17 Dec 2025 · 6 min
Brian Johnson explains how anticipating a task you're avoiding creates real pain in your brain, while actually doing it relieves that pain. He calls this procrastipain and argues procrastination is a destructive keystone habit that small, consistent actions can break.
Hey, this is Brian with a quick note before we jump into today's show. If you haven't signed up for the Optymyze premium membership yet, A, what are you waiting for? And B, you can now get the first 30 days of optimizing for free. Just cruise on over to Optimize me and sign up. Over 10,000 people now start their days with Optymyze so they can actualize their potential including best selling authors, leading entrepreneurs and even NCAA championship teams to of them. So again, 30 days of free optimizing at Optimize Me. If you're already a member, thanks for your support. Now for the show, You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one is on Procrastipane. Procrastipane. It's inspired by A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. Great book. Check out the note below. Procrastipain. We are combining procrastination and pain. Here's what we need to know. Procrastination, Barbara Oakley tells us, is one of the most monumentally significant keystone bad habits. So if you remember in the Power of Habit, Duhigg taught us that we have keystone habits. A keystone is what locks in. It's the stone that locks in an arch, right? So if you have an arch, you need a keystone in order to hold it in place. Now you have good keystone habits and you have bad keystone habits. Procrastination is unequivocally one of the worst keystone habits you can have. You may not think it's a big, big deal, but it's kind of like an addiction. When you procrastinate, you get a tiny little immediate benefit. But over the long run, you get a very large negative impact on your life. It's incredibly destructive to consistently procrastinate. We want to be honest about that and realize that it's a very big negative keystone habit that we want to remove and work on it. So we'll do a lot of work on that in the sessions before. We all have procrastination at different things and we tend to procrastinate on things that we're uncomfortable with. But here's what's fascinating as it relates to procrastinating. Here's you, you are in a brain imaging study. They're looking at your brain and they're having you think about things that you procrastinate about. And what they find is that when you anticipate, think about, anticipate doing something that you'd rather avoid. You actually elicit pain in your mind. You have the same response as physical pain show up in your brain. But here's what's cool that only exists in the anticipation of doing the thing that you usually procrastinate about. When you hop out of that lab and you actually do it, the pain goes away. Lesson we want to just do it. We want to discipline ourselves to create the structures and the process commitment which we're going to talk about in the next micro class to just do what needs to get done. But remember this procrastination is a negative keystone habit we want to work on and your pain really exists in the anticipation. So get rid of this elusive illusory benefit you're going to get in the near term and focus on turning this into a huge positive by taking tiny little baby steps, consistently moving through your tendency to procrastinate and and do what needs to get done. Next micro class is on how we can go about doing that. And again, we'll come back to this a lot more, but hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more. Have an awesome day. See ya. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer. I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern science plus common sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join?
