Be honest – have you got the urge to procrastinate right now? For a lot of us — cough, me — the answer might be, “Uh, what am I not procrastinating on?” It’s common to put off your responsibilities, whether that’s an innocuous task on your to-do list or making a huge life change. Heck, you probably even drag your feet on doing things you know you’d enjoy. If you don’t, at least occasionally, you might be the odd one out, says therapist Britt Frank.
As the author of both The Science of Stuck and The Getting Unstuck Workbook, Frank knows a little something about, well, feeling stuck. Understanding the brain science behind procrastination doesn’t save her from falling prey to this nearly universal habit. “I procrastinate because I’m human,” she says. “I do it with small things, I do it with big things, and I do it with silly things like answering an email that would take two seconds.”
Why are most of us like this? Thanks to the complicated tapestry that is humanity and neuroscience, there are plenty of theories behind our tendency to delay despite needing to act. In Frank’s view, it can be helpful to think of procrastination as part of the body’s natural reaction to stress, particularly the freeze response — you know, the lesser-talked-about sibling of fight-or-flight. “You freeze because, for whatever reason, your brain perceives a threat,” Frank says. If you’ve ever clammed up while speaking in front of a large crowd, you likely know that something doesn’t have to be actually life-threatening for our brains to yell, “Danger!” In fact, it might be something mundane — including, yes, seemingly harmless tasks that we’ll move heaven and earth to avoid knocking out.
So what do you do when you’re frozen in the face of going to the DMV, texting your friend back, or — in Frank’s case at the time of our call — putting away clean clothes that’ve been sitting there for two days? Here are her best tips, a.k.a. exactly how she plans to finish her dang laundry.
Don’t ask why you’re procrastinating.
Look, you could sit around and unpack why, exactly, you’ve been putting off Doing The Thing. I, for example, could look deep within myself and tell you that I’m not just procrastinating on sending a follow-up email — I’m grappling with my deep desire to never annoy people so they like me, okay! And you, perhaps, could reflect on the connection between your fear of failure and your inability to start that project, and Frank could certainly offer all sorts of insight on all the common reasons why anyone procrastinates on anything.
BUT RESIST THE URGE. “Stop asking why,” Frank says. “That is the most important first step.” Don’t get her wrong — sometimes a little self-reflection can yield helpful insight. It’s just rarely a useful first step. “You can analyse your why, but then you’ll just be insightfully stuck,” she continues. “Insight is good, but movement is better, at least at first. If I’m feeling really stuck, analysis and awareness can come after momentum, but not before.” You might be surprised how often you can resolve the issue without having to go full therapist on yourself. “And once you solve the procrastination problem that you’re facing, you might not even care why you struggled in the first place,” Frank adds.
Instead ask, “What can I do?”
“We want to get out of our heads and into our choices,” Frank says, suggesting listing potential small steps on paper or out loud to really cement them. For example, Frank might decide she could put away one sock (“Not even dig around for a pair — just one sock”), move the laundry basket to a more convenient location, or even just stand up and shake out her muscles “to create momentum.” All those sound better than “put away the giant mountain of laundry,” right?