A mindful approach to procrastination
Procrastination is just one of the many ways we use to avoid discomfort, and it is ubiquitous. We get very skillful at avoiding discomfort. Avoiding discomfort is a very human thing to do, and also, not all discomfort we can avoid. Here is how to find a procrastination cure.
You can read more about my experiences in curing procrastination in my book that is now on sale on Amazon for a short period of time.
Organizing a life that minimizes our contact with things we don’t like is our aim. Sometimes disappointments and losses cannot be avoided. It is important to learn how to manage those, because if we are not trained at managing disappointments, then we easily get overwhelmed when difficulties arise. We don’t have a strategy for dealing with the discomfort, and we do not believe that we can cope with various challenges that arise inevitably.
Mindfulness meditation helps build your capacity for tolerating unpleasantness without getting overwhelmed. If you are always avoiding discomfort, your capacity for holding difficult feelings gets diminished, but when you practice how to accept suffering, then you can manage a greater degree of discomfort without your mental health is threatened.
In all the years I am meditating, I was able to develop the skill to accept events in life even I do not personally like and causing stress to me. That way impact that stress has over me is much more manageable and not felt as a threat to my well-being.
The practice of emotions awareness to find procrastination cure
In your everyday meditation, as described in my book Mindfulness: Yoga And Meditation. Simple Beginners Guide To Stress Relief And Happiness, when it comes to paying attention to emotions through our practice, we should say that we are not looking for certain emotions during this practice. Instead, the basic instruction is to keep your focus on the breath. We give priority to the physical sensations caused to them. But if some emotion comes up and starts to require your attention, leave your breath aside and focus on the body sensations caused by that emotion.
When these sensations are no longer dominant, gently return to your breath. If the emotion is so strong that it makes it impossible for you to be with your breath or body, direct your attention to that emotion itself. See if you can identify and name it. Let her go. After some time, emotion will fade, so you can return to your breath.
Path to peace and happiness
In the end, we are all looking for peace and happiness. Even it seems that we want food, wealth, sex, entertainment, and respect, those are only superficial representations of a much deeper feeling of happiness.
What is happiness? It cannot be just the power to be in control of everything. Experience teaches us that it is not true. Instead, you can learn to control your mind, to stop being contaminated with desire and aversion.
Learn to recognize desire and not be controlled by it. You should not accept everything that happens to you. You need to have a productive relationship with your life, but with a new point of view on everyday life events. Mindfulness teaches you to change things in your life that you can, but also to accept those that you cannot.
It is crucial to be able to look carefully inside your mind, truthfully and objectively. You must learn how to recognize those moments without judgment. Only then you can make fundamental changes in your everyday life. Let go of resistance to change. Let go of your illusions and judgments. When you achieve that, you will see yourself as you are right now. That does not mean that you need to isolate yourself from social interactions. You must fulfill your duties and obligations to your family and friends, and all fellow human beings and, most importantly, to yourself. This is your path to achieve true happiness.
Working on mindfulness, you will better understand yourself. As your understanding grows, the more compassionate you can be. You will be ready to forgive and forget and to learn to love by understanding.
This is not an issue of faith. This is an issue of confidence and experience. It is made through everyday practice and endurance on the path to discover things as they really are.
Finding the Best Ways for You to Concentrate
It is vital to find what is the best atmosphere and location for keeping your concentration at the right level to perform the task ahead. Sometimes you will need near-absolute silence, other times some music will help a lot. You must find out what is working for you. What is the best environment for others may not work for you. Even in different stages of your life, different surroundings might influence you differently. Always seek for optimal conditions and try different setups. But bear in mind that you must be able to work in less than ideal circumstances. Mindfulness meditation will help you with that immensely. We do not need to control anything and everything. We could adapt and find procrastination cure this way.
You will also need to be patient. Achieving mindfulness and concentration, thus avoiding procrastination is a process. Sometimes it will not go as you would like. Be patient and persistent. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.
Live a Disciplined Life
I strongly believe that the most successful long-term cure for procrastination is to live a disciplined life. If you manage to achieve discipline on how you eat, exercise, and even meditate daily, you will have much more chance to avoid procrastination. To have a structure in your life is very helpful. Of course, you should not become a prisoner of those habits. Use them only until they help your cause. Stop wasting hours of your day watching YouTube, playing video games, social media.
Apart from helping you fight procrastination discipline will also help you to develop self-control and willpower.
If you are not prepared to live a disciplined life, you will struggle with procrastination. I am sure of that.
Think Concretely
Research shows that thinking in specific terms helps us stop procrastinating and start acting. When we focus on the next step only, this pushes negative thoughts and emotions into the background of our consciousness and helps us get started.
Do Things You Enjoy
Besides, to do all of the above, pay attention to your needs and do things you enjoy. Frequently, procrastination is your way to vent out the in-built frustration because you haven’t been able to do things you enjoy. If you have been working hard for a long time and haven’t done anything enjoyable lately, you are likely to lean towards meaningless activities. Those activities can then trigger your habit to procrastinate and create bigger problems for you.
A good way to keep that from happening is to devote some time to your needs of enjoyment and entertainment occasionally. Make it a daily or weekly ritual to engage in some enjoyable activity such as painting, dancing, listening to music, or anything else that mitigates your stress and helps you breathe. When you consistently spend some quality me-time, you feel better and content with yourself and can easily motivate yourself to work on your high priority tasks on time.
Find Work You Love
We procrastinate on things we don’t enjoy doing. If you can find work you truly love, procrastination will become a non-issue (concerning that work). You will feel intrinsically motivated, and you will find yourself wanting to work. Imagine you were a professional online gamer – you wouldn’t procrastinate on getting up in the morning and playing, would you? It is then not to hard to find procrastination cure…
Never give up
When you meditate, before you can let things go, you have to skillfully allow the subconscious to rise into consciousness. All your fears, anguish, despair, and anger are allowed to become conscious.
To find out more about Procrastination cure read this post. You can check out my other post about Mindfulness and about Living in the present.
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