We all procrastinate from time to time.
But if you struggle with chronic procrastination, it’s probably because—on some level—you don’t understand how procrastination actually works.
Today I’m going to share the 3 most important ideas for understanding the psychology behind procrastination so that you can break out of the procrastination cycle and start doing the work that matters to you.
1. Procrastination Is About Values, Not Discipline
For whatever reason, people love framing procrastination as a discipline problem.
Like there’s this magical attribute called discipline that some people have and others don’t. And if you’re one of the unfortunates who lacks discipline, then overcoming procrastination is about figuring out how to be a more disciplined person—which usually boils down to just getting tougher with yourself in moments of weakness and applying more willpower.
I’m not gonna get into all the gory details, but this is just not a good theory of procrastination. You can get tough with yourself all day long and the most likely outcome is that you end up procrastinating more, not less.
As an alternative, I’d like to suggest that you just forget about discipline entirely, and focus instead on your values. Values are principles or ideals that guide and motivate our behavior. Creativity, for example, might be a value for you. Or belonging. Or curiosity. Or justice.
When you’re clear on what your values really are, you’re far less likely to procrastinate because you end up being pulled toward your goals instead of having to push yourself toward them.
Put another way, procrastination isn’t so much a lack of discipline as a lack of values clarity.
When you consistently procrastinate, it’s your mind’s way of trying to tell you that your goals aren’t aligned with your values.
Seen from this perspective, procrastination isn’t the enemy—it’s a friend trying to help.
One implication of this is that you’re simply going after the wrong goals and you need to seriously rethink whatever it is you’re working on or toward.
- If you chronically procrastinate on going for runs after work, for example, maybe it’s not that you’re an undisciplined person, but instead, that you need to reconsider what type of exercise you engage in.
- Because it might very well be the case that if you started swimming or hiking or dancing as exercise, your discipline and procrastination problems would solve themselves because your goal would be more values-aligned.
But just because you’re procrastinating doesn’t necessarily mean you need new goals. After all, there are some things—say, paying your taxes—that you can’t just “give up” or find alternatives to. But even in the case of goals like paying taxes, or cleaning the house, or filing reports at work, you can still reduce your tendency to procrastinate by clarifying the values behind those tasks.
Even something as unpleasant as scrubbing the bathroom floor has a value behind it—maybe it’s orderliness, for example, or calm (because you feel much calmer and less anxious in environments that are clean and tidy). So, even with boring, annoying, or unpleasant tasks and goals, you can still get better at identifying and clarifying the values behind them, and as a result, boost your motivation and decrease your tendency to procrastinate.
If you want to learn more about using values to procrastinate less, I have a little 5-6 page guide called the Values Discovery Toolkit where I walk through a handful of my favorite exercises for discovering your personal values. You can find a link to download the guide for free in the notes below.
2. The Urge to Procrastinate Is Not Procrastination
Feelings are not behaviors.
That sounds obvious when you see it spelled out. But it’s shocking how frequently we confuse those two things, especially when it comes to procrastination.
A common pattern I see in my work with people who procrastinate is that they assume that because they feel the urge to procrastinate that means they are procrastinating—and as a result, that they are procrastinators.
Here’s an example of what it looks like:
- You sit down at your desk to compose a difficult email to one of your direct reports at work.
- But as soon as you open up your email, you start feeling anxious because it’s such an awkward topic you have to write about.
- But then you “catch yourself” feeling the urge to procrastinate and incorrectly assume that you are procrastinating.
- This leads to a rush of negative self-talk and self-judgment: I wish I wasn’t such a procrastinator? Why can’t I just be normal and focus? Damnit, there I go again avoiding stuff I know I should just get done.
- Then, predictably, all this negative self-talk leads to a bunch of guilt and self-directed anger on top of the anxiety you were already feeling.
- And because now you’re so emotionally overwhelmed, you end up picking up your phone and losing yourself in your Instagram feed as a way to numb out all that painful emotion.
See the ironic self-fulfilling prophecy here?
Because you confused the urge to procrastinate with the behavior of procrastinating, you ended up becoming more likely to procrastinate.
On the other hand, if you had handled the initial urge to procrastinate in a different way, there’s a good chance you could have worked through that initial anxiety and just cranked out the email instead of beating yourself up and adding way more painful emotion and the subsequent need to escape through social media.
Here’s another way to think about this distinction between the urge to procrastinate and the act of procrastinating:
- If you look at people who are remarkably good at not procrastinating—and I’ve spent years making a special study of this—what you’ll find is that they are shockingly kind and gentle with themselves when they feel the urge to procrastinate.
- They don’t make a big deal out of feeling the desire or urge to procrastinate—and they certainly don’t interpret it as a sign of their lazy or undisciplined character.
- As a result, they remain fairly calm and confident in the face of that initial urge to procrastinate and usually ride it out and get on with their task or goal.
Here’s the implication:
Be gentle with yourself when you feel the urge to procrastinate and you’ll be far less likely to end up procrastinating.
A simple way to practice being gentle with yourself is to normalize the urge to procrastinate.
So, when you feel like procrastinating, you might say something to yourself like:
- Yeah, nobody likes filing TPS reports
- It’s pretty normal to not want to go to the gym after a long day
- It’s not that surprising that I’m feeling resistance to working on my taxes—they’re boring and I’m always less motivated to do boring things
It doesn’t seem like much, but psychologically, you’re doing something really powerful here: By normalizing the initial urge to procrastinate and any emotion that comes with it, you’re avoiding the habit of negative self-talk and self-judgment which adds a huge and overwhelming second layer of painful emotion. And it’s that second layer that causes most of our issues with procrastination.
So remember:
- Just because you feel the urge to procrastinate doesn’t mean you have—or that you’re a procrastinator.
- The gentler you can be with yourself for feeling like procrastinating the less likely you will be to actually do it.
3. Procrastination Is a Coping Strategy
Like any bad habit, chronic procrastination sticks around for a reason. Put another way, it’s doing a job or serving a purpose.
And if you want to stop procrastinating, you need to:
- Understand what that job is
- Find a better way to get that job done
Now, I’ll save you the suspense and give you the answer, at least in general form:
The purpose of procrastination—the job it’s doing—is almost always some form of emotional avoidance.
For example:
- You procrastinate on going to the gym because you feel ashamed of how out of shape you’ve gotten. So procrastinating does the job of escaping that shame and embarrassment.
- You procrastinate on sending emails at work because you feel anxious and insecure about your writing since English is not your first language. So procrastinating does the job of getting you out of having to confront and feel that anxiety and insecurity.
- You procrastinate on writing your novel because you are afraid that it won’t be very good and people will think you’re a hack. So procrastination does the job of helping you avoid that fear and self-doubt.
What all these examples illustrate is that chronic procrastination is based on the belief that you need to escape or get rid of painful emotions.
But that’s a fundamentally false belief.
Yes, difficult emotions like shame and anxiety are uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean you have to do something about them—to get rid of them, regulate them, or avoid them somehow. That’s just one way to deal with difficult emotions.
The more difficult but ultimately far more healthy way to deal with difficult emotions is to accept that you don’t have to do anything about them and be willing to have them and get on with your life.
This is the essence of emotional resilience—when you stop seeing emotions as enemies that need to be eliminated or avoided—you can learn to live with them. And a very nice benefit of being resilient and living with your difficult emotions is that you stop needing unhealthy coping mechanisms like procrastination.
So, how exactly do you develop this belief that you can have difficult emotions without doing anything about them? How do you become more emotionally resilient?
Well, that’s a huge topic. And if you’re really interested in developing your emotional resilience, I teach a whole course on it called Mood Mastery.
But there’s a really simple way to get started developing more emotional confidence and resilience so that you don’t need procrastination as much: It’s called emotional validation.
Emotional validation simply means reminding yourself that just because an emotion feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad—or that you’re bad for feeling it.
This is the first step toward being able to tolerate your emotions. And the better you get at tolerating difficult emotions, the more you start to put procrastination out of a job because you don’t need to avoid them.
Next Steps
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