Procrastination: Why We Stall — the Method’s View

Procrastination is when people put everything off into the long drawer: they want to do something, can’t do it, and start dragging it out a year, two, three. Many people come with this. The method examines the cause step by step: first rule out the physical, then unpack the psychological.

First, Rule Out the Organic

The first main cause is asthenia. A person is tired, works long hours, many loads — simply no strength. They get up in the morning, drink some coffee, and: I don’t want anything, I can’t do anything. Then you have to look: are there disorders, infections, intoxication, is there an organic background, a pathology?

So the very first thing we do is run tests and check whether there’s any pathology. Blood, liver panel, inflammatory tests, thyroid, vitamin deficiency, anemia. We always check sleep: if someone hasn’t slept and hasn’t rested for a long time — the batteries are drained, the body won’t work.

If a person smoked weed or something for a week or two years — their head won’t work. They physically can’t do anything more or less normally, and of course they’ll do everything to put it off. They simply can’t. This is a well-known cause.

What Normal Looks Like

In a normal state a person is busy with something, starts things, thinks things over. You should always look at children for the norm: even in the morning a person finds it interesting — a good outing, going fishing or mushroom-picking, meeting good company. You lie down to sleep and can’t wait for morning — that’s the norm. There are such healthy people, and we were like that as children. But over the years this is often lost.

“Devilish Conditioning”

Real procrastination begins with what I call devilish conditioning. From the moment we arrive, and for many even before, they start breaking us. We don’t want to do something — and we’re forced by brute force. We resist, we’re broken and made to comply. Some more, some less.

Walk into a shopping center and look: a child of two, three, four, intolerance, screaming, queues, heat, the mother on edge. It’s all understandable. But this is how the attitude of “must” gets wired in through force — and later the body sabotages what it “must” do.

Off Your Own Track

Talking yourself into it doesn’t work. What works is that a person needs to be sparked: when they get sparked they have energy, and then you have to bring them onto a track where the work is a pleasure. Because if it’s not a pleasure, the carcass, the body, will sabotage it anyway — procrastination or something else, doesn’t matter, but the problem will be there.

Hard mistakes are hard because the path wasn’t chosen. But if you’ve chosen your own way, your road, then you like it, and you do it. There’s another trap too: when things become good. A person, like a calf, breaks off the chain — and it’s precisely when things are good that people wreak havoc.

The Psychological Child

You can’t make yourself do what needs doing for only one reason — because you’re still a psychological child. When you absolutely give that up, it becomes very simple: there’s no one to rely on, I’ll live by myself. Like Caesar: the legionnaires landed, the ships are burning — either you survive and win here, or you stay to fertilize this ground. Cutting off the retreat removes procrastination.

Practice

1. Rule out the body. Before blaming yourself for laziness — run tests, check sleep and fatigue. A drained battery doesn’t work.
2. Catch the morning. When you get up, track your state. If the day is already loaded onto you — stop, stop, stop. Find your “place of power” to clear the wrong adrenaline and come back to yourself.
3. Don’t ruin the day. If you don’t stop, you’ll spoil the whole day; one day, then another — and life can go off track. Everything should be okay.
4. Check your track. Ask: is this even mine, or an imposed “must”? Get sparked by what’s a pleasure — there’s no sabotage there.
5. Drop the child’s stance. Decide: there’s no one to rely on, I do it myself. Cut off the retreat.