i fixed my chronic procrastination in 1 evening
and it had nothing to do with willpower, discipline, or routine
I have a really hard time getting things done.
My life has been completely cyclical for as long as I can remember. I’d relax, procrastinate, and generally screw around until the pressure of some deadline hits, and then feed off the pressure to enter into a manufactured artificial flow state to scrap something together. There have been times when this has led to dazzling and spectacular results for me, and I’ve thought myself a real optimization expert and general all-around genius, maximizing the ratio of output to effort better than anyone else probably ever. Other times, it’s been disastrous, and I end up having to explain to my professor why my group mates exiled me from the project. (They finished the whole thing in class [which I obviously skipped, awful use of time] well ahead of the due date and didn’t even TELL ME! The audacity! I was anticipating at least two more weeks before I had to start to care, let alone start to work.)
Generally, though, I've been able to get away with this for quite some time.
It’s not that I try to procrastinate. It’s not even intentional! It’s just that I simply cannot summon the effort to work on things unless there’s a literal fire burning under my ass and I feel an impending sense of doom.
I think I’m an addicted junkie.
I relish the rush that I get from time pressure. Each episode is a challenge, a cosmic dare, where I once again get the opportunity to showcase my worth, my intellect, and my heroism. (Yes, the constraints are fully self-imposed, and yes, I’m the only witness, but so what? The rush remains, and that’s all that is real.)
I delight in the delicious tension between my fear of having pushed it too far and my determination to find a way through, and I savor the orgasmic release afterward, engorging myself on every chemical propagating the validation of my own hubris, my intellect, my cleverness.
But the most delectable part is the procrastination itself. There is an undeniable masochistic pleasure in doing things I know are not aligned with my long-term self-interest even if the things aren’t even enjoyable themselves. Trust me, you haven’t lived if you haven’t binge-watched a shitty TV show late into the AMs with a critical day ahead. You haven’t tasted heaven until you’ve engorged yourself on undercooked pizza rolls and egregiously spicy microwave ramen that will undoubtedly taste awful (if it has a taste at all) and wreck your sleep and digestive system. The body suffers, but the mind rejoices.
School and college at least gave me a routine fix of arbitrary deadlines that let me play this titillating game with myself. I got the freedom to experience constant highs, and if I pushed it too far and got myself into trouble, well, oops. It’s not that serious.
I don’t have externally imposed deadlines anymore. This presents a problem since the only way I’ve done incredible things in the past, well anything really, is with the pressure of an external deadline taunting me.
(I guess I have work, but I can’t really play this game with work. Not to say that I haven’t tried or that the desire doesn’t exist. I constantly feel the presence of that insatiable hunger, the magnetic pull to once again play the game and taste the rush. The thing is, I actually like my job and the people I work with. I can’t burn through it and the relationships I’ve built like I’ve burned through everything else in my life up to this point. And don’t try to tell me I can set deadlines for myself. Those are about as real as the tooth fairy and Mickey Mouse.)
Anyway, as I’ve attempted to make a more genuine effort to become a real and serious person who does stuff, it’s becoming clear that I need to learn to do stuff outside the context of this strange and maniacal game that I’ve built for myself.
At the start of this year, I had a wonderful period of mental acuity. I created several projects for myself, spanning work, entrepreneurial ventures, skill development, and more. I was really excited, knowing that these projects were not only real but aligned with areas that genuinely bring me joy and will bring me closer to the full expression of myself. These were the best internal, intrinsically created projects that I’d ever created for myself up to this point, and I knew I possessed the will, time, and intention to see these projects to completion.
Then something really funny and unintelligible happened. I noticed mental resistance and body tension every time I started to consider the projects. Frankly, I was extremely pissed off; I couldn’t understand where this resistance was coming from since I knew that these were all things I really wanted to do.
Luckily, I’d picked up a few handy dandy tools recently to help me understand and dismantle the resistance. So, instead of spiraling, I got to work.
The first thing I learned to do is to view the resistance and tension as information and not as obstacles. They are a “locally optimal” response that my body engineered to protect me from something I view as even worse.
To understand the purpose of my resistance, I asked myself the following question:
“What bad thing will happen if this resistance disappears?”
In other words, I asked myself what bad thing would happen if the pressure I felt towards things I wanted to do disappeared, and then waited for an answer. I got one almost before I finished asking the question.
I instantly felt a visceral sensation of fear and a thought that said “I’ll not be able to get anything done if I don’t feel pressure that constantly compels me to work on the things themselves.”
Instant lightbulb moment.
My issue wasn’t a procrastination issue, but it was a self-trust issue. I had a foundational, latent, and suppressed belief that absent pressure, I’d just binge-watch, drink, and generally do anything but the things I wanted to do. This belief was reinforced by basically all the experiences I had and the things that had been communicated to me. So my body took that as a given and started engineering resistance to try to propel me to act, but this was a really poor strategy since it sapped much of my energy and made me hate the things I was doing.
The second I repeated that to myself, the resistance literally vanished. I had finally consciously received the information that the resistance was trying to communicate; its purpose was served, and it had no further reason to be there. So it disappeared, and I felt an expansive, freeing, wonderful space inside my body. I laughed, looked myself in the mirror, and told myself:
“O, ye of little belief! We’re not a child anymore; we’ve grown, matured (a bit), and learned a lot about the world and even more about ourselves. The things we’re doing are things we’ve chosen of our own free will, and they’re things that we would freely choose to do even if we had the option to do anything at all with no money or status on the line. I trust myself to make better choices than I have in the past.”
I also noticed something more subtle happening inside me. Even though things had seemed like exploratory play initially, the second I made a mental commitment to explore something more intentionally, there was a built-in process that kickstarted in my brain instrumentalized the activity, essentially sapping the play and joy from it and turning it into something I had to plan for and schedule. And I hate planning and scheduling. It was as if enjoying something freely and working towards something were mutually exclusive in my head. As soon as I realized that, it wasn’t too difficult to remove it. “Oh, thanks buddy for your service and for looking out for me and trying to help me make progress. I can figure it out myself now, and this built-in strategy is really not helping me anymore.”
So now, whenever I’m experiencing any kind of block, I just remind myself that I trust my excitement, my skills, and my genuine interest. I remind myself that I love what I’m doing. I remind myself that I really do want to continue learning and exploring.
And it’s easier than ever for me to do things I want to. I’ve never felt more full of energy and possibility.
My main issue with much of the “get shit done” contemporary discourse is that it takes the existence of internal resistance to do things as a given instead of as a signal.
“You’re having trouble getting out of bed? Fuck you, you’re undisciplined and lack willpower. Go get out of bed anyways and take a cold shower, and then affirm that you’re the kind of person that pushes through it.”
“You’re having trouble finishing your tasks? Your issue is strategy and tactics. Throw money at the problem, buy my planner, and use my task completion system. Build habits!”
“You’re having trouble getting excited about what you’re doing? Time to toss it away and start anew. Instead of understanding the resistance, we’re going to run away because what is right for you will NEVER make you feel this way!”
All of these lies are dangerously seductive. I’ve spent years trying all of these approaches. They’ll all make you feel good in the immediate short term because change helps you snap out of established patterns. But if you try to make it a habit, all of a sudden the element of change is gone, and the familiar resistance returns. This leaves you with two options:
1. Keep changing things — this will always fail to bring you any sense of happiness or satisfaction because your only chance of finding meaning in anything is by **staying, committing, and building**. This applies to pretty much everything - careers, projects, relationships, etc. If you don’t stay, you’ll always feel like a floating nomad with an ethereal and insubstantial existence. Oh, and this all but guarantees that you won’t create anything, which was your whole purpose of changing things in the first place.
2. Accept that you’re the problem — for many people, this is a tragic and damning conclusion. They accept who they are, they accept the resistance, and they stop trying, turtling in and settling with grasp whatever fleeting moments of satisfaction that they can find.
There’s a third option! Instead of running away from the resistance or identifying yourself with the resistance, you can accept that you are a person with a problem, and working with the resistance is your pathway to finding the solution. The problem is never the object, the strategy, or the tactics; it is your relationship to the things you wish to do or create. Once you fix your relationship and understand the resistance, you’ll typically find that the specific object, strategy, and tactics don’t really matter and you’ll naturally discover the rhythm and routines that work for you.
Granted, there’s a lot of other work I did that helped set the foundation for this seemingly instantaneous transformation.
1. Meditation — it’s really hard to listen to messages from your body and understand how you’re feeling if there’s a constant barrage of noise in your mind. I’m not even close to eliminating the noise, but my progress has certainly made things easier.
2. Focusing — this is a technique that most people employ without realizing it, but I’m going to flag it here because I didn’t realize how well-documented and researched it was. Essentially, you tell yourself something, and then “feel” the response from your body. Based on your body’s response, you progressively iterate what you tell yourself until you fully understand how you actually feel / what you believe about something. In my case, once I figured out that I didn’t trust myself, I progressively iterated with a variety of explanations for why I didn’t trust myself until I found one that *felt* right and caused the resistance to vanish, which told me I’d uncovered a truth about myself and my feelings.
3. Therapy/coaching — it turns out that a prerequisite to working through my feelings and dismantling my conditioned responses is accepting that I have feelings and learning to feel them. A couple of conversations were enough to help me arrive at the surprising realization that I don’t just exist to collect achievements like trophies and please others and that getting in touch with my felt sensations and my body is the most important step I can take.
4. Creating better goals — I have worked really, really hard the last few years to loosen the gripping allure that money and status have on my psyche, and I’ve finally stumbled upon things that truly do feel intrinsically exciting for me. The problem finally isn’t “What should I do?” but “How do I do what I want to do?” which, in my experience, is a better problem to have and an easier problem to solve.
I have a final few miscellaneous notes for people interested in exploring exactly what happened.
The mechanism
Why specifically did understanding the thought or belief behind my conditioned behavior (my resistance + creation of pressure) lead to a release of tension? This theory of vasocomputation argues that the body’s mechanism for “storing” conditioned beliefs is through interactions between blood vessels and neurons. Here’s one aspect of the theory that seems particularly relevant:
Latched Hyperprior Hypothesis (LHH): if a vascular contraction is held long enough, it will engage the latch-bridge mechanism common to smooth muscle cells. This will durably ‘freeze’ the nearby circuit, isolating it from conscious experience and global updating and leading to a much-reduced dynamical repertoire; essentially creating a durable commitment to a specific hyperprior. The local vasculature will unlatch once the prediction the latch corresponds to is resolved, restoring the ability of the nearby neural networks to support a larger superposition of possibilities.
Crazy! It intuitively makes a lot of sense to me; latent / suppressed beliefs literally create tension. There is so much literature on the connection between the psyche and physical ailments, and this theory provides the interface. I think this is also why physical exercises like yoga, breath work, or other trauma-release exercises actually make a difference. There is so much more for me to learn here though.
My internal dialogue with myself
“Talking” to myself was a central portion of the work. The conceptual model that establishes this as a meaningful practice is based on a multi-agent model of the mind. Essentially, your conscious mind acts like the chairman of a board, and there are many subagents in your mind that are in charge of various sub-processes.
Many people have different multi-agent models of the mind representing the different categories of subagents and their relationship to the conscious agent (Internal Family Systems is one popular example). I don’t think it matters too much about the validity of a certain one or whether the mind truly is a multi-agent model; I think there is more than enough evidence that it is a good enough model or abstraction and the practices are useful enough that most people will find some benefit from engaging with it openly. That certainly was the case for me.
The brain as a prediction engine
The multi-agent models described briefly above are based on the premise that the brain is a prediction-making engine that recommends actions that are designed to keep you safe. “Safe” is an ambiguous term that means different things to different people based on their experiences, and growing more healthy psychologically typically means identifying poor predictions you’re making and updating them with more mature beliefs. In this model of the brain, most psychological disorders can be traced back to different forms of prediction errors. This is something I’m actively researching; the prevailing theory appears to be one called active inference.
Conflating resistance with personality
I think many people mistakenly identify with their resistance to certain things and call it personality. For example, people say “I’m not the type of person that does X”. That’s not a real personality trait. That’s the rationalization of a resistance or suppressed latent belief. Every piece of resistance is an opportunity to learn more about what terrifies you or what strange predictions you’ve built your worldview on without realizing it. Life is better when you engage with it instead of identifying with it.
Further reading:
incredible post as always Dhruv. So true, all success is bottlenecked by self-trust. People who believe their own words are able to stick to internally imposed deadlines and able to execute, while the rest of us procrastinators keep starting and restarting the same projects </3 next time I feel resistance I'll just remind myself that I CAN do this and that I WANT to do it :)
Reminds me of Existential Kink. I have a similar issue;never got anything in high school done before the last minute, then failed college cause you can't do that at the last minute. Going to think about these.