Why You Procrastinate and Scientifically Proven Ways to Stop

Hey there. Good morning. John Assraf. Here it is Tuesday at, right around 9:01 here in San Diego. And we're going to be talking about procrastination today. But let me wait for a few minutes before we get to that. No, I'm just kidding. I'm watching here on my computer screen. I've got a couple screens here in front of me in order to really connect with you. I want to know who you are and where you're from just so we can have a little bit of fun right here on our page. And let me know when you're, when you're joining us. I think we're starting to get a lot of people to join us. So who are you? Where are you from? And my first question is, do you procrastinate? And if you're a human and you're alive, then you're procrastinating. I'm doing this, by the way, today on Facebook Live and on Periscope. And so for those of you on periscope that want to join the conversation on my Facebook Live, then just hop to onassaraf fan page on my Facebook fan page, which is a really good way to connect with us as well. All right, so I see that a lot of you are joining right now and we've got lots of, lots of procrastinators. And so let's have a little bit of fun. Okay? What causes procrastination? What do you think the number one reason is for procrastination according to neuroscience? And hold on, there goes that. According to the latest brain research. I'm always about the latest brain research and I know many of you watched us on the Brain a thon last weekend and it was absolutely amazing. 75,000 people signed up for it. Brain stuff. The brain, the brain, the brain. What causes procrastination? Let me see your answers. Hey there, Billy and Neha and Ghoul and Rhonda from bc. All right, we got people from India. So Billy says doubt. All right, well, what causes doubt? Okay, come on, let's, let's get some audience participation here. I want to make this fun. Fun, fun, fun, fun today. What, what causes procrastination? I'm going to give you. So Hannah says fear. Cynthia says fear. Yusuf says not being fully engaged in what you're doing. Fear, definitely. So let's understand something right away. And if you like what I'm about to say, hit the like or the love button. Believe it or not, the number one cause of procrastination is. Is. Drum roll. Please. Low self worth, low self esteem. When somebody feels like they're not smart enough, not skilled enough, not knowledgeable enough, then guess what happens? The stress response system in the brain kicks in and the fear signal which causes people to fight, freeze or flee. Fight, freeze or flee kicks in. That's the stress response system in the brain where we don't have the knowledge or the skills or the confidence or the certainty that what we need to do will get done in a way that we are not going to be embarrassed or ashamed or ridiculed for. Self esteem and self worth is a self perception based on all of your experiences. Do you agree with that or not? Because that is the number one reason for procrastination. But it's also the number one reason for perfectionists. Perfectionists never think that they could get it right and so they don't even do it. Or they're consistently tweaking it before showing it to people procrastinating. And that is low self worth and low self esteem. Now, low self worth is when you feel like you're not as good as somebody else is. Low self esteem is just an image, a self esteem, of your entire belief of how you see yourself. Whether you're not worthy, not smart enough, not good enough, is all based on the mental construct that you have around who you are. So if you had the knowledge and the skill, then you wouldn't be activating procrastination as a behavior. See, procrastination is a behavior. It's a freeze behavior. And freeze behaviors are caused what? By what? By the mental image you have around what it takes to do the job in a way that you won't be ashamed, embarrassed or ridiculed. So if you focus on self worth and self esteem, that is what really will help you overcome procrastination. That's number one. So does that make sense? I'm going to look at your comments right over here. So wanting to be perfect. I see. Somebody said wanting to be perfect. That is a sign of procrastination and of self esteem. Self image. Okay. You're welcome, Martha. I'm glad you like this. Abigail and Sky. Laziness. Some people are lazy. I want you to write this down. Somebody write this down in the chat. Okay, Somebody write this down in the chat. You are 100% disciplined to your current behaviors. Let me Repeat. You are 100% disciplined to your current behaviors. What does that mean? It means that everything that you do is based on your habits. Just about. And your habits are reinforcing your comfort and safety. Zone. What does that mean? My habits are reinforcing my comfort and safety zone? Well, what it means is this, whatever you've become accustomed to thinking and feeling and doing becomes your comfort zone. It becomes the bubble that you live in. And anything that you will do to take you out of that comfort zone in the brain. Okay, again, in the brain is considered a potential risk. It's considered a potential danger. And whenever your safety, whether it's your emotional safety is at risk or your mental safety is at risk, or even your physical safety is at risk, you will tend and I will tend. This is for all of us. This is just the way the brain works. Safety first and comfort first. So anything that could cause potential pain or real pain is perceived in the brain as a threat, as stress. And when that threat or stress is activated in the brain, the motivation actually diminishes. The motivational circuit in the brain gets diminished, and procrastination is what shows up the behavior. I want you to think of procrastination as a behavior. Don't think of procrastination as something you don't want to do. You're procrastinating on doing something. The very fact that you are not doing something is a behavior to protect you. Does this make sense? I'm going to give you some ways to overcome your procrastination. All right? So let me just take a look at some of your feedback. And if you like this, hit the like or the love button. Give me some love here. And if you really like this, then share it. Share this. Share this. Am I confident I can stop? Alrighty. So I'm glad you like this. Good, good, good, good, good. So how do you overcome procrastination? How do you get to that next level? And the number one strategy for overcoming procrastination is first, you have to become aware that you're procrastinating. Second, you've got to become aware of your pattern of what triggers you to procrastinate. So what are the thoughts that you're having about why you are procrastinating? So if you ask yourself a simple question, let's say you have something you need to get done, whether it's for work or for your personal, you know, self. Okay, so why are you procrastinating if you don't take action? Why? Like why? What am I afraid of? What am I concerned that will happen if I take action? See, I don't believe you're lazy. You're not lazy. You're protecting yourself. Okay? And you are staying in your Comfort zone. And so we can become miserable and comfortable. Miserable and comfortable. And we want to do. What we want to do is break free from the bondage of our comfort zone. And so first you become aware that you're procrastinating. Secondly, you ask, why am I procrastinating? What am I afraid will happen? What am I moving away from? Remember, we move away from things that may cause us pain or discomfort. We move towards things, things that will give us pleasure. But write this down. We will do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. Let me repeat. Somebody write this down. We will do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. In the brain, all right, Whenever you are thinking about or you're needing to do something to achieve a goal, to achieve an outcome, before you even take action, the non conscious or subconscious processing of your brain asks this question. Is there any real or imagined danger? I mean, it doesn't ask the question like that, but it's assessing. If I take action and I get ridiculed, that's going to cause me emotional pain. If I take action and, and I lose money, that's gonna cause me physical pain and mental and emotional pain. And maybe even my comfort level's gonna be challenged. So your brain is processing every second of every day, every millisecond of every day, pain or pleasure. Pain or pleasure. Pain or pleasure. Pain or pleasure. And so we procrastinate. It's a non conscious activation of a system that when there is real or imagined danger, will procrastinate out of safety. So what's the key here? The key is, first become aware of it and acknowledge that you're procrastinating. Then you get into the thoughts that lead to procrastinating. Then you say, what am I feeling as a result of procrastinating? And, and then you look at the habit structure that causes you to procrastinate over and over and over again. We do not procrastinate when we feel safe. When we feel safe, we take action because there's no downside. But what do highly successful people do? First is they become aware. Okay, I'm aware. And then they start to reflect the questions I just gave you. But then, most importantly, here's what they do. The people who really want to move forward ask themselves these questions in order for me to take a little action, just a small micro action towards what I need to do, what knowledge do I need, what skill do I need? And what strategy will minimize my risk. Let me repeat, what knowledge do I need? What skill Do I need in order to minimize my risk of the pain I'm looking to avoid? And again, I want you to think of pain from a brain perspective, okay? The amygdala is what senses, okay, and triggers the pain response. So in your memory bank, okay, in the memory bank of the brain, all of your references, what you have read, what you have experienced, what you've been taught, what you have seen exists in the memory bank in your brain. And before any of us take an action towards doing something so that we feel the pride and the confidence and the certainty of the achievement, our brain goes through this processing at lightning speeds to assess potential emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, or financial danger. It does this beneath your level of awareness. And that is what gives rise to the emotion, the energy in motion. And if its energy is clear, and if the energy is really congruent with your knowledge, your skills and. And your behaviors, you take action. But if there's any. Let me repeat, if there is any uncertainty because of what's in your memory bank, okay? And if there's any uncertainty because your knowledge or skill is limited, then the risk response kicks in, the stress response kicks in. That is a normal behavior. So the key is, how do you overcome that? One of the things that I do when I want to achieve a goal is I will take the goal that I have. And I ask myself, do I have the knowledge, do I have the skill? And do I know the right behaviors? Do I have the knowledge, do I have the skill, do I know the right behavior that will increase my chances of success? That's number one. Knowledge, skill, behavior. That's number one. But number two is this. Whenever we feel, remember, feeling is conscious awareness of emotions that are processed at the non conscious level. So emotions are processed at the non conscious level. A feeling. Feeling is my awareness of the positive or negative or pleasant or unpleasant emotions. So part two of overcoming procrastination is learning how to be aware of the emotion and then learning how to overcome the unpleasant emotion that is triggered by the fear response mechanism in the brain. So how do you recognize an unpleasant emotion? You feel it. I mean, you feel it. You look at the behavior that you're not taking and you reverse engineer. I'm procrastinating because I'm afraid. I'm procrastinating because I might be ridiculed or embarrassed or ashamed. And I don't want to feel that. I don't want to feel embarrassed, ridiculed, or ashamed. Why not? Well, because that means that I'm not good enough, not smart enough I'm not worthy, I'm not valuable. Okay, so now we're dealing with self esteem issues and self worth issues. See how we just came back to where we started. So how do I increase my self esteem and self worth? And I'm going to go back to your knowledge, your skills and your action plan to minimize the risk. That's one. But number two, what I do, whenever I want to achieve a goal that has some risk, it's got financial risk or emotional pain or even physical pain. The first thing that I do, and many of you know this from, you know, my books Having it all or the Answer or the Vision board kit, my best selling books or you know, One of the 10 movies I've been in or the work we do at Neuro gym is I love to visualize and see, see myself overcoming the physical, mental, emotional or spiritual hurdle that I have. I see myself overcoming it. I see myself at the end destination. So I mentally rehearse the destination that I want to be at. Why? Because if you can actually teach your brain to overcome the mental or emotional or even strategical obstacles that you have, then what happens is you are creating a neural pattern. You're developing a new neural pattern to overcome the lack of confidence, the lack of certainty or the lack of strategical path to achieve your goal. And when you give your brain that instruction, it will start to focus on the, the pleasure of achieving the goal instead of the activation of the fear circuit in the brain which is really what's causing the procrastination. I know this might be a little bit deep today, but this is what is happening and you owe it to yourself to learn. How does your brain work? See, because if you don't understand how your brain works, that's like having a phenomenal car in your driveway, but you don't know how to drive it. Well, it's the most powerful tool in the universe, your three pound tool. All right, are you liking this? All right, I'm going to go for about another eight or 10 minutes. I'm giving you a couple more things that you, that you can do to be able to crank this out. I'm just looking at your comments right now. Again, every Tuesday we do this 9 o' clock Pacific Time, 12 o' clock New York Time, which is eastern time. All right, so I see that we've got about 50,000 people that are reached already. Niha. I'm killing it, my dear. Thank you, Jenna. Awesome, Joseph. All right. Good, good, good, good, good. So I'm seeing all your likes over Here, if you like this, help me out as well. Share this with with your peeps. All right, so again, we've got people on periscope over here. If you want to join us on my Facebook live, just join me on my fan page, onassaraf. Okay, so for those of you on Facebook right now, by the way, here's a boom high five for you for being on here. There's so many people that know this is happening. Don't show up for free. Killer advice and strategies. Okay? So that's number one, awareness. Upgrade your knowledge, your skills. Visualize yourself overcoming the reasons why you're procrastinating. Okay? So you don't just visualize yourself overcoming procrastination. Overcome the real reason you're procrastinating. And here is something that some of the best brain research is showing that is really, really easy. When you find yourself procrastinating and you're aware that you're procrastinating, and now you know it's because you're avoiding being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, having your identity challenged, because you're not going to do it well, it's not going to be perfect and you're going to be judged because of it. What I want you to do is I want you to remind yourself that that's why you're procrastinating and then stop. And I want you to just stop and breathe six times. This is really so easy. Breathe six times in and out like this. Ready? One, two, three. You may want to try it with me. Five seconds in. Out. Five seconds in. Five seconds out. Five seconds in. All the latest research is showing that six breaths, about one minute will actually deactivate the fear center in your brain. The part of you that's trying to protect you, keep you safe, okay? Six breaths will deactivate the fear center in your brain. And as you deactivate that with six breaths, and then you invest one minute. So I'm giving you a two minute inner size, okay? Inner size, not exercise. Inner size. 2 minute inner size. 1 minute to reset the fear circuit in the brain. And then you visualize for one minute overcoming the obstacle to seeing yourself safe. Seeing yourself achieving your goal and dream. Seeing your self image and your self worth augmented versus digressing. All right? And then take one action, one action towards doing what you need to do. So I'm going to repeat that for you. Step one. If you're feeling you're procrastinating and you know it because you're going to become more aware and you take Six breaths to stop one circuit from being activated in your brain. The fear circuit. And you take one minute and you visualize overcoming the obstacle, overcoming the procrastination, augmenting yourself for its self esteem and reaching the goal that you want to achieve, doing the thing you want to achieve. Now you've activated the motivational circuit in the brain and that means you've activated the anterior sink. I'm sorry, the, the insula and the. There's another circuit that's the motivational circuit in the brain that's just popped out of my head right now that actually is going to light up this part of your brain. This is called the lfc, the left prefrontal cortex. Lpc, Left prefrontal cortex. And this is the genius part of your brain. This is the Frankenstein part of your brain. That's the Einstein part of your brain. This is the part of your brain that'll perpetuate more procrastination. This is the part of your brain that's thinking about why you can't, why you shouldn't, how to be safe, all the times you've failed in the past. But when you activate the motivational circuit in the brain, the left prefrontal cortex is activated. And this is the part of your brain that's the executive director, the CEO. The part of your brain that can come up with all the reasons why you can and how you can and why you should, versus the other part of your brain that's activated when you're in a fear mode. So, so when you breathe for one minute, visualize achieving the goal for just one minute, achieving the goal, overcoming the obstacles, and then taking one action step. What does that do? Number one is you start to develop a new positive neural pattern in your brain. You start to develop a pattern of I'm a doer versus a procrastinator versus and when you focus on seeing yourself at the next goal and you take one action step, then you can back it up with an affirmation. So what would be a good affirmation? Good affirmation. Even though I procrastinate at times, I know how to take action and move forward. Even though I procrastinate at times, I know how to take action and move forward. Let me repeat one more time. Even though I procrastinate at times, I take action and move forward. Now that's a totally different self talk than somebody says I'm a procrastinator. So I say I procrastinate at times and I take action and move forward anyway. And what you want to do is you want to develop the habit of being aware, acknowledging, okay, that fear is what's holding you back. Self worth, self esteem, being judged, being embarrassed, being ashamed, being ridiculed, all the stuff that we want to move away from. I don't want to be judged. I don't want to be embarrassed. I don't want to be ashamed. I don't want to be ridiculed. I want you to love me and like me and tell me how great I am. Right? And that's what you want. But I want to be self aware first, that those are things that are holding me back. And if I could be self aware and humble and I could be in a state of in my power and be inspired versus out of my power and expired, that's not going to help me achieve my goals. I want to be moving forward. And, and it all starts with self awareness. It all starts with being able to have the tools to move forward. All right, and so those are a few tools that you like. So Abigail likes this. Debbie, you like this. Carol, you like this. Raina, you like this. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So this is making sense. Remember, Tuesday is 9 o'. Clock. Every Tuesday, 9 o', clock, unless I'm traveling. So somewhere where I can't reach you or get on here. But right now, you know, we're live. We've got lots and lots and lots of people. Do you like this? I'm seeing that about 487 of you liked it. And there's a whole bunch of you that haven't liked it yet. So hit the like and the love button. I get fueled by teaching some of what we're learning on neuroscience and neuropsychology. Everything we do at neurogym is all about evidence based methods. Some are simple, some are more complex. But let's start off with the simple stuff. Procrastination kills your dreams. But procrastination is an effect. Procrastination is an effect. Perfectionism is an effect, for the most part, low self esteem. I don't think that I'm good enough, smart enough, worthy enough is one part. The other part is I don't want to be embarrassed, ashamed or ridiculed or judged. That's the other part. Well, guess what? We're all going to get judged. We're all going to get embarrassed. We're all going to be ashamed. We're going to be embarrassed at times. That's okay. It's part of my growth. It's okay. It's part of my growth. All right. So that is what we're talking about today. Tell me if you like this kind of stuff. Do you want more of it? What's one thing you learned? So if you want more of it, hit the like or the love button. What's one thing that you learned today? Tell me one thing that you learned? Type it in there right now so I can see one thing that you learned. It makes no sense for you to be motivated without you taking action. That's a recipe for insanity and for being more frustrated. So what's one thing you learn and what's one thing you're going to take and do? Carol? Mental floss. Tamara, thank you so much. Either George or Jorge and Mildred. Mildred. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I'm seeing some great comments in here. And again, I keep these to about 30 minutes just to give you a little power. Half hour, how's that? All right. More, more, more. Thank you. Yes. Abigail, breathing six times. Yes. Bea Harper, self confidence. You are normal. Paula. Every one of us procrastinates. Every one of us has these emotions that we're moving away from. The unpleasant ones, the ones that give us, you know, discomfort or pain. We move away from that before we move towards pleasure. But what we can do is learn how to manage our emotions better by understanding them and having ways to deactivate the stress response system in the brain which fearful, painful emotions, okay, cause that trigger and circuit in the brain to activate. So if we deactivate it with one minute of breathing in and out, five seconds in, five seconds out, that resets the brain's fear response and we visualize, okay, the goal that we want to achieve. We visualize ourselves overcome the objection or overcoming the procrastination. We visualize our self worth and self esteem being high. And we visualize ourselves enjoying the process. We activate the motivational circuit of the brain and that genius part of your brain, the left prefrontal cortex. And that's the beginning stages of, of overcoming procrastination. And you take one action step even when you don't want to build that muscle, okay? That even when you don't want to, you feel the fear, you feel the unpleasant emotion, and you do it anyway. Feel it and do it anyway. Just one step, not 20. Don't do the whole thing. Create an environment where you can lower the neural resistance, okay? And take one action. And that one action will turn to 2 and 3 and 4 down the road. The habit of what I just told you about is more important than the intensity at first. The habit's more important than the intensity at first. So develop the habit of learning how to feel. Be aware of your procrastination, feel what you're feeling and then override it with the skills that I just gave you today. Okay so. So if you like this, pass it around by hitting the share button and just tell people that Just got a great little lesson with John Assraf. Invite them to join us and every Tuesday, nine o', clock right here on this page. And hopefully you like all the affirmations. We put up about eight or ten posts a day. Little stories, little affirmations, little videos that I do, whether I'm driving my car or I'm on the beach or I'm traveling just to help you out. So I appreciate you so much. Help me build this community. Have an amazing day and we will see you next Tuesday at 9:00am Pacific time, 12:00 New York time. And you've got to figure out what that is in your part of the world. God bless you. Adiva Deutschy. Have an awesome, amazing day. And to everybody on Periscope, join me on my Facebook Fan Page OnAssarath Fan Page thanks Adivadechi.