When Procrastination is Useful
I’ve just finished reading a new book called The Power Of Adversity (a link to it is at the bottom of this post) and something in it reminded me of a technique for limiting almost all negative thoughts or feelings.
In the book the author presents the idea of setting aside an hour or so each day as your designated time to worry about things. The author’s idea is to deal very tough adversity. Hopefully you are in a good place right now, but that said, doesn’t everybody experience the odd bit of negativity here, and, a bit of beating up on yourself there?
I use to worry a lot… about the past, the future, where I was heading, that I wasn’t achieving enough etc. The first technique I learnt was to go on a ‘negative thought fast’, where for 30 days whenever anything negative enters your mind you instantly banish it. This can work well for some people, but I found a major flaw in it. Whenever you catch yourself with a negative thought you are very likely to beat yourself up (mentally) for thinking it, and what you resist always persists! The more you try and stop yourself having a negative thought the harder you beat yourself up for having one.
So, how to solve this problem? Whenever I want to program a new behaviour into myself I always try and make use of the ways we naturally operate. For example, procrastination is a natural behaviour for most of us, everybody does it to some degree and I know I do it a lot. So I decided why not procrastinate on my negative thinking? I decided to set aside 30 minutes at the start of each lunch hour whereby I was allowed to have all the negative thoughts I wanted, I gave myself permission to really let rip about every aspect of myself and my life.
After trying this, two incredible things happened. Firstly, I found it quite easy to procrastinate on my negative thoughts.
Secondly, when it came around to the time where I allowed myself to have the negative thoughts, I no longer felt like doing it! Honestly, I couldn’t even if I tried… really REALLY hard!
So, the next time you catch yourself in a negative mind-set, don’t beat yourself up about it, just make the decision to procrastinate until the next day at a specific time. Don’t be surprised that when the time comes to dwell on your negative thought it has either vanished or simply become irrelevant. I bet that when you try and force yourself to be negative it’s actually much harder than you might think!
The Power of Adversity: Tough Times Can Make You Stronger, Wiser, and Better
