Three Strategies to Overcome Procrastination

Living with a pattern of procrastination can be difficult because it is often a silent, invisible, and shameful inner struggle. You may feel that there is a cloud of dread hanging over your head at all times. As the deadline looms, the sense of dread can grow until it becomes too much to bear. You may say to yourself, "This feels awful and I will never do it again!" Only to find yourself back in the cycle of procrastination the next time a deadline comes around. Procrastination can be both draining and costly to our mental health and have significant consequences for our relationships, school, work, and life. As I mentioned in a previous post on cultivating self-discipline, I struggled with severe procrastination through undergrad and into graduate school. What finally broke the cycle for me was not better time management strategies, the newest productivity hack, a fancy planner, will power, or self-control (I had tried them all without success). What helped in the end was understanding that procrastination was the result of unattended emotions, shame, and perfectionism and that addressing those issues resulted in significant behavior changes and freedom from the cycle of procrastination. In this blog post, I want to share with you three strategies that have worked for me and my clients.

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