38: Procrastination: The Self Defense Mechanism We Can Do Without

“Procrastination is often not just about laziness and people who don’t care and don’t give a darn and aren’t willing to do something. It’s actually a variation of a fear response.” -Master Certified Coach, Jill Farmer In today’s episode, Coaches Gabriella and Jill tackle procrastination. Who of us hasn’t dealt with procrastination at one time or another? Does it leave you calling yourself lazy or not good enough? You’re not alone. But it turns out that is simply not the case. Procrastination is often a variation to a fear response and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a natural way of your brain trying to protect itself from something it may find threatening. Tune in to hear ways to move through and overcome procrastination. Get One-on-One Coaching with Coach Gabriella Dennery MD Get One-on-One Coaching with Master-Certified Coach Jill Farmer Excerpts from the show: “Jill, in your work with clients what have you found is the reason for putting things off?” -Coach Gabriella Dennery “Well, that was an interesting thing that I discovered because I had the tendency to be a procrastinator myself and my secret deep dark, inner critic voice around that, was that I was lazy and just not as smart as everybody else because I couldn't get my act together. When I started trying to help other people with procrastination, I decided to sort of dive into the psychology of it and figure out why, as humans, do we procrastinate? It turns out that procrastination is often not about just laziness and people who don't care and don't give a darn and aren't willing to do something, it's actually a variation of a fear response. So when we get agitated and are in the activated fear response, we tend to fight, flee or freeze. So procrastination is really a version of fleeing away from something that feels like a threat to us. That was so fascinating for me because I thought about how I tried to motivate myself to do something that was feeling overwhelming, that I was putting off, the big project, whether it was in school and it was the big paper I was writing or it was a big project that was due at work, my way to try to get myself excited about doing those things was to beat myself up and talk about how hard it was and how much time I needed in order to do it right. And I just needed to buckle down with this inner dictator voice, and of course, I would find anything else to do other than that because I was trying to use an inner voice that was threatening me in order to deal with something that I was already perceiving as a threat. It felt hard to me, it felt threatening. So I was subconsciously moving away from it. So that was kind of eye-opening for me to think about, that procrastination does not mean that we are evil or lazy. Often it just means that we've got the subconscious perceived threat about it, we're worried about doing it, we're worried about doing it right. Perfectionism often gets mixed in there and so we avoid it because it feels scary.” -Master Certified Coach, Jill Farmer “A lot of time it has to do with the overwhelm. Especially for doctors and for medical students, for people going through all of that craziness of hours of studying and sleeplessness and trying to jam all this information into a very short period of time. Then it's like, ‘You know what, I just want to zone out for a minute.’ And you want to gravitate to something that feels a little better in that moment. If there's some kind of instant gratification, so, you know, let me look at a cat video on YouTube so that I can feel a little more sane, rather than trying to push myself. And then you're right, I think the point about the inner critic being able to say, ‘Look, let me try to beat myself into submission,’ as opposed to, ‘I’m being lazy or I'm not good enough,’ and all of these kind of stories we tell ourselves. When the focus is on that, and then that creates a kind of vicious cycle of more procrastination and more delay and more, ‘I kno