Have you ever spent more time avoiding a task than the task itself would probably take?
My husband and I are both guilty of those in very different ways.
You know you need to send the email,
Make the phone call,
Unload the dishwasher,
Open the documents,
Get in the shower.
And you're not confused about what needs to happen.
You're not even necessarily unwilling to do it.
You just can't seem to start.
So you scroll for a while longer,
You do something else,
You think about the thing that you're not doing,
You feel guilty about not doing it.
You promise that you're gonna start in five more minutes and somehow an hour has passed.
One of the most frustrating things about this experience is that from the outside,
And sometimes from the inside,
It can look a lot like a motivation problem.
If I really wanted to do it,
Wouldn't I just do it?
But wanting to do something and being able to initiate it are not the same process.
Getting started requires your brain to move from intention to action,
And there can be a surprising amount happening in that gap.
First,
Your brain has to disengage from whatever you're doing now,
Even if what you're doing currently is nothing.
You're lying on the couch,
You're looking at your phone,
Your brain is engaged in a pretty rewarding activity.
Starting something new requires transition.
Then your brain needs to identify that first step.
Hold the goal in mind,
Estimate the effort involved,
Organize the sequence,
And generate enough activation to begin.
That relies heavily on executive functioning.
There's also a motivation and reward component.
Our brains are influenced not only by whether something's important,
But by how immediate,
Interesting,
Rewarding,
Clear,
Or emotionally comfortable it is.
That's one of the reasons someone can desperately want to file their taxes.
And still struggle to open the tax software.
While somehow finding enough motivation to spend 45 minutes researching a completely unrelated question or cleaning the house.
This can be especially noticeable for ADHD folks,
Where motivation and attention can be more responsive to things like novelty,
Urgency,
Interest,
Or immediate reward.
But again,
This isn't only an ADHD experience.
Everyone's ability to initiate gets worse when we're exhausted,
Overwhelmed,
Stressed,
Depressed,
Anxious,
Or overloaded with decisions.
Or facing a task that feels ambiguous or unpleasant.
And I think that some of those descriptors apply to a lot of us right now.
And here's something else that matters.
Sometimes what we're calling procrastination is actually avoidance of an internal experience.
I know for me,
I'm often so focused on finishing the task and all the steps it will take,
That starting the task can feel totally overwhelming.
But there are a lot of internal experiences that may show up here.
Maybe the test makes you feel incompetent.
Maybe you don't know how to begin.
Maybe you're afraid you'll do it wrong or imperfectly.
Jesse and I both struggle with this one.
Maybe it reminds you of how behind you are,
Or maybe it just feels tedious.
Or maybe the task is so vague that your brain can't locate an entry point.
Work on the project is not an action.
Neither is deal with my finances,
Clean the house,
Get my life together.
Your brain needs something much more concrete.
And when it can't identify that concrete starting point,
The whole task can just register as one big wall.
Then something really painful can happen.
The longer we don't start,
The harder on ourselves we tend to become.
Come on,
Just do it.
Stop being lazy.
You're wasting the whole day.
Why are you like this?
And unfortunately,
Shame isn't always a great activation strategy.
Sometimes it makes the task feel even heavier because now you're not just not starting the task.
You're starting the task while carrying the belief that you should have done it already.
So underneath,
I can't get started,
There may be a need that has nothing to do with more discipline.
You may need clarity.
You made the tasks you may need for that task to become much,
Much smaller.
This often works for me.
You may need less pressure.
You may need help creating momentum.
My husband likes to have me in the room just as a body double.
You may need reassurance that you don't have to finish once you begin.
Or you may need enough self-compassion to approach the whole thing without immediately attacking yourself.
So here's a skill I want you to experiment with.
When you notice yourself saying,
I need to do this.
Don't ask yourself to do the whole thing.
Ask,
What is the smallest visible action that would count as starting?
Not finishing.
Just starting.
If the task is sending an email,
Maybe the initial action is opening the inbox.
If it's paperwork,
Maybe it's putting the form on the table.
I love cleaning the house.
There's so many ways to break that down into small tasks,
Like putting one dish in the dishwasher or cleaning the mirror in your bathroom.
You are deliberately making the starting point almost absurdly small.
And then this part matters.
Give yourself permission for that first step to be enough.
Because sometimes when we resist that first step,
It's because our brain secretly knows that it's actually signing up for 45 minutes more work.
So instead,
Try.
I'm only opening the document and then I can decide what comes next.
Very often momentum takes over,
But sometimes it doesn't.
Both outcomes are okay.
The goal is to make the doorway easy enough to walk through that you're going to actually walk through it.
And if you're sitting there right now being really hard on yourself because you've been avoiding something,
I want you to consider a different question.
Instead of beating herself up or asking,
What's wrong with you?
Try.
What would make the starting point feel more possible?
Because struggling to initiate something doesn't automatically mean that you don't care.
Sometimes we care very much.
Your brain just needs a smaller doorway between thinking about the thing and actually doing it.
Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
I hope that that felt supportive.
I hope to see you in a following video.
Take care.
