I Beat Procrastination by Deliberately Doom-Scrolling on Social Media.

This counter-intuitive mindset tip is one of the most effective ways to become an action taker.

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

Hi and welcome to ‘Something More’. If you’re new here, I’m Caroline Ferguson, mindset trainer and therapist. Here we explore mindset matters, self-leadership and what a life that matters might look like. Thank you for reading this free post. For just £80 a year you can join my monthly, live group-coaching sessions and receive extra mindset tools in your inbox.

One in five people is a chronic procrastinator.

While most people procrastinate now and again, twenty percent of humans routinely self-sabotage by putting off doing things that are in their best interests to get done.

Serial procrastinators are fully aware of the stress they cause themselves and others but can’t seem to change. The fact that they consistently leave things until the very last minute is mystifying: we’re talking important stuff like revising for exams, preparing for client sessions and putting together presentations for significant meetings at work.

There’s a LOT of self-flagellation amongst the terminal procrastinator tribe. They try to justify their habit with excuses like, “I do my best work under pressure”, or “I actually can’t focus unless I’m inches from the deadline”, but if they’re being honest, they know it’s all bollocks. Each time they miss a deadline or squeak in just under the wire, anxiety off the scale, they tell themselves, ‘Never a-bloody-gain!’. But it’s a lie and they know it. Their procrastination habit puts them at constant risk of letting themselves and others down and missing opportunities. It leaves them feeling stressed, guilty and inadequate.

In case you think I’m being a tad harsh, this is a topic I’m all-too familiar with – I’m one of the 20 percent for whom procrastination is a pernicious, life-long habit.

At least I was…

Eight years ago I decided I’d had enough of feeling rubbish and causing myself and others ridiculous amounts of totally unnecessary worry. Determined to crack my procrastination habit, I started experimenting with various types of mindset juju.

A lot of the stuff I tried didn’t work, but over time I found (and created) methods and frameworks that did make a measurable difference. Hurrah! I still remember how jubilant I felt when I submitted my company accounts (my particular bête noire) three months before the deadline. It was energising and motivating to realise I was consistently taking action, with relative ease, and my self-worth took a great leap forward.

I later rolled out a programme to help others beat procrastination and become action takers. I’ve outlined a couple of the techniques from the course in this post and this one for my ‘More Mindset’ paying subscribers in the last few months.

Here’s a trick that worked well to curb my procrastination habit.

If you have things you want to get done and can't seem to stop scrolling on social media, compulsively gaming, watching TV, cleaning the kitchen, or whatever way you routinely waste time, try this technique, which has worked well for me:

Procrastinate consciously and deliberately.

I realise making your time-sucking distraction activity a deliberate choice might seem counter-intuitive, but bear with me.

Photo by Thomas Oxford on Unsplash

When we think about doing the thing we’re putting off, we feel uncomfortable. It’ll be hard/ boring/ scary, our mind tells us. This wakes up the alarm centre in a primitive part of our brain; a reflex I call the tiger in our cave (more on that in a post to come).

At an unconscious level, feeling uncomfortable leads us to believe that the thing causing our discomfort is dangerous. Our mind prompts us to return to calmer waters by seeking a tried-and-tested displacement activity that will put the scary tiger back in her cage, helping us feel better

The activities we turn to when we’re procrastinating tend to be ones we perceive as less challenging than the task we’re putting off. When we’re doom-scrolling or procrastinating in other ways, we’re on autopilot. Our bodies reward this retreat into comfort by giving us hits of dopamine, which puts us in a trance-like state of pleasant neutrality – temporarily at least.

What our unconscious mind hasn’t figured out is that putting off tasks we need to get done is in itself a cause of discomfort. We feel anxious about doing the thing, and we feel anxious about not doing the thing. It’s a lose-lose situation.

So how does procrastinating help us beat procrastination?

If, instead of habitually defaulting to the displacement activity, we consciously and deliberately CHOOSE to do it, and set limits on it, we change our relationship with the activity. Now it’s no longer an unconscious retreat but a deliberate choice – one we can see the absurdity of.

Photo by Yousef Salhamoud on Unsplash

This is how I deliberately procrastinate:

When I notice the urge to put off taking action, or I feel uncomfortable when I think about one or more tasks on my to-do list, I pause and pay attention to what I’m feeling. Then I follow this simple, three-step process.

1️⃣ I ask myself these three questions and reflect on the answers:

• What task am I putting off doing?

• What do I feel like doing instead?

• What positive difference will it make to my life when I’ve completed the task?

From a neurological perspective, simply asking these questions moves us out of our limbic system, with its need for instant gratification and reward, into our pre-frontal cortex, which is the seat of our executive functioning and our adult, creative, solution-focused self

2️⃣ Then I say out loud, with energy, preferably looking at myself in a mirror (I stash a hand-mirror by my computer for this purpose):

“I'm going to choose to waste my time pointlessly [name your displacement activity] instead of making progress on [task you’ve been putting off]. I'll waste my valuable time for exactly 10 minutes and then I'll reward myself by tackling the task and enjoy feeling a sense of achievement.”

3️⃣ Now I observe what happens when the choice I’ve deliberately elected to make – giving myself permission to procrastinate – is front and centre of my consciousness.

Sometimes I’ll briefly do the displacement thing (usually scrolling FB), and if so I set a 10-minute timer on my phone. But often I feel pulled to get on with the task that needs doing, even when I’ve told myself it’s OK to doom-scroll for a while. The evidence in favour of taking constructive action is just too compelling for my conscious mind to ignore.

That’s the power of making a deliberate, purposeful decision – I put myself in charge of me and give myself true choice. It’s an act of self-leadership.

The more you use this simple technique, the more you’ll reinforce the reality that you’re someone who’s capable of taking action.

You deepen your self-awareness, prove to your mind that you can do things differently and swap self-criticism for self-respect. And as well as bringing a halt to pointless stress, you’ll find the satisfaction and sense of achievement that come from crossing things off your to-do list trump the rather passive high you get from procrastinating.

If you’re a procrastinator, as I was, it has to be worth a go, don’t you think? Let me know how you get on.

Thank you for reading – I’m glad you made it to the end. If you’ve found this useful, please like the post and restack it so that others can find it too.

Now excuse me while I consciously choose not to scroll through Facebook videos and get this post ready for scheduling instead.

Until next time, take care,

PS - Sometimes I replace the three questions with just one really powerful one:

“What will future me thank me for doing right now?”

PPS - Thank you for reading this free post. Annual paid membership of Something More is currently £70 a year, or £7 a month. For this you get monthly, live, group-coaching sessions (the next one is on Wednesday 27th March) and extra mindset tools in your inbox. For new subscribers the fees will shortly rise to £12 monthly and £80 annually, to better reflect the value of the live support. If you’ve been thinking you’d like to try the coaching sessions and would like to lock in the current price for life, I strongly advise you upgrade now.