This is How You Crush Procrastination

Is there something that you need to do that has routinely blocked you? Tax returns that need to be filed, starting an exercise routine, cleaning up your house? Taking on that “super important” project at work that intimidates you in some way?

In this day and age, success is most often defined by what we can accomplish in our daily lives. We only have so much time. How we use that resource and how efficiently we apply ourselves to meet our goals can lead to a sense of satisfaction, self-agency, self-confidence and yes, even self-esteem.

But what if I told you that the biggest tool to achieving your goals is within your reach? What if your greatest challenge is you? The truth is, your thoughts and feelings have a strong hold over us. They determine what goals you pursue, which dreams you label as “unrealistic”, and others you’re not so sure about that you simply ignore.

More often than not, we push our dreams aside because of anxiety and fear. We are afraid to try because we cannot bear the thought of failing. Society has conditioned us to believe that failure can define you. No one wants to be a “loser”. If you continue to fail, your self-worth and self-confidence will plummet leading to feelings of frustration if not despair.

Fear develops because people feel vulnerable and insecure about how they function. Because of this, we are afraid to take on new challenges that could potentially lead to greater growth and success. Instead, we use procrastination and the underlying psychological defense of avoidance to protect us from feelings that we think we can’t handle but ultimately get in the way of meeting our goals.

First, a little about our psychological defense system. We all employ psychological defenses to manage our everyday lives. Denial, repression, splitting, sublimation, intellectualisation, rationalisation—and avoidance-- are just some of the defenses we use to protect ourselves. If we rely on them too much, as in the case of a parent who is in denial of his son’s addiction problem and therefore fails to get him the treatment that he needs, these defenses become dysfunctional and create a secondary problem. This is often the case with avoidance.

We avoid something that we are uncomfortable about and we leave it there (for the time being). But we never come back to facing the original task. Avoidance cuts off that healthy initiative to face challenges. In this way, avoidance becomes a habit. We begin to apply it to a range of tasks and behaviors that make us uncomfortable but for different reasons.

At the root of it, you are afraid of disappointing yourself or finding out something about yourself that you cannot face. But not facing something important can make you feel worse, because at some level you know that you are avoiding it, backing down, turning your back on it or simply not dealing with it. When avoidance eventually becomes a habit, your productivity basically disappears. You feel like you cannot risk doing anything because you are too afraid of taking the emotional risk of falling short of your own expectations.