Stop Procrastination – Reprogramming Your Mind

The greatest saboteur

For all its intricacy and splendor, the brain sure has this unparalleled knack for sabotaging us and holding us back. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. We’ve all struggled with procrastination, self-doubt, lack of drive or inspiration, and just the mental wrestle of trying to get ourselves to make something great. The mind, the very thing that allows us to create, is also the thing that causes us to NOT create. It’s almost like it’s the result of some kind of cosmic or divine prank.

Our own psychology can be empowering or it can be limiting, it all just ties back to how our inner thought processes have been trained. For example, when we procrastinate, we essentially avoid things that are even a little difficult or uncomfortable and purposefully seek out suitable distractions, even if the thing we’re putting off ought to be highly important to us.

We often take the path of least resistance, whether that’s working on little things that take less effort but leave us less fulfilled or whether it’s shrugging off our creative work entirely and binge-watching Netflix instead. With ice cream. Don’t forget the ice cream. And so, great pieces are left sadly unpainted. Beautiful poetry is left unwritten. Life-changing ideas remain locked away in our minds, gathering mental cobwebs and dust. We throw up our hands in dismay; Surely there must be something deeply wrong with us. All those other people followed their dreams and achieved success, so why not us?

Can you relate to that? I sure can. This was a big part of my struggle for years. Before I started working on Meager Quest, I had a plethora of other ideas I thought were awesome but never followed through on. The remnants of their beginnings still languish, untouched, in forgotten regions of my computer’s hard drive. I know how frustrating this can be. But what if I told you that you can alter your mental processes to make the struggle less of an uphill one? You can! When the mind talks us out of things, it’s coming from a bit of a dark, yet wholly reasonable place. If we can learn through practice and gentle self-correction to see things accurately and with clarity, the brain becomes more the amazing tool it’s meant to be and less of a hinderance.

Benefit vs. Cost

Our repeated decisions to procrastinate and put off our own creativity for later are actually pretty rational if you think about it. When making even small decisions, we weigh the benefits of certain actions against their cost. Choosing whether or not to sit down and work can be a lot like trying to decide whether to buy one product or another. Sure, one of them (chasing our dreams and hustling hard) will fit our needs better but look at that price! It’s easily more than 10 times the cost of this cheaper one. And, we reason with ourselves, all those other features might not be so great anyway. So, between waging the (sometimes actual) war of creativity and vegging out watching Netflix while wiping orange Cheetos dust on the couch, we often settle on the less taxing of the two. The brain may not deal in actual legal tender, but it does have its own currency that is every bit as real and that can be depleted just like money can be.

The currency of the mind

Just as the bank account can run dry of its funds if we’re not careful, so can the brain. The brain, however, deals in the currency of energy; certain kinds of mental work tend to burn up more of it than others. To better understand whether this is truly the case, three researchers (Todd A. Hare, Colin F. Camerer, and Antonio Rangel) gathered together a group of dieters for a study. They laid out before them a variety of foods, all ranging in both nutritional value and deliciousness. They then monitored their brains as the group went about making their decisions as to what types of food they would eat. When the participants made decisions in keeping with the diet they’d personally committed to, a very specific part of the brain lit up on the monitor, showing that energy was being used by the brain to make that decision. There was real work being done and energy, our biological currency, was being used at a faster rate. They noted that this activity happening in the same part of the brain was reduced when participants basically said “screw it, I’m eating the chocolate cake.” By scrapping their diet for a moment, they were quite literally making the less costly decision. Of course, it’s not like one small decision depletes all our mental reserves and leaves us drained. But throughout any given day we make hundreds if not thousands of little decisions. That can quickly become exhausting and the brain attempts to reserve energy wherever it can.

Without even resorting to scientific studies, I think we know all this at an innate, subconscious level. We know that doing actual work that we’ve promised ourselves we would do takes more effort and energy than just going with the flow of what we “feel like doing.” This innate knowledge is why we as humans are what psychology calls “cognitive misers.” This means that subconsciously we value our mental energy very highly and by instinct we try to hoard and cling to it. We’re like Ebenezer Scrooge when it comes to this stuff. We’re only going to expend our finite mental resources on things that are actually compelling to us. The rest is just “humbug.” Bah!

Sometimes we choose the easy way out because we genuinely don’t care much about that thing we’re “supposed” to be doing. In those cases, obviously the energy cost is not worth spending for a result that’s essentially hot garbage. If you’ve found yourself in a rut though where you’re tired of procrastination keeping you away from the awesome things you want to bring to life, it’s probably not the case that you don’t care. You likely do care very much, but something is going on behind the scenes to downplay the benefits while making the costs seem much more astronomical than they really are.

Mental Programming

Each of us has gone through a variety of experiences. We’ve had happy experiences and we’ve also harbored sadness and pain. We’ve all dealt with failures and criticism, some of it harsh and unwarranted. We also internalize lessons learned from watching the failings of those around us. As a result, each of us believes things about ourselves, about our abilities, and about our work that shapes our actions. These beliefs are fed into our minds like an automated computer program. They execute on their own and run through our minds when certain trigger events happen.

If one sits down to edit a video, a “program” may run that says “Nobody is going to watch this. It’ll only get like 10 views like the last one.” If one gets out their paints and brushes a a “program” may run that says “I always mess up my paintings.” Sometimes when I sit facing a blank document to write articles like these I have a thought pop in: “I’m not credible, who would want to read what I think?” Other self limiting mental programs include “No one is going to care,” “It’s too ambitious; I’ll NEVER finish something like this,” “People are going to thing this is really dumb,” “I wish I had time to do this but I’m way too busy,”and “I never finish anything, so why even start?” I’ve personally really struggled with some variation of every one of these, and they are all unequivocally terrible.

WOW. No matter how much we personally care about our own work, is it really so surprising that we find it hard to be motivated to expend effort on it with garbage programming like this? Why would any sane person spend their time, energy, and effort if they deeply believed that they were destined to fail? These programs take something that is incredibly valuable to us and cheapen them. We look at the end result of our hard work through the urine-colored lens of past pains. Suddenly the tremendous benefits of completing our projects start to look like nothing compared to the amount of effort it will take to get there.

If you’ve struggled with this, you’re not at all alone. Blocks like these are just about as common as creativity itself. One of my goals, in addition to finishing Meager Quest, is to help you begin to reprogram your mind to make your creativity flow more easily as I have. My own programming isn’t free of bugs or glitches just yet, but it’s making progress and even that has worked wonders for me already.

The truth will set you free

You can begin changing your psychology right this very minute. Begin elevating the benefits of your creativity so that the energy costs don’t seem like such a bad investment. The end goal is to end up with some new mental programs that are good and positive, but also believable. We need to retrain the mind to see things clearly— to see the costs and benefits of creating art as as they really, truly are. Empty optimism won’t carry you too far, since lies you tell yourself will eventually break down in the more rational regions of your brain. Base your positive thinking on good, solid truths, though, and you’ve got yourself a winning formula. There are plenty of truths about your creativity to go on.

The truth is, working hard to extract the unique material out of your head is part of what you, as a human being, were born to do. We humans are the only species that can truly do this.

The truth is that creating is the ONLY way to become a master of the craft you love. You may feel like you’re not very good yet but if you will create consistently you will look back a year from now and see progress.

The truth is that creating is the only way to become the master of your own course in life.

The truth is that nobody will have the opportunity to fall in love with your work and vision if you don’t bring it forward. You may struggle to find an audience and it may not be a smash hit overnight, but having even one person deeply admire your work is infinitely more fulfilling than zero.

The truth is that a finished project with flaws is of more value than the theoretical “perfect” one that never gets off the ground.

The truth is that you can do it, and that if you don’t know how yet you can learn.

The truth is that even if you only have 15 minutes a day to work, if you use those 15 minutes every day there WILL eventually come a day when the work is done.

As creative people, we have got to replace our negative mental programming with programming that nourishes us with these truths every day as we sit down to create. In the next article, I’ll share with you a specific process I’ve used to do just this. Keep an eye out for that and until next time, stay creative!