime. But that's okay, be patient with yourself, give yourself the time that you need to develop new routines that are better for yourself and your daily routine.
How did you overcome procrastination? Feel free to drop me a line in the comment section or shoot me an email.
