Is This Self Care or Pleasurable Procrastination

Hey there everybody. After my last video on self care, I had the question come in about the difference between self care and pleasurable procrastination. So let's take a look at that. Self care helps you move toward your rich and meaningful life. Self care may be pleasurable, but it is usually planned and time limited. So you know you're going to do this in order to allow yourself to rest and recharge, but are only going to do it for an hour or you're only going to do it for a weekend or whatever the time limit is that you set. Pleasurable procrastination tends to have no time limits and often prevents you from doing what you need to do to move toward your rich and meaningful life. And I know it's still kind of clear as mud. Let's take a look at an example. Video games. I like video games. Probably close to as much as the next person I know my son may like them more, but I digress. Self care video games can be a pleasurable form of self care. If you decide, okay, I like playing prep video games and I need to do something to wind down at night so I can get to sleep easier and more effectively. So you decide, I'm going to play video games for one hour each night, help me wind down and get to sleep easier. This is not an escape or an avoidance of other things that I need to do to move toward my rich and meaningful life. And that is the key difference. Pleasurable procrastination, on the other hand, would be playing video games for an hour when I'm supposed to be working and sitting here and doing presentations and everything else, being on the computer all the time. It is really tempting to get sucked into just about anything else sometimes, and that would be pleasurable procrastination. I have something at this point in time that I'm supposed to be doing, but instead I'm choosing not to. I'm choosing to do something else that is more fun. And yeah, video games are a lot more fun than doing work, but I need to do work in order to keep a roof over my head and keep the Internet going so I can play video games. Another form of pleasurable procrastination is regularly getting sucked into that activity, in this case video games, and losing a lot of time and energy I could have used to move toward my rich and meaningful life. So getting on video Games, say at 11am on Saturday and the next thing I know it's dinner time and I had a whole bunch of things I was supposed to do, but I didn't set boundaries, I didn't set good limits on my use. So that's pleasurable procrastination, if you will. Now, pleasurable procrastination, it's hard to say, can actually move into addiction if the person starts having difficulty controlling the amount of time they're spending in that activity, even when they say I'm going to limit it. But that's again a different video simple little life hack that you can consider. Whatever you do for pleasurable procrastination can be used as a time limited reward for doing things you don't want to do. For example, as soon as I get this presentation done and recorded and uploaded to YouTube, then I can use the rest of the time that I would have been working on it to play video games. So if I get it done and I get it done efficiently, then I free up some time that I can actually play video games until my next appointment, until the next thing comes up. So pleasurable procrastination is in essence using a a behavior or engaging in an activity to avoid doing something that is important that you need to do for your rich and meaningful life, as opposed to self care, which is engaging in something pleasurable sometimes in order to enhance in a way that will enhance and help you move toward that rich and meaningful life. So it's a very vague difference, if you will, but it is important to differentiate your motivation behind particular behaviors.