You have a big dream,

You decided you are done with the 9-5 life and want to build your own business. 

You decide you are done feeling out of shape and want to create your ‘dream body.’

You decide that you don’t want to feel financial stress anymore, so you are going to pay off all of your credit cards and loans. 

You keep imagining how great your life will be once you achieve your goal. 

You create a rigorous step-by-step plan on how to achieve the goal. 

You buy all the products that the pros recommend, and you begin. 

You push yourself for a week, use strong willpower, and force yourself to do the rigorous plan you set out for yourself, and then… 

one day, you procrastinate, then the next, and then the next, and then you quit. 

Now you really feel like shit. Even worse than before. 

You shame yourself for your failure and dig yourself even deeper into the life you don’t want anymore. 

You go back to hating your life, create a new big dream, and then start the cycle all over again. 

This is a constant cycle I have found myself in for most of my twenties. 

I create this massive dream, an unrealistic schedule for myself, and then when it’s time to do the work on the dream, I procrastinate hard. 

In fact, I love to procrastinate… well, I used to. 

Through self-reflection, I realized that I do a great job of coming up with a big dream and planning it out, but I have a tough time executing on it. 

Thanks to my friend, procrastination.

So, I started to do a lot of research about why people procrastinate. 

I became tired of always preparing to live. 

Procrastination has a lot to do with stress and the emotions we place behind our big dreams. 

When you have a big dream or a desperate need to escape your current reality, you will put a lot of pressure on what you must do to get there. That pressure can be a great source of motivation for a few weeks or even months, but more often than not, it becomes a source of stress. 

Eventually, the pressure you put on yourself to get started becomes the reason you don’t want to continue. Sometimes, we get so caught up in the pressure that we don’t even actually get started in the first place. 

The pressure to succeed is so high that we avoid doing the task because it forces us to face the high expectations we place on ourselves. 

But the alternative to facing this pressure that we place on ourselves is living a life that lacks fulfillment. If you don’t do what you want to, you will always be stuck, you will never be able to express your most authentic self, and you will be forced to sit with the deep pain of knowing you could have lived a better life. 

Behind my procrastination is the source of an infection I have been living with for years: the infection of not being able to live a fulfilling life. 

The method I will describe below is how I am now approaching procrastination. It has nowhere near solved my problem because I still have so much unresolved emotion behind why I procrastinate. But this method certainly helps.

First, let's understand the emotions behind procrastination. 

There is something that Mel Robbins describes in her podcast known as the “Stress backpack.” This backpack is the stress load we carry, sometimes without even realizing it. Things get added to this backpack without us knowing and continue to weigh us down. 

The “stress backpack” gets in the way of us doing our work. We may not be able to see it, but it is often the source of our procrastination. When you have a heavy “stress backpack,” you probably need some deep rest, but you decide that you are going to go after all these goals you set for yourself. 

However, since you didn’t give your body the rest it needed, you will now scroll on Instagram for 3 hours rather than doing what you told yourself you would do. Then, you shame yourself, add even more weight to the backpack, and procrastinate even harder.

These are some other emotional reasons that could be causing your procrastination.

• Perfection Paralysis - When you are at the beginning of anything, you aren’t going to be very good at all, but you are a perfectionist, so you think you have to be. You get so caught up in wanting to be perfect that you can’t even begin— you procrastinate instead. 

• Artistic Resistance - If you ever read “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield, you know what I’m talking about. The most important work you must do is the work you will resist doing the most. (It probably has to do with the pressure we place on ourselves.) —I use “side quests” to avoid doing what I know is the work most authentic to me. It’s easier for me to do work that is not the most important because it feels less stressful. You can often use doing as a way of procrastinating or resisting.

What can we do when we are procrastinating?

1. Shift your identity.

• Stop labeling yourself as a procrastinator. You are not a procrastinator. You are just a tired human who is avoiding stress. 

• Through doing the things you plan, you will reinforce within yourself that you are the kind of person who does what they say they will do. 

• Once you stop procrastinating, you will leave time for actual rest. Procrastinating is just fake rest time.

2. Take the pressure off yourself.

• Apologize to yourself if you have been procrastinating. 

• Become an observer of your procrastination. Don’t let the procrastination be higher than you. Meet the emotion at your level. 

• Identify the stressor. —once you do this, the stressor will loosen its grip on you.

3. What would your higher self want you to do?

• Imagine what the future version of yourself would want you to do. 

• Do you need to rest, or are you avoiding the work? 

• Do what your future self would want you to. 

• As Matthew McConaughey said in his 2014 Oscar acceptance speech, your “hero is always ten years away.” That’s because his hero is his future self. Acting for your future self is super important.

4. Get started on something approachable.

• Suppose your goal is to do a workout. Just get yourself to the gym. 

• The most challenging thing to do is just get started. Don’t make it so hard on yourself. 

• Once you get started, you will get in a flow and do the rest.

If you have tried all these steps and it’s not working, Dr. Huberman suggests that you should do something more challenging than the feeling of procrastinating. One example would be taking a cold shower. Sometimes, you just need to change your body state, and then you will feel motivated to do the work you were avoiding.

Now, for the ones with the intense plan…

• Stop overdoing it. I know it’s a lot of fun to visualize the future and what it would be like to achieve a big goal. But you are putting so much on your plate that you are stressing yourself out and avoiding the work. 

• Create loose goals. Create more of a direction that you would like to move in. Year, month, week, and day. Break it down. Most importantly, make sure these goals are your own. It’s easy to follow an influencer’s path to success because they made it, and their method must be guaranteed. No. The best way is your way. Create your own process on how to achieve your goal. You can grab inspiration but never follow anyone else’s plan step-by-step. 

• Have a why behind all of your goals. Know why you are trying to accomplish everything you want and remind yourself of this every day. 

• Create an approachable daily habit that will get you into the mood to work. Allow this to be playful, not something you are forced to do. I call my habit “daily play”. This is the time I use to get into a writing flow. I journal and then create my posts for the day. I approach it as the time to play with my favorite hobby, writing. 

• Each day I do my daily play, I accumulate evidence that I am a writer, and I build momentum toward my goal of being a full-time writer.

Let this newsletter be your sign to stop procrastinating, rest when you need deep rest, and just start doing work when you know you are avoiding your life’s purpose.

This week, I would like to include a few helpful videos and podcasts surrounding procrastination because this is such a large topic, and I want to help you out as much as possible.

Mel Robbins Podcast

Stoic thoughts on beating procrastination —Ryan Holiday

Ali Abdaal & Ryan Holiday

Sedona method for beating procrastination - Actualized