Mindfulness of procrastination.

Are you a procrastinator? I sure am….. from way back and the suffering is real hey!
Mindfulness and self compassion practices can really help. As this article explains procrastination isn’t a lack of willpower or laziness…..it is yet another form of avoidance of the unpleasant, unpleasant emotions and feeling states…. or what is called “experiential avoidance”. We are often unconsciously trying to avoid the unpleasant and keep the pleasant. Totally understandable behaviour…..unfortunately sometimes we have to be with the unpleasant to get to where we want to get to or to be in alignment with what matters to us, our values.
So even though our basic physiology and nervous system says (screams) avoid unpleasant! grab and hold onto pleasant (and take no notice of the neutral) this is not always what serves us best and as an evolving species (more then just blindly reacting) we can use mindfulness and self compassion to make this more conscious and make some actual choices of what we want to do.
So, always avoiding the unpleasant doesn’t always make us feel good or happy. My experience of procrastination (that I have got to know well over the years with mindfulness) is it feels pretty awful. I get irritable and even more stressed trying to hold onto to less unpleasant activities in the attempt to avoid the unpleasant feelings associated with the task I am avoiding/ procrastinating over…usually on the familiar themes of perfectionism “I won’t do it well enough” or fear/ anxiety “I will get it wrong, or something will go wrong”.
The thoughts of how it is going to be doing the task, leading onto the predicted feeling states; is usually much much worse then it turns out to be when I actually get round to avoided task ….leading to thoughts of “that wasn’t that bad, why didn’t I do that before” with the all to familiar pull into self berating! (bring in self compassion)
Ok….. the article is brilliant and I will stop procrastinating now and get on with what I was supposed to be doing!