Your Mind Is Playing Tricks on You

You won’t find a soul on this planet who has never procrastinated.

It is one of the most common complaints in a world that moves fast, is obsessed with productivity, and where every wasted moment could have been better spent working towards improving your life.

Everyone assumes it to be a mental game. And it very much is! Studies have shown that the real reason for procrastination is the failure to regulate one’s emotions about whatever they have to do.

When I first heard this explanation, it hit me like a ton of bricks because that is exactly why I procrastinate. It is also especially applicable to me as almost all of what I do today is creative work.

However, there is more to it than just being all in your head.

Pay Attention to Your Body

I want to suggest an exercise. You should do it the next time you are working and feel like procrastinating.

Pay close attention to what your body is doing. You might feel a mild uneasiness clawing at you. Because procrastination is much more than just mental discomfort. If you are cognizant enough, you can feel that mental discomfort manifesting in your body! And the surprising part is — it is evident to everyone but you!

Unconscious movements when you are trying to focus like shaking your leg, fiddling with a pen, or, applicable to me, constantly selecting text on the screen while reading. All of these are signs of a stressed and anxious mind that is either worried about something not relevant to what you are working on or is trying to defuse some of the tension through musculoskeletal movements.

I have not met anyone in real life who has the last of the aforementioned habits. When I read on a computer, my hand is always on the mouse constantly selecting random text on the page. I don’t always select the text that I’m reading but just random text anywhere above or below it.

I have been called out several times in college for this behavior. And I wasn’t even aware I was doing it! It was just so habitual to me that I never realized that someone observing from afar might find it weird.

I have almost stopped doing it now that I’m older, but it was how I “read” things on a screen for as long as I could remember, well into my late 20s. I suspect it may have been undiagnosed ADHD, or it may just have been my body manifesting my stress physically while I was completely oblivious to it.

My point is that procrastination, or the desire to just stop what you are working on and escape the present moment, is a feeling that is not just in your head and can easily turn into a physical response that you are unaware of.

I caught myself shaking my leg right before writing this sentence.

The Remedy

This may sound like something pretentious out of an Apple keynote but the answer that I found works the best for me is courage.

What do I mean by this?

The courage to accept that whatever you are working on has to get done and you are not going to try to escape the moment anymore.

The best way to do this is to commit yourself to a certain time slot — say 25 minutes like the Pomodoro technique. You must tell yourself that for the next 25 minutes, I cannot escape this task.

You must lie to yourself that everything else in your life that you may be worrying about — your family, finances, friends — all those problems are taken care of. Once you fully convince your mind of this lie, only then can you free yourself to have the courage to face whatever challenge you find difficult or frustrating to focus on. Tell yourself that for the next 25 minutes, I have nothing to worry about but this task ahead of me.

Next, you must be physically aware enough to identify when that uncomfortable feeling in your body starts creeping up. Only then can you fight it.

However, fighting it doesn’t mean telling yourself to “work harder.” That might cause more stress!

Instead, you just have to silently recognize and acknowledge that feeling. Say to yourself, “I sense a feeling of panic” instead of “I’m panicking.” This change of context from feeling something to being an impassionate observer who merely senses that feeling is the first step towards disconnecting from it.

If this sounds too much like meditation, it is! Think of it as physical meditation where your brain is preoccupied, your hands are working, and the stress is in check. Some might call it the “flow state.”

Closing Words

The mind and body are inexorably linked. A problem in either is going to affect the other and pretending otherwise is foolish. Assuming this to be true, a corollary emerges that fixing a problem in either can fix the same problem in the other.

So, keep this in mind the next time you want to just quit working on your novel or take a “small” break from coding before the timer is up. You’ll find that quieting down your body can have a profound effect on your mind.