You're trying to use self-control to break bad habits and stop procrastinating. It’s not working and it's not going to work. Here’s why and what’ll get you to actually make changes.
TL;DR: get the jist by scanning through the bolded parts.
You have a meeting with a supervisor. Could be for work, grad school, whatever. A little update on what you’ve been doing for the last few weeks.
On the surface it goes okay.
Sure, you didn’t finish Project X as intended, but you made some progress here and there. You both agree that, overall, you’re moving forward.
You leave the office. Once the door closes, you let out a sigh of relief.
You pulled it off.
You got way with your white-lies, omissions, and quasi-deceptions. You don’t feel good about it, but it’s done. You’re in the clear… for now at least.
The truth?
Well, the truth is you did almost nothing since you last met. Before the meeting, you crammed in an hour to prepare in a fit of anxiety and panic. You read the abstracts of a few articles. You copy / pasted old reports and spreadsheets and changed a few things so you’d have something to show.
The truth is you wasted your time. You procrastinated hard, despite showing up each day determined to get work done; despite the crippling anxiety of getting exposed as a liar and fraud; despite the looming consequences of getting fired or expelled.
Noone can know the truth, least of which your supervisor.
You b-line it back to your office space.
Without a moment’s hesitation, you’re on Reddit. Then YouTube, TikTok… fast food… doesn’t matter.
Anything. Anything to distract the anxious mind. Ease the guilt. Escape reality.
This sort of paradoxical behavior—where you’re physically compelled to reach for vices, despite knowing painfully well that the actual “cure” for all that’s distressing you is to just do the effing work—makes perfect sense once you understand its root cause.
It’s a form of self-harm. A self-punishing behavior so engrained into habit (trigger à impulse action), that it’s hard to perceive, let alone control.
The origin of this evaded me until it was neatly articulated by Mel Robbins in a podcast. Now it all makes perfect sense, to the point where it’s clear what I need to do.
The fundamental flaw in human design is that when something happens to you as a kid, you don’t have the life experience, or support system to be able to process what’s happening. You don’t say, “what’s wrong with these bullies, or what’s wrong with my dad, or what’s wrong with this situation”.
You say “what’s wrong with me”. We aim it back at ourselves.
And then this starts to build as a thinking pattern, that there must be something wrong with me. You aim everything that’s happening out there, back at yourself.
As kids we don’t get the whole story.
We don’t understand—we couldn’t understand—why dad drinks, or why mom is critical, or why we didn’t get Christmas gifts that year, or why we get teased and bullied—so we work with the data we have, us in our tiny bubble, creating a mental model of the world that’s as simplified and distorted as our finger paintings.
Given the unexplained chaos we experienced as kids, and the fact that we are at the center of our world model, we come to the only possible conclusion: if there’s a problem, it must be us that’s the cause of it.
This narrative gets reinforced over the years through confirmation bias. Something bad happens—to which we don’t have close to the whole story—and our mind says "there you go, I told you, it’s all my fault".
Problem is, we evolved to ruminate on threats. But when we see ourselves as the threat, it only builds and builds since we can’t outrun ourselves.
At some point though, we stumble on something wonderful and unexpected: a vice. We find an escape; a magical way out of our threatening reality, if only for a little while.
Back then this coping mechanism was entirely understandable, but now the vice has transformed into its own little devil that contributes to much of your stresses.
And stress is painful.
So in a twisted way, your procrastination is now a form a self-harm. It’s a way to punish yourself—to attack the thing you subconsciously believe is a threat.
This is where your “lack of discipline” comes from. This is why you procrastinate to no end, despite the escalating anxiety of the consequences.
The pain of procrastination is a feature of your actions, not a bug. Exercising “self-control” would go against your very survival.
Your problem is thus fundamentally your distorted view of the world, where you are the threat.
It’s not a lack of self-control. It’s not apathy, or anxiety, or depression. Those are symptoms. Those are effects of the chronic stress from being around a threat you can’t defeat or out-run.
So the solution is, naturally, to change your belief. To update your world view, which through years of stubborn confirmation bias, is caked over with layers of assumptions, misinterpretation of life events and exaggerations.
This, in my experience, is what a good therapist will focus on. You come in with a laundry list of beliefs and views of the world, and the therapist proceeds to gently dismantle them while replacing them with actual truths.
Beyond that—and what many therapists will also point you towards—is the practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness can do two things. First, it can serve as a much-needed wedge between the stimulus (feeling guilt and panic from deceiving your supervisor) and your automatic reflex (binge on Reddit in a fit of self-destruction).
By creating that space, you can exercise your freedom to choose how to respond in the best way (go for a walk, allow your nerves to ease, make a plan of action to get a few things done) rather than go down a habitual and irrational rabbit-hole of a binge.
You can also see mindfulness as the act of seeking the unblemished and unbiased truth about the world and your current circumstances.
Mindfulness is taking a moment to observe your inner space and immediate environment to ask, what, right now, is wrong exactly? what is missing? what am I lacking?
Maybe you’ll observe stress because of all that procrastination. Maybe you’ll “see” the feelings of regret, sadness or resentment towards yourself. Maybe you’ll hear the mean and critical self-talk you’ve gotten used to and take as gospel.
But those are reactions to imagined problems of the future and the past. They stem from stories. Distorted and biased fictions. A flawed mental model created by a lost and naïve 6-year-old.
Right now, with a roof over your head, with your basic needs met, there is nothing fundamentally wrong. Not with your circumstances, not with you. Nothing is missing. There is no threat.
If you continue to just sit with your feelings, while also observing that, in this thin slice of the present moment, nothing is in fact wrong, there is no threat, they will dissipate.
If you listen to your hateful and hurtful self-talk, while also witnessing that it’s actually full of sh*t, you’ll finally be able to shrug if off as the juvenile ramblings of a confused and scared child.
The truth is, you aren’t the problem. You never were.
The more you do this. The more you take moments to observe firsthand how the world actually is, live and unfiltered, the more your model of the world gets updated.
And when you update your model, you'll find yourself not needing to attack a threat that isn’t actually there.
That's how you end your bad habits.
And there’s a bonus too.
When you discover that nothing is in fact “wrong” or “bad” or “missing” with you and your circumstances—when you find yourself accepting reality exactly as it is—a funny thing happens.
You get a fresh dose of motivation.
It’s a paradox.
I’ve written about this in another post on the subreddit r/getdisciplined, but motivation to improve things only happens when you come to accept reality exactly as it is.
Pressure, stress, self-blame, negative self-talk doesn’t lead to motivation—they lead to compulsions. To vices.
Self-love, compassion and acceptance leads to motivation. Because when you love something, you want what’s best for it. You get motivated to work to make sure “best” happens.
I invite you to discover all this for yourself.
-Simon ㋛
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