One of the most destructive effects of procrastination is the fact that it makes you feel out of control. Procrastination is like an ‘invisible force’ that keeps you from doing the very things you know you must do. With the increasing demands on our time and attention there seems to be an increase in procrastination as a chronic problem, especially amongst those people that want to succeed the most. Procrastination usually sets in when you feel overwhelmed by all the ‘have to’s’ in life and instead of making steady progress you take on too much without ever getting any of it done.

Feeling out of control takes away all your power to shape and direct your own life. It’s true that there are many things over which you have no control, but you always have full control over what really happens to you – and what really happens to you is a mental process and independent of the circumstances and events of the outside world. Being empowered means that you realize that you already have the power and this realization also gives you the ability to take action. Here are five empowering procrastination tips that can help you to reach this realization and become empowered to effectively deal with procrastination and inaction.

It’s All Inside:
Procrastination is an internal process and although it might feel like it’s happening to you, you are in actual fact responsible for it. This procrastination tip can help to put you back in control almost immediately. Procrastination is not an external force, but an internal response and evaluation. The simple realization that it’s ‘you’ that are doing it to ‘you’, gives you the power to do something about it.

It’s All You:
When procrastination drags you down it’s all to easy to think that ‘it just is’ and that you can’t do anything about it. Although it feels like you have no control, you actually do. In fact this is why you feel out of control – because you believe that you can’t do anything about it. There are two very important beliefs you need to develop to help you break free from procrastination. The first is that you CAN overcome procrastination and the second is that YOU can overcome procrastination. No one else can do it for you and because you created it, you can un-create it.

It’s All In Your Head:
The reason why most people remain stuck in patterns of procrastination is because of fear. At the most fundamental level, all forms of procrastination comes down to fear. What you don’t face controls you. To overcome the fear and the procrastination that comes with it, you need to confront and do the very things you don’t want to do. The instant you do, you take charge and it no longer has any control over you. The ironic thing is that fear only exists in your imagination – it’s always something that hasn’t happened yet. Procrastination is not real – it’s only the way you evaluate things in your mind.

It’s All about conditioning:
Success at anything in life relies on consistency. The best of the best at anything are those who can repeat their greatness consistently. The way you get consistent is through conditioning. Your nervous system operates through conditioning. When you do something over and over again it becomes ‘normal’ and when it’s normal you don’t have to think about it – it becomes automatic. The challenge is that this principle works both ways. Whether your conditioned responses support you or whether it pulls you down, your nervous system does not make that distinction. If procrastination is your conditioned response you will always feel out of control, simply because that’s what you’ve ‘learned’ to do automatically. You simply need to ‘recondition’ yourself to a new response; to teach yourself to respond in a different way..

It’s All about awareness:
Procrastination does serve a purpose - and a very important one as such, but only is you are aware of the benefits.  We only procrastinate about those things that have value to us. At some level, either directly or indirectly, you believe that taking action will benefit you. If it didn’t it would not bother you, right? Be grateful for procrastination and use it as a guide to ‘know’ what you need to act upon. Being aware of this fact, and developing an awareness for what you do and fail to do can empower you to be in charge of yourself on a much higher level.

When you are empowered you are in charge, and even if things seem to go wrong on the surface, underneath you know that you have the power to deal with it effectively. Procrastination is disempowering and it takes away your ability to take immediate action and deal with any situation.  Always remember that you are ultimately in charge of you. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. Don’t delay. Act!

Bookmark to:

How do you make an easy task difficult? Simple. You put it off and you keep postponing it until it eventually becomes a big deal. It’s one thing to procrastinate on the small things, but it’s quite another to procrastinate on the big issues in life. You can trace almost all your personal problems back to the failure to take effective and timely action.

The effects of procrastination are mostly indirect and often far reaching. One of the most devastating effects of procrastination is fatigue. In fact, procrastination and fatigue goes hand in hand. Procrastination is not only the result, but also the cause of fatigue. Because of procrastination you keep postponing important tasks and because you postpone it you become fatigued. There is a big difference between being tired and being fatigued. Fatigue is emotional and mental while tiredness is mostly physical. Getting enough rest can solve the problem of being tired, but it won’t really do much for fatigue.

We all have a mental capacity which determines how much we can comfortably deal with in our lives. Everything that’s ‘on your mind’ is something that you have to deal with on a mental and emotional level. When you deal with it you feel a sense of accomplishment and you feel like a load has been taken off your proverbial shoulders. In reality, this sense of relief is the result of offloading some of your emotional load by dealing, and completing some task that was on your mind.

Everything that you feel like you have to do has got some value to you. We only procrastinate about the things we care about – otherwise it’s won’t concern us whether we do it or not. It’s only when we fail to take action that procrastination sets in. Every time you fail to take action and complete a task you fail to offload what’s on your mind. This tends to add to your ‘emotional load’ and since we all have a limited capacity, we tend to feel fatigued.

Fatigue can lead to more serious issues, ranging from depression to sleeplessness to a loss of self confidence. When you procrastinate you can easily turn the simplest task into a mountain and the more you think about it the harder it gets. Now you have to climb a mountain in your mind every time you think about doing it and every time you fail to act on it your mountain gets bigger and your fatigue get worse. Although procrastination and fatigue

The most important things to remember when you suffer from fatigue due to procrastination is that a sense of accomplishment is self reinforcing. Every time you finish a task you feel good and it’s this feeling good that motivates you to do more and to be more effective. It’s one of the most effective ways to conquer procrastination. More than anything, procrastination is an emotion – it’s a feeling and by taking charge of your emotional state you can take back control and empower yourself to take action and complete what you know you ‘must’ do. Unfortunately this fact is also responsible for fatigue. When you fail to complete a task, or worse, when you fail to even start, you create the opposite effect. You feel bad and you tend to act on this feeling which is what keeps you from approaching the task in the future.

Procrastination and fatigue is a cycle and the one tends to lead to the next and because it’s so self reinforcing it tends to keep many people tied up in an immobilized state of mind where they can’t seem to make any real progress. One of the simplest ways to snap out of this patterns is to design some simple task that you can easily complete and to gradually build your emotional strength. If you are procrastinating on something, break it up into three or four simpler tasks and then focus only on one at a time – forget about the rest. Each time you complete one you will ‘offload’ a bit of emotional baggage, your load will feel lighter and your sense of accomplishment will motivate you to do more.

Procrastination is like running on an emotional treadmill – you keep running but you are not going anywhere. It only leads to an emotional tiredness or fatigue that can greatly jeopardize your sense of well being, your level of motivation and your personal happiness. We all have a desire to progress with our lives and we at the back of our minds we all know what we can do to move forward and make our lives better, When we don’t act on these ideas we feel a certain strain which comes from the knowing that we are not advancing. This strain contributes to fatigue and adds to your emotional load that you have to carry around with you. We all carry a little ‘to-do list’ around in the back of our minds. Ever time something comes along that you ‘have to do’ it automatically gets added. As a general rule, the longer your list, the more fatigue you will experience.

To effectively deal with fatigue you simply need to off-load your ‘emotional load’. You have to deal with everything that’s on your mind. And the most effective way to do it is to deal with it one by one. Start with the tasks you are procrastinating most about as they will give you the greatest sense of accomplishment. Procrastination makes an easy task hard, but action makes a hard task easy. Just do it. Break it up into smaller simpler tasks and just do it piece by piece. It’s ironic, but the more you do the more you can do. The more you do the less emotional baggage you have - the lighter your load, the more you can carry. The wonderful fact about procrastination and fatigue is that when you eliminate the procrastination, you can eliminate the fatigue. Be kind to yourself. Free yourself from procrastination. Free Yourself from fatigue!

Bookmark to: