THE 5 SECOND PROCRASTINATION CURE
How to stop procrastinating so you can live your dreams
I meant to write this blog a long time ago. Do you, like me, find yourself putting off the things that are most important and meaningful to you? Do you feel pangs of disappointment when you realize that a mishmash of inconsequential pastimes, imaginative daydreams, captivating newsfeeds or emotive twitters have — somehow — replaced the most important things you wanted to do to fulfill your dreams?
There is a trick to stop this, and it takes just five seconds. 5 seconds? Well, maybe less. Now it’ll take you way more than 5 seconds to read this, of course, but the technique for dealing with any moment of procrastination takes just a few seconds. This is a powerful technique. It’s not new, though more recently it has backing from the science of the brain.
READING/viewing BEFORE THE EXERCISE
Before I say more, I recommend a 14 minute TED talk by Tim Urban. It’s already been seen by millions. He presents an entertaining look at procrastination and why we do it even when we know it costs us. When you watch this:
You don’t need to do anything for another 14 minutes
It may make you laugh.
It is very forgiving for us procrastinators; there is no judgment at all — nothing heavy or over-teachy.
It tells you the mechanics and the cost of procrastination, a perfect set up for later, as you’ll see.
Tim Urban makes the point that procrastinators often get by because they are eventually forced to take action through other people’s deadlines. But when there is no deadline, procrastination can go on for our whole lives, leading to intense frustration, and the deep dissatisfaction that we never took action to fulfill our dearest dreams.
Procrastination is not doing nothing. No, we procrastinators do do things. We do things that are easy, fun and habitual before — or instead of — doing the things that are most meaningful and useful to us. We make this seemingly strange choice because the things most meaningful to us often involve, at least initially, some discomfort, fear, change, and/or effort.
So our escape activity is emotionally driven: we are driven both by the attraction to the pleasure of the escape activity and by aversion or fear of the action we are putting off - it’s a powerful carrot/stick combo. But not that powerful! Fortunately, we also have the capacity to make rational decisions towards our goals — so long as we can find a way of interrupting the flow of our procrastinating habit. The trick is to use a switch or trigger that interrupts our procrastinating activity enough to be able to change gear and take the action we know we need. Many people have discovered this trick and it has some different iterations.
David Kotick, a neighbor and friend, told me that he discovered the trigger to exit procrastination 15 years ago, when he was 77. He simply says to himself, out aloud - and quite loudly - “1-2-3-GO,” and then takes the action he knows he needs to do. “It works really well,” he said, “I wish I’d found it a little earlier.”
In 2017, Mel Robbins published a book called The Five Second Rule, in which she describes her technique for breaking out of self-destructive behavior patterns through saying, out loud, “5-4-3-2-1” and then moving on to the action needed. Tens of thousands of people have attested to the effectiveness of this method. If you don’t already have a trigger technique that is working for you, I recommend the 5-4-3-2-1 method.
THE 5 SECOND PROCRASTINATION CURE
THE EXERCISE
Here’s what you do to cure procrastination in five seconds or less: you interrupt your thought pattern/ procrastination activity/day-dreaming/ doubting hesitations, etc., with “5-4-3-2-1” spoken out loud, and then move to the activity you need to do without thinking. The more you build this habit, the easier it will become!
WHY IT WORKS
Procrastination is doing what is pleasant in the moment before what is most meaningful in our life. When we procrastinate, it’s not that we don’t know what to do. We usually know exactly what we should do, but we are somehow captivated by our escape activity. The ease of the escape activity, combined with the reluctance/discomfort/dread of doing what we know we need to do, creates an emotionally sealed cocoon of avoidance! The 5-4-3-2-1 is, effectively, a switch or trigger that breaks open the emotional cocoon for long enough to exit and begin the action we know we need.
Though Mel Robbins discovered what she named the five-second rule herself, it has been used in schools, in barracks, and in hypnotherapists’ offices for many decades. In schools, a 5-4-3-2-1 can be great for bringing a rowdy group of children to attention and focus. And that’s pretty similar to the effect it has on us, bringing rowdy groups of mental distractions — which play in our minds like excited kids— to one point of focus. In hypnosis and relaxation techniques, the 5-4-3-2-1 is a tried and tested way to bring people into an altered mental state, measurable on an electroencephalograph (EEG) by the increased presence of slower alpha waves. In this altered mental state, the client is more open to change.
The 5-4-3-2-1 arrests our current thought processes. It is a basic mental rule that you cannot stop thinking something by telling yourself to stop thinking about it. (Try not thinking about a yellow giraffe, for example.) But you can replace your thought with something else. This is what the 5-4-3-2-1 does. It creates an opening by replacing your habitual mental activity with an innocuous thought which is, logically, leading you toward zero.
Replacement of thoughts (as opposed to trying to stop thoughts) has a heritage of thousands of years in the ancient wisdom techniques for settling the distractions of the mind. From the scientific point of view, the 5-4-3-2-1 method not only interrupts the prior pattern of avoidance (patterns that are energized in the emotional limbic circuits of the brain), it also requires the thinking of the pre-frontal cortex, the seat of higher (or at least less emotive) reasoning. And, in addition, the 5-4-3-2-1 becomes a starting ritual for our new behavior. Starting rituals can be immensely helpful during the hardest part of changing to a new activity — starting!
I have personally experienced all the techniques that I recommend, and I full-heartedly recommend this one.