They say that procrastination is about pain avoidance, you don’t do what you’re supposed to be doing and instead choose to do something else to avoid the pain of a difficult task. Instead you choose the pain of guilt and anxiety because the avoided obligation won’t magically disappear.
“Many people delay taking action because they hope to avoid suffering. They keep searching for a path that won’t involve tradeoffs. But some form of suffering is always inevitable. The process of taking action is the process of choosing your pain.”
James Clear
Is it really worth it to endure the guilt and anxiety in exchange for a small reprieve? Unlikely, it seems to be an unfavorable transaction, you spend your time doing something else while still thinking about your obligation and you will eventually still have to do it anyway.
It’s very clear that choosing your pain is an effective way to prevent procrastination, just tough it up and start. But what about worrying about a future obligation? Sometimes we experience that same guilt and anxiety for something that might come later, but we can’t do anything about it yet.
I think that choosing your pain can also be effective to reduce the unnecessary stresses of worrying about the future. We all know that it doesn’t do any good to fret about things you cannot control and cannot predict, but it’s often very difficult to keep this under control. Meditation helps a lot but committing to what’s going to happen and being determined to be present in the moment in the meantime is something that can be very effective in controlling unnecessary anxiety.
It’s counterintuitive, but I have found that things related to motivation usually are. When you’re having a bad day, when you fell slow and unproductive or even when you feel miserable, a good option that you normally wouldn’t think about is to try and find someone that you can help.
If you spend these kind of day trying to find ways to help yourself, you will only find more reasons to be disappointed. That’s how mood distorts our perception.
I have found that if you instead try and find someone you can help, it can do wonders for your motivation and your mood, if you approach it with the right attitude. If you see it as a burden or as people getting in your way, then it will only make things worse. However, if you reframe it as an opportunity to do something valuable on a day when you’re feeling “off”, it can turn around a bad day.
If you’re going to be slow and useless on your own stuff sometimes, it could be worth it to change gears and help someone else instead and likely the satisfaction of helping others can pull you up from the pit.
The key to building long lasting habits is consistency. Do something every day until it becomes automatic. The problem is that life happens, and it has a nasty habit of throwing obstacles at us in unexpected ways.
When this happens we usually just skip our habit for a day, and that’s ok. You shouldn’t beat yourself up for skipping a day due to unforeseen circumstances. The problem comes when a day becomes three becomes ten and before you know it your habit is gone.
There is a better way, you can figure out a “minimum viable session” for your habit. It doesn’t matter if it seems pointless or not worth doing. Best case scenario you will end up doing more than the minimum. Worst case scenario you will keep the ritual going, you will not break the streak and you can always pick the intensity back up tomorrow.
Lift a kettlebell once, pick up the guitar and strum it once, read one page, write a very short blog post. These are all good examples of minimum viable sessions that will help keep you on track towards your goals.
In it’s original sense, a mantra is a mystical formula of invocation in Hinduism and Buddhism and has all sort of religious and spiritual significance. In the more secular sense it is a word or phrase that can be repeated frequently for motivation.
Recently I have adopted two mantras that have helped me a lot to keep myself from slipping into inactivity and laziness. This is very important to me because if I start down the spiral of laziness my mental health suffers and it’s very hard to get back on track.
The first one is quite simple but extremely powerful, I read it on the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. It helps get many little annoying things out of the way before they have a chance to pile up and become overwhelming. In my case the most valuable contribution this has had in my life is to help me keep my kitchen sink clean. I used to just put my dishes in the sink and let them accumulate until washing the dishes became a huge annoying chore that I ended up delaying. It’s not fun to spend an hour cleaning days old disgusting dirty kitchenware, and I haven’t had to do that in months because any dish or piece of silverware that I use is washed immediately thank to the two minute rule.
If it takes less than two minutes, do it now.
david allen – Getting things done
The other mantra that I have been using has been invaluable for my music practice, this is something I came up with myself but I’m sure it’s not an original thought and someone else must have penned it somewhere. It has helped me progress much more effectively on my music practice, on physical exercise and even at work.
When you feel like giving up, try just one more time
It sounds simple, it sounds dumb, but it’s deceptively powerful. It gives you permission to quit without guilt after just one more try, but more often than not you don’t try only once more. In my experience I either get it right in that “last” attempt, or get close enough that I get a second wind and finish my practice session. Mantras can be an effective tool to improve your resilience.
There’s a difficult conversation, a tedious task or an uncertain situation coming up in a few days. You think about it non-stop. You imagine all the possible scenarios, all the different ways in which it will go wrong, all the worst case scenarios and horrible consequences. You are a victim of doom thinking. So am I and so are a large percentage of people.
And I guess this makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. In a wilderness survival situation you need to be on edge, you need to be prepared to fight or flee in a second. Of course this doesn’t apply anymore to most of us but we have been cursed been too much progress in too little time.
We are not ready for modern life, our bodies have not adapted and they give us warnings all the time. Illnesses related to stress are not uncommon and they happen because in a wilderness survival situation with a primitive brain, the “fight or flight” response lasts for a few minutes and then you go back to normal. In the modern wilderness we just don’t turn it off, we ruminate and dwell and wallow and keep our bodies and our minds on edge. We effectively put ourselves through imaginary bad situations over and over again for no reason.
The worst part is that when the dreaded situation finally comes, it’s almost never as bad as we imagined it would be. We tortured ourselves for no reason but it’s really hard not to, the more you tell yourself to stop fretting, the more you bring attention to it and the worst it gets.
Lately I have found that thanks to meditation and mindfulness I have managed to control the doomthink a little bit. Being aware of it, observing it and letting it pass without resistance is a way to at least not make it worse, and with practice you can acknowledge the thoughts but also just let them pass. I’m still by no means an expert on letting it pass through me without damage, but more and more I’m observing that being aware helps a lot to catch yourself and to avoid diving into the well of despair.
Don’t let yourself suffer over and over again through imaginary futures that will never exist. Acknowledge the dread and face the monster only when it’s really here.
On March of 2019 I read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I don’t like to be dramatic so this is a little uncomfortable to say but the concepts in this book quite literally changed my life.
I have always been impatient with myself, if I tried something and didn’t quickly become competent at it, I would abandon it and move on to the next thing. I was naturally proficient at some things so I gravitated towards those and later on in life I indeed got better at being persistent with some things, but I was never really consistent with anything, at least not anything positive (flashback to young me consistently staying up until 7AM watching garbage TV in my college years).
As a kid, school was relatively easy for me, and ironically that turned out to be mostly a net negative in my life. I failed to learn resilience, I failed to learn consistency, and in the last couple of years I have come to realize how important these concepts are for success, but most importantly for leading a satisfying life.
Getting by without planning or structure was a badge of honor for me. It’s not that being resourceful and figuring things out under pressure aren’t good skills to have, but I realized that the majority of the stresses in my life were avoidable if I had known back then about the importance of consistency.
Small, consistent changes can have a surprisingly large impact on your life, you always hear about the drop of water breaking the stone and all of that, but who has the time to wait for it? Well, turns out that in most cases there are no reliable shortcut and it’s best to commit to the long term payoff, while enjoying the process.
If you want to make a positive change in your life, you should recognize that change requires patience, as well as confidence that your habits are keeping you on the right trajectory – even if you aren’t seeing immediate results.
James Clear – Atomic Habits
The problem is that this is not easy to do, or rather, it is relatively easy but not intuitive. The best way to solidify a new habit is to make it so easy that it would be very difficult to fail. This is very counterintuitive but if you think about it for a few minutes makes a lot of sense, because once the habit becomes automatic, it’s easier to gradually increment the amount, duration or intensity of it until you reach the desired result. Not doing this is why we fail at habits, because we think we must do too much too soon, get overwhelmed, get frustrated and quit (many years of failed resolutions are undeniable proof of this).
This book taught me a foolproof strategy to build new habits and so far it has worked extremely well to help me create lots of habits that I still practice, many that I don’t need any more and many others that I will build in the future because now I know how to do it. I have also failed to set some habits, but instead of quitting for good, I reviewed what happened and tried again, sometimes multiple times. It took me several tries to solidify a consistent exercise habit, but now I have it and it is one of the topics that I would like to write about here.
In fact, this blog is the newest habit that I decided to start because I want to share all the good that has come to me from researching into the topics of productivity, motivation, mindset and meditation. I will also write about other interests such as music production, sports and in particular I have a draft for a multi part series about the wacky world of Japanese alternative idols, which I will publish someday.
I can say without any doubts that I am now a better person and can be self motivated and productive, all because of the tools I got from this book (and many others that I have read since then). Sometimes I wish I had read this (or something similar) when I was much younger, but regrets are not productive and wallowing is pointless. The past is unchangeable and that future doesn’t exist yet, so what’s left is to be consistent and continue building towards the person I want to become, now I know the way to get there.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
