Reset Your New Year’s Plan- The Pit Of Procrastination

As we continue to make our way through the New Year, I’d bet a few of your intentions have yet to manifest. Procrastination is often to blame.

If you find yourself procrastinating, I’m pretty sure this isn’t your first trip around the procrastination cycle. Maybe you are worried that you can’t be successful or that you will be judged or won’t be adequate to complete the task at hand. Maybe you are waiting for the perfect time and the perfect situation or maybe the perfect series of actions to ensure your success. Maybe you dream of the greatness that occurs when you have completed the task and then set your sights on even greater or different goals. Maybe you refuse to be held to the standard of others and so discard your goals as undesirable.

These are the four types of procrastinators:

Worriers – Fear freezes them

Perfectionists – Idealism constricts them

Dreamers – Surrealism distracts them

Oppositionalists – Defiance blocks them

Try these solutions:

Worries and Perfectionists – Recruit an accountability partner who can help you reality test your concerns. If you can get someone to walk with you into shared goals, you will have a better chance to move forward.

Dreamers – Try setting SMART Goals: Small Specific actions, Measurable outcomes, Actions that you alone can accomplish without being dependent upon someone else’s actions, Realistic and Relevant actions, Time-frame for accomplishing and measuring the actions

Oppositionalists: Suspend your beliefs and allow the possibility that your goals can exist independent of what others think you should do.

Linda Dapadin covers these topics in more detail in “How to Beat Procrastination in the Digital Age.”

As you consider how procrastination has hindered your journey to the New You Year, realize that procrastination alone is also associated with a tendency to poorer health in general.

In a study of over 3000 university students (renowned for procrastination globally) from three universities in Sweden, the authors tracked changes in health over time with changes in the self-assessed level of procrastination. Low levels of worsening depression, stress, and anxiety were noted. More surprisingly, increased procrastination were correlated with worsening pain in the neck, head, back, arms, and legs. Increased procrastination was also associated with worse sleep, more inactivity, greater isolation, more alcohol use, and more cannabis use.

This study could not discern why the worsening symptoms occurred. Perhaps their underlying coping styles drove worse health outcomes. In any case, procrastination not only worsens our health by stopping us from getting on with our health journey, procrastination also materially worsens how much pain we feel, our mood, our relationships, and our lifestyles. 

It is never too late to start, re-start, re-set, or drive on. We live only in this moment on this day on this planet in this universe. Even though starting can sometimes seems to be much bigger than we are. The most powerful agent-for-change in existence is CHOICE and that power lies with each of US in THIS MOMENT.

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