 Hey there, my name is Dr. David Maloney, and I'm a licensed psychotherapist and psychologist, and if you would like to work with me, you can do so by contacting me in the link below. I offer one-to-one sessions on things like depression, anxiety, life purpose, also self-sabotage, and the reasons why people are not happy in order to help people be more happy. I don't focus on happiness, I focus on removing unhappiness. But I won't get into that too much. Feel free to contact me if you would like to talk one-to-one, or you can visit my website, Dr. David Maloney.com, where I have a series of online videos for subscribers, and you can browse through them and see if you're interested. They're very very affordable. So hopefully I'll see you there, and let's dive into the video. Okay guys, question on procrastination, as you can see from the title, the thumbnail of today's video. This is a question from a viewer. If you would like to send me a question, you can visit my website, and there is a link there that you can just send me a question, and I will make a video for you based on your question. The idea behind all these videos, of course, is that your question will probably relate to a lot of people. So it'll help other people based on the issue you're having. But this one today is about procrastination, okay? Now of course, this is a person who is suffering with procrastination in their academic work, it's a student, but the principles here apply to how procrastination manifests and plays out in all the areas of life. It's the same dynamic that happens, no matter what the thing you're trying to achieve, the goal you're trying to achieve. So I've just actually recently made a video course on my website. You can check it out. It's on procrastination. You can access it for four euros and fifty cents. I like a lot of these other online courses that costs a lot more than that. It's a 14-part video, four hours of content plus I make bonus videos for subscribers. So check that out if you're interested. But let's dive into this question. Procrastination is ruining my life. So my problem with procrastination has been getting worse for the past few years. It got way worse when I moved out from home to college. Well, yes, that's what happens because when we're at home or we're in school, we have this extrinsic motivation, right? People telling us what to do, where to be, where to go, how much to do. When we move out, we have to become all of a sudden intrinsically motivated. So we make the decisions based on what weed term is the best for us. That's very tricky because we're not taught that in school, right? We have to figure that out as we go along and that's why college students in particular have some of the biggest issues with procrastination. That was when I had the biggest problems with this issue in my life. Okay, so let's keep going. If I had some important work that's due, I literally sit around at home spending my time online or watching movies. The sense of panic gradually starts to set in and gets worse and worse with every passing hour. So at the beginning of the evening, it's not so bad, but as you continually procrastinate, this sense, these feelings of well, I know exactly what the feeling is. The feeling is guilt. Okay, that's what it is. It doesn't say it here, but that's what it is. That sense of guilt gets worse and worse as you go on through the evening. This is actually torture. Okay, this is what this is. It's a indecision that's in our mind. Will I want to? And we keep going on for hours and hours. Yes, I should, but I don't want to blah, blah, blah. It keeps going on and on and it gets worse and worse the closer you get to the deadline. If the assignment is not due the next day, so I have some time, I keep telling myself that it's fine. I'll start doing it tomorrow. Exactly. Okay, I'll start doing it tomorrow. So I'll do it later is the, you know, what's the word? The catchphrase. That's the catchphrase of the procrastinator. I can always do it later, right? What's actually happening there is that say let's, for instance, this person is a student. What is a student's biggest fear in the world? Do you know what it is? Well, it's not failing. Okay, it's not that they're not going to get great grades. Their biggest fear a student has and anyone in life who has a goal is that they will not do what is required to achieve it. They won't put in the effort. Think about it, right? Let's say you're procrastinating on something and I could wave a magic wand and that meant that from this day forward you will definitely put in the time that's required to achieve success in that goal. How would you feel? It's 100% guaranteed now that you're going to do it. You would feel 10 times better, right? That's because your big fear is that you're not going to do what's required. Because of that fear and we're not taking action, that fear starts to play up and we get anxious, right? And we use procrastination. I can do it later as a way to alleviate that building anxiety. That's what procrastination is, okay? It's a defense mechanism. It's a way for us to feel good because we're not taking action towards our goals. That's part of it, right? Okay, so you might think that I get my study done by cramming at the last minute. This is only half true. Sure, I do spend some time, often well past midnight, cramming, but I only get a fraction of the work completed that I really need to do. Yeah, okay. The fact that you're still cramming past midnight is a red flag for procrastination, obviously, right? I used to do this myself. One of the things you learn in my course on procrastination is that one of the first things you have to start doing is selecting an end time for when work finishes, okay? If not, this indecision continually goes on and on and on. So what I would suggest to you is still say at 6pm, you will say to yourself, okay, by 10pm, under no circumstances am I allowed to work anymore after that point. That would be one thing you could do straight away from a practical point of view. That's one thing you could do. So you're going to get a fraction of the work completed that I really need to. This cramming is truly an awful experience. It's literally a feeling like my world is coming to an end. It feels like I'm going to face an MMA fighter the next day and have done no training. The feelings of regret and self-loathing are so intense and painful I actually feel like I could cry. Now you might think to yourself that that's overstating the problem or the experience. I guarantee you that is not overstating what this person is going through. You know, I'm a therapist and a lot of people I work with have things like depression or anxiety or even suicidal ideation or self-harm or whatever it is. And when I tell people one of the areas I'm most interested in is procrastination. They think that's interesting. They don't quite realize why I'm so focused on procrastination. Well, the reason is this. The amount of emotional pain people are going through because of this procrastination problem is huge. It is happening to so many people in their lives and the solution to this is very, very easily fixed. I used to be the worst procrastinator in the world until I figured out why am I doing this to myself? It took me a while. It took me doing some research. Now, this is all I focus on now. It's one of the main issues that I focus on now because I'm so passionate about it. And I know what it feels like to be an ex-procrastinator, but it is a very intense feeling when it's happening. A lot of guilt, a lot of self-loathing, as you say there, and intense feelings of guilt. It's actually torture. That's what's going on, right? You're torturing yourself with this goal of academic work. Why? That's the question. So let's just finish the question here. It says, as you can imagine, my marks are not good. Even if I do scrape by, that is all it is. I know it's not what I'm capable of achieving. I have no idea why I keep doing this, but it needs to stop. I need to know how to stop procrastinating. Okay, so why do people procrastinate? My whole theory on it is a little bit different. My theory about procrastination fundamentally is that it's down to guilt. It's not a guilt because you fail to follow through with your goal, and then you feel guilty. That's not it. Although that's how it seems to be. The truth is that you feel guilty about yourself to begin with. Sorry if I touched my mic. You feel guilty to begin with. And because you don't feel good about yourself, you start to disrespect yourself. You start to use the things in your life, any goal you have, academic goal or anything else, as a way to prove to yourself how unworthy you are or how lazy you are or how terrible you are. It's a way to perpetuate that sense of guilt that was there to begin with. The solution to the problem is basically doing some inner work on yourself, looking at your beliefs, and changing your story, changing how you talk to yourself. This thing about going through your entire evening, well, I won't die. I can do it later. Well, let's see. That's indecision, and it's an indecision between two parts of your mind. One of them is called the lazy mind, I call it, which is, I don't want to do it. I can do it later. Don't feel like doing it. The other part of your mind is the posse mind. So that's do it now. What are you thinking? We don't have time for this, etc. And you're stuck in the middle of those two voices. Neither of those two voices, believe it or not, are helpful. Most people think the posse voice is more helpful, but it isn't. Trust me, it isn't. So you're in the middle of that. And what you need to do is start using things like mindfulness techniques and changing your story, cognitive therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, just to change your story is simply all I'm saying, right? Change your language. And what you're going to do is, because you're no longer listening to these two voices, you get in touch with a part of your mind that I call your compassionate mind, which transcends both of those two lower voices. So you start to talk to yourself in an encouraging way, giving yourself support, giving yourself what you need. Procrastinators have no fun in life. Even if you're sitting there doing fun things, you're watching TV, you're watching movies, you're not actually enjoying them. They're ruined by a sense of guilt that's always in the back of your mind as you're doing it, right? What I would suggest is, take my course. It's €4.50 online. It's 14 videos. I outline exactly how to solve this. But if you don't want to do that, this is what you do. Start to change your language. Start to change your story about yourself. And start to put in place, practically speaking, limits on the amount of work you're allowed to do every day. And guarantee yourself fun. You will start to procrastinate because you will feel that your fun is being threatened in life. I'm giving you very brief advice here on this. But you need to start sitting aside consciously, time for when you will relax, and under no circumstances are you allowed to do any work in that time. And then you will realise there's a window of opportunity left for me in which I can do my academic work. Take out all the guesswork. Now, there's one other piece of advice in the course. It's quite a big piece of advice, and I'm not going to get into it here. Not because I don't want to give it to you, but because there's too much to do with it. I might talk about it in another video. It's about what happens if you don't follow through. There has to be consequences to that. But for now, just change the story. You talk a lot about these feelings of self-loathing. Even if you do become productive, those feelings of self-loathing are still going to be there. Go to work on those. Go to work on those right now. Start to forgive yourself for procrastinating. You're a human being. It happens to a lot of people. Change your story. That's the first thing you can do. I'll leave it there for now. Great question. I have a few other questions on procrastination. I'm going to get to it soon. I'm not going to procrastinate. I hope you enjoyed this video. Maybe like it and subscribe. Do all those things. It helps me reach more people. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you in the next one.