I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of why I don’t always follow through with tasks or projects when I intend to. It’s not the planning. I’m a very good planner. Remember my previous post when I said I’m great at starting things? Planning is the main skill in starting a project. It’s the follow through that seems to evade me.

I work from home and that has lots of advantages. I love it. However, it also requires quite a lot of self discipline which is something I think I lack. Now, don’t get me wrong, I get the job done but not always as quickly or efficiently as I’d like.

This week though, other (read: unimportant) tasks have really drawn me in - tracing my many lines of ancestry, for example. I love it, it’s fascinating! I’m trying to unravel a mystery, piecing together vague clues about somebody who died a hundred years ago and uncovering unexpected connections. The whole process parallels my fascination with crime dramas and documentaries. As a teenager I dreamed of becoming a forensic scientist - not weird at all!

I actually spent an entire day (and well into the night) almost uninterrupted, working my way through old records trying to figure out who great-great-great-grandad’s father was! It’s probably the least important task on my radar right now but I let it swallow up a huge chunk of my time.

This led me to wonder why. Why did I have that much dedication to something so unimportant?

Clearly it wasn’t a lack of energy that diverted me from other tasks. The process was mentally stimulating and required me to utilise all my creativity, deductive reasoning and data organisation skills but here’s the clincher: nobody is going to make any judgement about the outcome. No stress.

At that point a bright nugget of wisdom hit me in the head. I’m reading Mel Robbins’ book, The 5 Second Rule again and learned that procrastination is a self protective response to stress. Your brain is a finely tuned danger detector and when your mental stress load reaches red on the dial your brain says, “stop.”

It’s not always with clanging bells and flashing lights. In fact, it’s usually a very subtle, “I just don’t feel like it,” and when you try to push yourself all the energy seems to drain from your body. Familiar?

The deceptive thing about stress is that it isn’t always about a serious or urgent situation. It’s most often a result of a collection of small “shoulds”. Like a basket of stones, each one is of little consequence but together they make up quite a load.

It’s also not necessarily the task itself that is the issue. Often it’s the perceived emotional consequence of possible outcomes that turn an otherwise innocuous situation into another stone that adds to the load in your basket.

It’s called negativity bias - your brain notices and amplifies dangers and stressors to protect you. Even if there is no real, physical danger the process is the same. It’s a natural process so don’t hate on your brain or beat yourself up about it. Just understand that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for your procrastination.

Do I have a cure? No. It’s not a dysfunction. There isn’t a cure but understanding how to calm the stress response and maybe even work with it is the current stopover in my learning journey. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Collecting stones