Procrastination Cycles and Mental Health

Our ability to manage logistics can often be overlooked when we think of our mental health. But logistics (planning, doing regular, boring life tasks like cleaning, paying the bills, etc) are an important factor for our stress and anxiety levels. For many people, trying to plan or white-knuckle their way out of frustration with managing their day-to-day life doesn't work. 

Maybe this is familiar:

Your kitchen is wildly messy → tired and overwhelmed, you decide not to do it now → you feel a teeeeensy bit better, because you’ve decided not to deal with the thing. → your kitchen is worse now, and because of that, your feeling of overwhelm has also gotten worse. Now, more than ever, you really (really, really) don’t want to clean the kitchen, because it would take a solid 2 hours to clean it properly. At some point, you will likely reach a point where you will end up cleaning things, or someone else you live with may. And then this whole cycle can start again. 

On the outside, this situation can look like laziness. But if we press in further, what’s often happening is a difficulty coping with that initial discomfort. For many people, it’s difficult to start a task despite the overwhelm, and often some all-or-nothing thinking gets thrown in there too. 

Chances are that some of the pile-up happened because of thoughts like “I don’t have time to clean up after the whole meal right now, so I won’t do any of it”, or “I don’t have the energy to spend an hour cleaning up, I’ll have to do this tomorrow”. These types of thoughts are all-or-nothing thinking, which often coaxes us into unhelpful extremes. Most likely, you actually CAN do just one dish right now. Or maybe you can clear one counter. Or set a timer for 3 minutes and get done as much as you can in that time-you get the idea. After that, you can keep going-or you can choose to stop. But all-or-nothing thinking will tell you that it’s either an entire 60 minutes when you’re already tired from your day, or you don’t do any of it; so tomorrow things are looking worse, and that hour has increased to an hour and a half. In reality, there’s a lot of options between nothing and everything. So set a ridiculously easy goal for the kitchen-one dish. One countertop area. One pan. I mean, it’s hard to talk yourself out of one dish, right? You can do that. You can clean the kitchen just one dish at a time.