8. What is Procrastination? Why You Procrastinate and What You Can Do About It.

If you struggle with procrastination, this podcast is for you. Today we're going to talk about the seven main reasons why we procrastinate and what to do about it. Welcome to my podcast. I'm Dr. Nicole Cain, a naturopathic doctor with a master's in clinical psychology. I'm a consultant, author, founder of the ACT Method and your expert in integrative approaches to anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and trauma. Several years ago, I had the privilege of working with the founder and CEO of a major international company. As the company grew, so did my clients responsibilities. Calls came in on his cell phone all hours of the night and on the fly. Multitasking became a necessity as the pressure mounted. So sleep was sent to the back burner and he started to experience heart palpitations, high blood pressure and stress. He noticed he'd started to put off completing tasks that required more effort. And once his symptoms got bad enough that they started to bleed into his professional life, he went to the doctor. His psychiatrist diagnosed him with adhd, generalized anxiety disorder, and gave him a prescription for an antidepressant, a prescription for Adderall, and a prescription for Xanax. My client's libido dropped and that impacted his relationship with his wife. The Xanax helped with the high blood pressure and the palpitations, but then it made him feel lethargic and he wasn't able to be creative and that made him feel depressed and he started to be hard on himself. So he would self medicate with the Adderall and that helped him get through work, but it created a whole other cycle of then he had to alternate the Adderall with the Xanax and for all of the trade offs, he was still procrastinating and now he felt like he was losing his edge. I want to share with you exactly what I said to my client. Your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing given your experience. In fact, your ability to adapt to the pressure of your circumstances is outstanding and is very likely a big part of how you have been so successful to this point. So I want to talk with you about what stress does to the nervous system and how we respond to it. And I want to talk about different ways that stress can impact our nervous system and the seven different types of ways that we may respond via procrastination. When under stress, the healthy nervous system triggers a cascade of responses that have worked throughout human history to ensure survival. You have adrenal glands, they're in your back on top of your kidneys and they release a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol gives you energy and drive, and it helps you run from the metaphorical bear. So that means when you're relaxing on the couch, if you get a phone call, your body can produce a surge of cortisol so that you can be up and alert and ready to answer that call. It also can have the same response as if you're chilling in the woods and a bear comes and it has to chase you. The body responds the same way. So we also have adrenaline. And adrenaline increases and speeds up your thoughts, your heart, your blood pressure, your speed. Everything gets faster and more urgent when we have adrenaline surging through our veins. So this is really useful when you're in a literal crisis, but it can cause a whole host of issues in a setting where you need to sit down, focus on the task at hand, or finish a project and get something done. When we think about a task that feels really big or overwhelming to us, and our body's like, all right, we're gonna mount up the response to do this, it could also produce symptoms of irritability or anxiety. And the way to mitigate that or to put those feelings down and to help you feel less stressed is we may procrastinate. We may put aside what we need to do that's provoking that response from our body. In the example of the CEO, his autonomic nervous system enabled him to thrive in his job. It did this by giving him quick thinking. He could turn on a dime. He had energy to wake up and be ready all hours of the night. He was hyper vigilant, and that enabled him to detect issues rapidly in his company and endurance that allowed him to persevere despite exhausting hours, grueling conversations, and high pressure decisions. His body was doing what he asked it to do. And untethered, your nervous system can behave like a snowball rolling down a hill and collecting more and more snow, picking up speed and leaving us overwhelmed, overstimulated, depleted, and unable to calm down. Have you ever had that feeling of feeling wired and tired where you want to focus, but your thoughts are racing, you want to rest, but your body is vibrating. One of the trade offs of being able to live like a bear is constantly tracking you is that it can become incredibly difficult to live in a relaxed, calm, focused state. Overwhelm will bleed into our brain and body. And one of the strategies to reduce that feeling is to procrastinate is to put it off. Procrastination is a natural response asking you to pay Attention to an underlying unmet need. Our CEO was in a state of fight or flight. And procrastination was an adaptive mechanism by which he mitigated his stress in the short term. But as you see in the long term, all of these things accumulating on the back burner caused an overfilled backlog of to do's and worries and stressors. And then he started to develop examples, symptoms, gone on medications and he was still back at the beginning and wasn't any farther along where he wanted to be. And it was starting to impact his relationships, his finances and his perseverance in his job. If you relate to any of this, then this is the podcast for you. The first thing we have to do is to figure out what is underneath of your procrastination. Why are you procrastinating? What are the symptoms? What are the circumstances? Because only then are we going to be able to help you get what you need so that the procrastination doesn't need to be there. Procrastination is adaptive. Procrastination is an effective way to reduce anxiety or anger or overwhelm or stress in the moment. But as you know, and the reason you're listening to this podcast is because you figured out that procrastination isn't getting you the life that you want. In fact, it may be making you feel worse. So first we have to figure out, why do I procrastinate? The number one most common cause of procrastination is anxiety. What is your anxiety like? Do you deal with anxiety? Anxiety may present in a fear of failing. Anxiety can present as perfectionism. Avoidance is a hallmark of anxiety. When we feel overwhelmed and the anxiety is mounting and we feel the impulse to take Xanax or take a supplement or read all of the self help books that are out there, it can make us feel disempowered. Even though our bodies are mounting a response that provokes you to be as effective as possible. But that's the irony of anxiety, right? Is that your body is doing everything it can. Your nervous system is responding in an amazing synchronous cascade of responses, but it isn't working right when it comes to things that are important to us. If anxiety is holding you back, if anxiety is causing you to procrastinate, the first step is to figure out what is causing my anxiety. Our CEO didn't have a regular schedule. He didn't have clear boundaries. He wasn't getting regular rest. He was overwhelmed with to dos and tasks. And his body was in this constant Cycle of fight, flight, freeze. So we have to think about what is going on in your circumstances, what is going on in your boundaries, and what is going on in your physiology. The second thing that may cause procrastination is worrying. Similarly to anxiety, worry can keep us from accomplishing our tasks, completing our goals. And worry can come up in all sorts of insidious ways. You may not be anxious, you may not have fight or flight, but do you worry? Does the worry cause you to feel overwhelmed? And in order to get rid of the worry, do you have to do something different, like avoid or put it off? Some people worry that they're not as equipped as they need to be for the job. Or other people worry that they're not going to do it right. Or other people worry about criticism. Worry can be a symptom that deserves a response as opposed to being suppressed and then procrastination taking its place. The third cause of procrastination that I see really commonly, especially among high achievers, believe it or not, is uncertainty. A lot of high achievers have what I call an intolerance of uncertainty. These people who have an intolerance of uncertainty have a tendency to hit the pause button when they feel uncertain about something. They want to be sure of the tasks, they want to be sure of the steps and everything that they're going to need to do in order to get from point A to point B. And sometimes not having a clear understanding of what that looks like can cause somebody to be stuck. They can get paralyzed in the moment and to not proceed forward. If you like to mentally work through every possible scenario before taking the plunge, and if you get caught up in thinking about the details rather than the big picture, you might be dealing with an intolerance of uncertainty. Do you try to do too much yourself, or are you able to delegate or outsource to others? If you can only be 100% confident before proceeding, you might be dealing with an intolerance of uncertainty. If this is happening, I'm not saying to ignore uncertainty and to just go without having a clear understanding of where you're going, but by noticing that part of you, it gives us empowerment to come up with strategies that you can put into place that will help you get unfrozen. For example, soliciting support from people or mapping out what you need to do, or creating a big picture roadmap instead of zooming in on the exact little details. I have a client who, she's an Ivy League student, and one of the things that she really struggled with is procrastination, and she has an intolerance of uncertainty. So what will happen is she gets an assignment to write a paper, and if she doesn't know every single little reference, every single detail, every statement that she wants to make, she can feel so overwhelmed by what's ahead of her that she can't see and doesn't know that it's almost impossible for her to write the paper. So one of the strategies that she had to employ was identifying, okay, am I feeling intolerant to this uncertainty? And how can I promote certainty instead of procrastinating, writing this paper or putting this off? The fourth cause of procrastination is perfectionism. Your personal demand to be perfect can contribute to your struggle with procrastination. You may think that perfectionism is a positive attribute, however you you may be setting yourself up to such a high inachievable standard and it can hold you back from completing tasks that can lead to feelings of defeat. Humans are remarkably creative when it comes to finding ways to avoid that bad feeling, and perfectionism can come out in personal self talk and reasoning that may tell you that the procrastination is the right answer. Procrastination may manifest in I'll do it tomorrow or it could actually come out in diversion, Let me just check Twitter first. Or sabotage. You know what? It's a dumb idea. I'm not going to be able to do it the way I want, so why even try? The self sabotage one is particularly popular among analytical and cerebral types who may not even realize to the extent where their hyper rational reasonings for abandoning their dream are influenced by fear. Do you deal with perfectionism? What kinds of thoughts come up for you? If you think about an example when you wanted to do a task and you put it off, if you can reverse engineer that thinking process, what reasoning came out before you decided to put that off? What thinking patterns happened that created that sense of stress or anxiety or fear? Having to have all your perfectionistic criteria met in order to proceed can create an inachievable metric for being able to move forward. A lot of perfectionism people take on the form of should statements like I should write all of the references before I write this paper and I am not doing a good job if I don't do that. And then self criticism will add to the pressure and can derail attempts at reaching your goals. Perfectionism can also lead to procrastination. When we feel like we need to have everything lined up perfectly before we feel ready to work on a particular task, you may be always waiting for that perfect time to start working on a goal. For instance, you may tell yourself that you can't work on relaxation techniques until you've read several self help books for panic attacks. Or maybe you tell yourself that you're too busy right now to get professional help for your condition and so you're just going to have to put it off and not do anything until that time. By waiting for everything to be in order, you're actually putting off progress and giving in to the procrastination. Do you relate to any of this? Number five is resentment and anger about having to do the task. So sometimes procrastination can come up because we feel upset about having to do the task to begin with. We may feel it's unfair that it's not our responsibility. We may feel agitated and angry and irritable and those feelings are incredibly valid. And when those feelings come up, when we're going to do the task, those feelings come up. It can feel incredibly overwhelming. And then the response that we do when we procrastinate is to help relieve those feelings by putting off doing the task. But that's a technique of avoidance and a strategy that will help you be able to do the task but also honor the feelings that are coming up is to address the resentment, to address the anger. So how do we do that? One of the ways I like to address my feelings if their anxiety or if their irritability or anger is to write everything down that I'm thinking. I call it brain dump journaling. Where if you feel like you're overwhelmed or if you're feeling upset about something, even if it doesn't make sense to you, just write it all down, brain dump it down. And then find somebody that you trust who can listen to you and start processing through these things with you. Getting it all out is the opposite of avoidance. And that will help antidote the procrastination pattern. The sixth cause of procrastination is depression. How is your confidence, how is your motivation and how is your drive? Sometimes we don't feel anxious and we don't feel worried and we don't care about perfectionism. But sometimes we just feel like we can't muster up the emotional bandwidth and energy to do it. And so maybe your problem isn't procrastination love. Maybe it's that you don't have the confidence or the motivation or the drive. As you see, looking at the reason for the procrastination is more important sometimes than the procrastination itself. Procrastination is simply data. Data about how we're feeling, our unmet needs, what's going on in our lives, and it gives us data, tools, and what to do about it. The last reason I see procrastination happening is people feel overwhelmed and unclear on how to proceed. Our CEO was definitely overwhelmed. And sometimes there were so many things that he was trying to juggle. He felt unclear on what to do first. And he would catch himself just putting those in the back burner. I need to put out this fire right here, right now. And that secondary thing needs to go on the back burner. He had too many tasks. He was trying to do it all himself. His working memory was overwhelmed. His amount of hours were being overspent, and he had no bandwidth. When we're faced with a large task, it can feel easy to be discouraged by the amount of work ahead. And sometimes when that feeling of overwhelm and discouragement come, we just put it to the side. What I'm talking about here is these are seven things that can trigger a response of procrastination. Procrastination is a response to an emotion, to a feeling, or to a symptom. When you think about your procrastination, it's important to honor that your body is doing what it's supposed to be doing, and then it's giving you data. So your job is to figure out what is that data. What is triggering my procrastination? What comes up when I want to do a task? To give you another example, I have a client who, when she cooks a meal, she comes home from school, she cooks a meal, and then she's exhausted. By the time she finishes cooking, eating, she has a night of homework that she needs to do. And then she looks at the counter of all of her dirty dishes, and she feels completely overwhelmed. She has all of these tasks, her working memory is filled up, and she just doesn't have the bandwidth to do the dishes. And so then she puts it off. The dishes accumulate, and then every time she looks at it, she feels more and more stressed, more overwhelmed. She procrastinates, and it gets to the point where she feels completely trapped in a house where she doesn't have groceries, she has all of this homework that she can't find the time to complete. Her house is in disarray, the dishes are mounting, there's flies, and it just feels completely enveloping. She feels demoralized and discouraged. And the original piece of data was that she was out of bandwidth. And so in those moments, what we need to do is we need to utilize her procrastination strategies. And I'm going to share with you my top six. The first one is to decide if the activity is actually worth it. Imagine a seesaw tottering back and forth between what feels good and what is good for me. Sometimes procrastination needs to be dealt with by instead of dealing with the anxiety and the overwhelm and the grief in that moment by putting it away is we have to utilize our affect tolerance skills. Push through that. Affect tolerance skills are skills to help you deal with unpleasant emotions. One of the ways we do that is procrastination, but there's other affect tolerance skills that we're going to be learning about in this podcast that you can use in place. So when you think about that teeter totter seesaw, what feels good? It may feel like procrastination feels good, but is that good for you? And try to find a balance between honoring and listening to what feels right and what feels good and also doing what you need to do and putting off what you can. And so you have to decide is this activity worth it? I ask clients to mindfully notice what choice they make in relation to particular growth areas and then identify what choice they value. If they value what's good for me, we can lean in and develop a more specific plan of action. If they value in that moment what feels good, we have to honor that and then we reassess next time. The second procrastination strategy is to embrace uncertainty. This is all about going into the zone of proximal development. Sometimes perfectionistic types don't like being in the zone of proximal development. They like to know with certainty all of the steps, what's going to be expected of them, how to do it and how to execute. And sometimes embracing uncertainty and going out of our comfort zone, out of the zone where we can be perfect is actually an opportunity for growth. Going out of the zone of proximal development into this zone of the unknown is a way for us to grow and evolve. And that can be really uncomfortable. In fact, the research by Scott Miller shows that people can only typically encounter that zone for about 30 minutes out of their comfort zone before they start to get unwanted symptoms like anxiety or stress or overwhelm. I found that the more that I strategically embrace uncertainty and opt for better or uncertain options over worse certain ones, the easier it gets. And the more my brain has begun to interpret uncertain situations as exciting rather than threatening. And so relabeling that response from the body of oh my Gosh, this feels overwhelming and threatening as this is exciting and uncertain, but I'm going to do it anyway can be really quite empowering. The third step is to practice making small decisions quickly. There's a strategy of thought called heuristics, and these are mental shortcuts that can help you make decisions quickly and that can free up cognitive resources. So we were talking about our student who would come home and she had all of these thoughts from her classes and her homework in her head. And doing the dishes after cooking a meal and having a long day felt so overwhelming, she didn't have the bandwidth for it. And one of the strategies that we actually used with her was to create mental shortcuts to help her make big decisions with excess thought and then making little decisions without much information. There are cognitive tools that can help us make quick decisions and judgments that will help us not deliberate over our hundreds and hundreds of daily choices. So instead of having to decide every day, for example, what to wear, have default options, instead of choosing from an entire menu or a refrigerator filled with different items, eat what you enjoyed in the past or create a menu for your week to help you make small decisions. You have to be a little bit more intentional up front. Being a worry wart is energy intensive. And so if you can have the luxury of time to think through big decisions, it can help you make small decisions more quickly. And, and it will reduce the amount of overwhelm and lack of bandwidth that you're dealing with. Number four is to work on your self esteem and confidence. There are strengths that can arise from an anxious brain. Our anxious brain makes us hypervigilant. It helps us be able to predict things that might happen negatively in the future. And our CEO with his hyper vigilant brain was able to actually see things that might go wrong with the business. And instead of constantly feeling like he's putting out fires in the begin of his career, he was able to anticipate things and put in strategies ahead of time so that he could be successful in the long run. Having an anxious brain can make us pretty hypervigilant. But our negative beliefs are overpowering fears and that anxiety getting out of control is where the problems arise. So when we're working on self esteem and confidence, we want to work on fact checking. When it comes to procrastination, we want to fact check or reality check our thoughts. The first thing you could do is list all of the reasons for not engaging in higher priority behaviors. And then the second thing is to challenge the credibility of each reason. So begin to assess if you really do not have the skill set needed to complete the task, or if you don't have the time to complete the task or the resources or are you competent. If you don't have what it takes to complete the task, then taking that yellow light and slowing down is really valuable. It gives us time to increase our knowledge based on something, or it can provide us an opportunity to solicit support. Sometimes pausing can be really helpful. But when does the pause become procrastination? Procrastination is when we have an unwanted feeling we put it to the back burner versus pausing and listing the reasons for not engaging in that behavior and assessing what you need in order to be successful. Successful can be really empowering. Sometimes people can be surprised to realize that they're prone to both positive and negative cognitive biases. An example of a positive bias is overestimating how much you can realistically get done in a particular window of time, or biting off more than you can realistically chew. And a negative cognitive bias is the opposite feeling like I can't do anything, I can't get that completed. And and not giving yourself enough credit. Reality checking. Procrastination is empowering and it's helpful and it can help you be more successful without overextending yourself. The other thing for working on self confidence and esteem is to calculate your wins. Oftentimes we have a negative filter and we feel like it's easier to see what we didn't do as well and to ignore what is working and what is going well. So I always recommend to create a wins board where you get a big piece of paper or a dry erase board and you put that up somewhere where you're going to see it. And every single day, write down your wins. Write down what you were successful at, write down what you did well. Sometimes, babe, that's just simply taking a shower. And it's just important. The fifth step is to get organized. In the short term, the most effective strategy is breaking down your larger goals into small, measurable steps and then scaling your expectations back when you feel paralyzed by worry. Just. Just simply opening an Excel spreadsheet and choosing a title counts as progress. That's something you could put on your wins board. So don't promise yourself that you're going to get three pages of fluid writing. Just be aware that it's important to start where you are right now. Avoid the allure of perfectionism in all of its forms. Count your wins, and do one thing at a time. There's a book that you might like. It's called getting things done and what this person talks about. One of the strategies I like is to get 31 cardboard folders, label one for each day of the month, and then use file jackets and in each thing like a manila envelope so things don't fall out. And in each thing put in to do lists or tasks that you need to do that day. So then you're not having to look at all of the things that you need to do that they're all consolidated and condensed in one place. So for example, maybe on the first of the month I'll go through all my receipts from the last month and I'll put them all in there and they're in that envelope and I only have to worry about them that day. An example of what one of my other clients has done is they use a post it note strategy where they get a giant calendar and then they have different categories of post it notes. So one color is activities of daily living, like washing your dishes, washing your clothing, bathing, doing your hair. And then the other category may be marketing for your job. Or another category may be doing something in order to personally develop, like read a book. Another category may be a hobby. Another category may be something you need to do for your family members. And so then what you end up doing is you write down all of your tasks for the week and then you put them on the calendar. Each day will have a different post it note color or category. And organize it so that you're able to take that post it note off when you're done. And it makes it bite size and one thing at a time. It's just a strategy to help you organize yourself. And this kind of leads into our last step, which is small steps. Identify where in the task do you struggle the most. The beginning, the middle, the end. You might not feel nervous about all aspects of a task, but perhaps you just feel nervous about one. For instance, you might not want to make a phone call, but the rest of the task isn't particularly nerve wracking. Once you've gotten past that step, and then you want to get support so somebody can help you where you struggle the most. Pick out one small thing that you can complete towards accomplishing your larger goal. And it will be helpful for you to list out all the small steps that will lead up to accomplishing that greater task. Like we talked about earlier, our student writing papers, she found that writing an outline was incredibly helpful, where she would insert all of her references and then she would start to write the paper. After she had everything outlined that made so much more sense for her brain and her perfectionism was able to be more organized. Instead of just writing this perfect paper, she outlined it, she put in her references, she made them smaller steps and that helps her get a task done. So today we talked about procrastination. We talked about the seven reasons why we procrastinate, and we talked about six steps for dealing with procrastination. I hope that you can take the information that we talked about today and immediately put some strategies into place so that you can get your life back. Remember, your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing. Given your experience. When you have a feeling or a symptom come up that makes you want to respond by procrastination, look at that feeling, look at that symptom and take it as data from a wise body. When you have that data, solicit support and figure out what you can do to honor that part of you instead of procrastinating and putting it to the back burner. And sometimes procrastination is the answer, but doing it mindfully is what's going to give you a sense of empowerment and help your snowball not get so big and out of control. If you're looking for extra support, we have an Anxiety Freedom warriors private Facebook page. I have a lot of information on there, free resources, tips, videos and we have a seven day anxiety freedom challenge. It has 14amazing tips that talk about the brain and the body and how to get your life back. If you resonated with anything here that you heard today, check out more of our podcasts by clicking on the link provided. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. This has been Dr. Nicole Cain. If you want more free information on how to get your life back, check out my website at www.drnicolecane.com. you can send me questions, learn about consulting with me directly, and even preview my online courses. And here's the disclaimer.

The recording you just listened to consists of the personal opinions of Dr. Nicole Caine, a naturopathic doctor with a Master's in Clinical Psychology. While these opinions are based upon literature, her counseling education, medical training, and clinical experience, this content should not be viewed as the definitive opinion on these subjects. Listening to this podcast is not a substitute for any sort of medical, psychological or other form of treatment. If you are in a Crisis, please call 911 or call the National Suicide Prevention Line at 1-800-273-8255. If you're in need of counseling, don't hesitate to make an appointment with a counselor in your area. Dr. Nicole Cain is so passionate about people getting their life back. If this resonates with you, and you think this podcast would help someone you love, please share it with them. Stay in the conversation with Dr. Nicole Caine about writing the next chapter of your life so that it plays out just the way you want it. Explore your options for working with her at www. Dr. Nicolecane.com that's Dr. D R Nicole N I C O l e cain c-I n.com when you're there, be sure to take advantage of the Free Anxiety Freedom One week challenge. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the get your life Back podcast. Here's to your next chapter.