What is the difference between procrastination and listening to your body?

4th October journal entry:

I feel like I’ve let myself down and can’t shake these guilty feelings. I haven’t exercised and have eaten way too much chocolate. I’ve stopped learning French, reading books and writing blog posts. My motivation to keep improving feels to be slipping and I’m not sure why. 

This happens to me from time to time. Everything is going well, I have my routines and structures to help me do what I want to do: 20-30 minutes of morning exercise (yoga, HIIT, running or walking), daily journaling, time to plan my day, 15 minutes to learn French each evening, 10 minute evening meditation, reading before bed, time for writing at the weekends.

Then, out of seemingly nowhere, it all comes to a grinding halt. I want to sleep rather than exercise in the mornings, I want to binge watch Netflix rather than read or write, I want to scroll aimlessly through social media feeds on my phone rather than spend time learning French. I still have my goals of wanting to be fit and healthy, to help and empower women, to grow my business, to be able to understand French, but the will to actually do the things that I know will help me achieve these things has gone.

Believing all actions are serving us in some way, I asked myself “What is not doing these things giving me?”

My initial response was basically my journal entry again - that I didn’t know and it was just shame and guilt I was being given. I revisited my own work on procrastination and motivation as I know procrastination can be a stress reliever - but by reverting back to very old habits of not doing these things, this was causing me to feel stressed!

Then I explored this a bit more - I was feeling stressed because I knew what I thought I ‘should’ be doing but did I need a break and this procrastination and slipping into bad habits was trying to give that to me? I know my ‘why’s’ which would normally mean I had my motivation, but did I just need some downtime that was removed from this?

Was this a time to focus on reading, resting and recovering, or to escape and not keep moving towards my goals for a while?

For this particular timeframe, it had been a tough year with the pandemic. Nothing felt ‘normal’ and on a good day I felt productive but on a bad day it took a lot to stop me bursting into tears and curling up into a ball. So was this just my body’s way of releasing everything I had pushed down and tried to paper over in the last few months?

I honestly don’t know.

What I did was allowed myself to feel what I was feeling and continue with any and all of the ‘bad’ habits for another week. It was like giving myself a holiday. In my own mind I could justify things as there was no pressure to do the normal routines as I was on holiday!

My friend, and a fellow coach, Kali Harmen, said to me we sometimes need time and space for processing, and this percolation of ideas and thoughts is not procrastination, it is progress. I liked the reframe that sometimes we just need to accept where we are and that some things just take time for us to work through in our own way.

Some may say it was self-sabotage or a self-limiting belief creeping in that stopped me making [visible] progress. They may be right, but this worked for me. It was an extension of the stewing box technique - allowing myself to ‘be’ without any pressure of change. And, like with the stewing box technique, when I stopped fighting against this and feeling bad because of all the ‘should’s’ that I wasn’t doing, within a few days I found I was starting to crave the good habits again and started doing what I knew would be better for me.

As I mentioned, this isn’t an isolated incident where I fall into these slumps - they probably happen at least once a year, but the difference on this occasion was when I stopped fighting it and gave myself permission to do the bad things, I got over it much quicker than previously. 

I share this not as a solution for you, or as someone with ‘the’ answer. I share this as a fellow human being who, even knowing lots of tools and techniques, can still struggle. I am constantly learning whether it is through reading, studying, working with my amazing clients or my own experiences. I am an explorer in my own life and will keep sharing the things that work for me in the hope they either help you, or inspire you to find your own answers.