Procrastination

Hello, hello, hello everyone! How are you today? I hope you are good.

Today I would like to speak about procrastination. Once we understand what it means, it won’t interfere in our ability to complete the tasks.

Last year my academic year was very stressful. Being the first year, I found it hard to manage due to the big change I was experiencing which was getting used to a new country, a big city, meeting new people, cooking, studying, etc.. This year therefore, I wanted to do a little bit of research before starting my second year to understand what caused me a lot of stress, and how could I release the stress. I found out that PROCRASTINATION was the issue and I think most of us or even all of us suffer from this at one point or another in our day to day lives. I hope that this explanation of what procrastination is and how to stop procrastinating will help you throughout all this year and forever.

I think everybody knows what it is, but do we really know what it means? Procrastination means “putting off and avoiding doing things that need to be done, often by doing other less important or more pleasurable things instead” (Encyclopaedia of Health, 2018). I wouldn’t have been able to explain it better.

I went on to YouTube to continue my research, and I typed the word ‘procrastination’ and loads of videos came out. But out of all of them, I just stayed with one that made me wake up and reflect upon what I was currently doing in my day to day, which was procrastinating. I believe the video is very useful:

According to Mel Robbins, procrastination is a form of stress relief. She then goes on to explain it further. She believes that the reason behind the difficulty of doing the little things that will improve our lives is the way our mind is designed. She states that our mind is designed to stop us, to protect us from anything that might cause us any harm (things that are uncomfortable, scary or difficult).

For example, imagine we have lots of little things to complete, such as studying, doing our grocery shopping, laundry, cooking for the week, speaking to our family, etc.. All these things cause a small hesitation, which then sends a stress signal to the brain to react to what’s making us stressed. Instead of completing the small things, it will try to relieve the stress by distracting us (with Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, etc.) and in this way become more relaxed. This can then become a habit and won’t let us complete the little things that will improve our lives. Therefore we need to cut off the habit.

Mel Robbins explains in four steps how she managed to overcome procrastination;

1. Firstly, acknowledge the stress. What’s causing you stress? (Not understanding the assignments, being away from your family, feeling lonely etc.).
2. Find something you want to achieve, a motivation so that when you hear the alarm in the morning, you act as a rocket counting back from 5 to 1 and you jump out of bed immediately.
3. Stop the procrastination habit.
4. The important thing is to start, instead of completing everything and rewarding yourself at the end, because you are going to procrastinate and then you will feel guilty. Try completing a task for 5 minutes and then giving yourself a reward for it.

I hope you have enjoyed watching the video and I hope you find it useful.

“The Way To Get Started Is To Quit Talking And Begin Doing” – Walt Disney.

R.A.