How to Stop Procrastinating

To understand how to stop procrastinating, we need to understand the anatomy of procrastination. And that anatomy is a lot like the anatomy of a weed.

Think of your schedule as a garden. You plant different kinds of activities in it, and some of them bear useful fruit, and others, like pretty flowers, are just enjoyable. Procrastination is like a weed growing in that garden. It steals your time and energy from better pursuits just like weeds steal sunlight and soil nutrients from more desirable plants.

And procrastination has three layers, just like a plant has leaves, stems, and roots. Let’s look at each of these layers to learn how to uproot procrastination.

Leaves: Resistant Behaviors

Most people approach procrastination by trying to change their behaviors. They tell themselves “no more video games until my chores are done” or “I’m not allowed to do anything else until this report is written.” You might even use rewards and punishments to try to control your behaviors.

This focus on your behaviors is like snipping away at the leaves of the weed. On a fragile plant, removing its leaves might kill it. But on a hearty weed? Not a chance. It’ll just grow them right back. So if your procrastination has deep roots, you’ll find yourself breaking the rules you set for yourself in no time.

It’s important not to blame yourself for this — it’s not because you lack an important quality like willpower, it’s because your procrastination is so much more than the leaves you’re snipping at.

Stems: Fears

Your resistant behaviors — taking breaks to snack, nap, scroll online, or watch TV, or even clean your house — keep coming back because they’re supported by the stems of the procrastination weed: your fears.

These fears can include the fear of failure, the fear of being rejected, the fear of becoming successful and not being able to handle it, the fear of being judged, and more. Take the What’s Your Procrastination Type? quiz to get an idea of what your top fear might be.

When fears grow like weeds

It might be hard to imagine that you have these kinds of fears, but the truth is, these are totally normal and healthy fears to have, in moderation.

In fact, even weeds are normal and healthy when they grow in the right habitat, where they don’t have an unfair advantage over all the other plants. But a plant becomes a weed when it grows out of control, and similarly, these fears become harmful when they get out of proportion and take over your life.

Fears that have become weed-like drive you to avoid activities that are actually quite safe. In fact, such fears often become counter-productive, driving you into bad circumstances instead of out of them. That’s when we need to do something about these fears.

Soothing fears works — temporarily

So what to do? One common solution is to use productivity tricks that soothe your fears. You can trick your brain into feeling safer if you tell yourself “I only need to do this for twenty minutes,” or “Don’t think about the whole overwhelming project, just think about this tiny first step.”

These are perfectly healthy, and I like to offer my audience tips like these as a stop-gap measure while they’re still working on transforming their procrastination. But they typically don’t work forever. They soothe the fear today, and then the fear pops right back up again tomorrow. And over time, they can get less effective at soothing the fear (or harder to make yourself use).

That’s because these fears are growing out of the roots of your procrastination. If you really want to get rid of a weed, you have to pull it up by the roots. And if you really want to change your procrastination, you have to get to the root of it.

Roots: Beliefs

The fears that drive procrastination are driven by beliefs that you hold deep down, beliefs like “My worth is derived from my accomplishments,” “Only perfection is good enough,” “I’m only okay if everyone approves of me,” and more. To get a sense of what belief might be driving your procrastination, take the What’s Your Procrastination Type? quiz.

If you don’t change these beliefs, they’ll just keep re-creating the fears, over and over, like a weed putting up new shoots every spring.

Talking sense into yourself doesn’t work

These limiting beliefs are about important things like who you are and how the world works, so your psyche isn’t going to let them change just because someone said “you know, it’s healthier to love yourself unconditionally.” If you’ve ever found yourself saying “rationally, I know better, but I still feel this way,” then you know how hard it is to change this kind of belief.

In order to uproot the procrastination weed, we have to bring your psyche really strong evidence for changing these beliefs — the kind of evidence you can feel, not just think about. That’s what we do in my coaching engagement, Painless Productivity.

The Whole Picture

So procrastination is actually a three-layered system: on the surface, you’re resisting your work. The resistance is driven by fear. And the fear is driven by a deeply held belief.

When productivity influencers tell you that you should just will yourself into breaking your procrastination pattern, they’re telling you to change your procrastination from the top down. But any gardener knows that’s a recipe for failure. When you keep trying to change your procrastination by snipping at leaves and you fail, it strengthens your negative beliefs about yourself and your fear of failure, reinforcing the whole belief -> fear -> procrastination pattern.

To actually change the procrastination pattern, we have to get to the root of it — the limiting belief — and change the whole system from the bottom up.

Next Step

Are you interested in making this change in yourself? Book a free Strategy Session with me. I can help you find out what your procrastination is made of and how to address it.

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