Understanding And Overcoming The Causes Of Procrastination
- Procrastination plays a major role in self sabotage.
- Procrastination usually stems from a desire to avoid pain.
- The hardest part is always the start. So get the ball rolling now!Â
In this article we are going to be taking a closer look at the emotions of pleasure and pain, and see what bearing they have on your ability to stay disciplined.
Understanding what you link pleasure and pain to can help you gain far more control over your life, rather than just randomly experiencing pleasure or pain by accident, and then reacting to them as they appear.
If your associations of pleasure and pain are out of alignment with what you want, you will never reach your goal.
The key word here is control, and that is exactly what you will gain when you learn how to change the connections you normally use to link pleasure and pain in your life.
Procrastination And Self Discipline
One of the most common results of a misalignment of pleasure and pain and goals people set for themselves, is procrastination.
Procrastination simply means avoiding the things you want to do in life, by putting them off, with the intention of doing them at a later date.
However the trouble with procrastination is that things usually never get done. Or by the time you finally get round to doing it, it’s too late.
Procrastination is therefore one of the main ways in which people self sabotage potential successes they could have in their life.
The effects of procrastination make you feel guilty for wasting your time, and worst of all, leaves you feeling powerless and without control.
Why Do People Procrastinate?
Although there can be many reasons for procrastination, the most obvious is the avoidance of a perceived pain.
This may stem from a feeling of insecurity that comes from not having the information to do a task, and the resulting illusion that the task will be a lot of pain or hard work to accomplish.
Since procrastination is really a focus on the pain of a task, instead of the benefits, one of the best ways to deal with procrastination is to restructure how you perceive the pleasure and pain of the task at hand.
Projecting Yourself Into The Future  Â
This is exactly what world class athletes do through a process of mental visualization. By projecting themselves forward into the future, they focus and motivate their mind on the future pleasure of a task, rather than the present pain.
The famous boxer Muhammad Ali once remarked how he hated training. But he said he managed to get through the pain and discomfort that came with his long intensive training sessions, by picturing himself as a champion and the rewards he would receive by becoming the best.
In this way he was able to overcome his present pain, by focusing on his future pleasure.
Control Your Mind, Or It Will Control You!
Mental visualization is important, because either way your mind will either be visualizing the perceived pain of a task, or the perceived pleasure.
However because it is a natural tendency to think about things that are happening immediately in the present, the mind tends to think of the pain first, and so is motivated to immediately avoid any pain in the present.
The reason the mind focuses so much on the present is because of a built in survival mechanism. When we were still hunters living in the wild with dangerous animals, the mind had to be constantly focused on the present and avoiding pain in order to survive.
Skip forward a few thousand years and our minds haven’t changed that much! We still think primarily in terms of immediate pleasure, or immediate pain.
This is where control comes in. By shifting that focus away from the immediate present and into the distant future, you can change the minds natural motivation away from pain to become motivated towards pleasure instead.
Since the pleasure comes after a task is completed, changing your focus is therefore an extremely powerful technique to use in living a highly disciplined and productive life.
Here is a 3 step process you can use to overcome present pain, and become motivated by a future pleasure.
3 Step Process For Mental Projection
1 - Make a visual, kinesthetic or auditory representation of your objective. If you don’t know what your dominant thought processes are, see this article on NLP models and the subconscious.
Visualize the benefits of completing your task. A slimmer body? More money? More friends? Better health? Whatever it is, focus your mind on the future pleasure you will receive, rather than any perceived present pain.
2 - Intensify those pleasant feelings. Make images brighter, more lively. Make feelings more intense. Make sounds more vivid.
These don’t even have to be accurate representations of reality, so make them as wild, vivid and exaggerated as you can.
3 - Stop what you are doing, and start the task immediately. Then feel good for doing it.
Thoughts To Feelings To Actions
This 3 step process is exactly what highly trained successful athletes do. They first change their thoughts, which changes how they feel, which in turn changes how they act.
This is often called “psyching yourself up” or “pumping yourself up”. They can do it, and so can you.
Using these 3 steps will help you to associate pleasure over pain, and with time this will eventually become natural and automatic.
Get The Ball Rolling!
Another benefit from using this technique in overcoming procrastination, is that even if you do not complete the task the very first time, you still become motivated to start working on it immediately.
Often starting is the hardest part of any new task. But once you get started, things become a lot easier. A good analogy to use is the energy it takes to get a ball rolling.
The most energy is required at the start to move the ball. But once the ball gets rolling and gains momentum, very little energy is required to keep it moving forward.
Goodbye Procrastination!
So the next time you feel you are procrastinating, and avoiding doing something you know you should do, practice this 3 step mental visualization process.
Then get started on your task immediately, even if it is just for 5 minutes! The sooner you get the ball rolling, the quicker and easier things will get done.
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