Procrastination solved:

Stage 1: Stabilizing motivation and energy


In less than 24 hours you will feel more motivation or energy without doing anything. Let’s talk about motivation first.

How motivated you feel mainly depends on one chemical in your brain: Dopamine. The more dopamine you have, the more motivated and excited for action you feel. The less dopamine you have the more depressed (lazy) you feel.

Human beings have a baseline level of dopamine, meaning we always have some dopamine. Dopamine is crucial for any action and with that for our survival. So when the dopamine level is low, you feel depressed and unmotivated, which of course is a problem as it makes you procrastinate on any action.

Apart from having a very rare physiological condition, low dopamine situation happens for one simple reason: dopamine crash which happens after a rapid spike (rise) in dopamine.
Rapid spike of dopamine happens when you indulge in high pleasure activity which also gives you immediate reward. Such activities are for example playing video games, scrolling social media, eating junk food, watching pornography and so on. The more instant and the more pleasurable “quick fix” is, the deeper down your dopamine (motivation) will crash.

Don’t worry, I will not tell you to get rid of all the fun stuff in your life. You don’t have to sacrifice anything!

When you are in low dopamine phase, you feel terrible, not feeling like doing anything productive. The only way to quickly and efficiently improve your mood is to get another quick and strong fix. This means you spend all your hours in a day on so called dopamine binge. You are either high from the quick fix, or low desperate for another one. It is the same pattern we can notice with drug addicts. The only difference is, drugs are designed to make dopamine highs even higher and lows even lower.

The fact is that productive work also rises your dopamine, but rise of motivation is not that potent when you are doing productive work. Do you remember the last time you were able to finish something productive and felt like you want to do some more productive stuff? This happens because productive work naturally rises level of dopamine. The only problem is that if you are currently in dopamine crash state, productive work will not improve your mood enough, so you will rather choose more instant and potent option like playing games.

On the other hand, if your dopamine (motivation) was on a healthy, natural baseline, you would feel neutral (not depressed or lethargic). Good news for you as a human is that baseline level of dopamine (motivaiton) is enough for you to truly feel like doing something productive.

Once you are able to come close to your natural dopamine baseline, you will feel motivated for doing basic productive tasks like cleaning. Completing these tasks will rise your dopamine (motivation) even higher, which will make you truly feel like doing even more challenging tasks.

So in the next segment, I will show you a ridiculously effortless way of getting back your motivation and energy.

When you feel like you are in bad mood and feel like you must urgently play game, watch Netflix or eat junk food, choose an option that is 5% less fun than the one you would normally choose.

In practice this means that instead of putting 10 grams of sugar in your coffee, you put in 9.5 grams. Instead of watching your favourite tv show, you watch something still fun but slightly less fun than your favourite show. It is up to you to decide to what degree you “cut fun”. As long you reduce it just a little bit, you are making massive progress towards higher motivation.
As we learned before the higher you go in dopamine, the lower you fall in motivation right after. So, if you gradually go not so high, you will not have feeling that you are sacrificing anything, but on the other hand your motivation will not crash so deep down. The good news is that overnight your dopamine level resets (unless you are physically addicted to drugs) very close to your base level anyway. So if you moderate your quick fixes today, tomorrow you will feel a massive improvement in your motivation.

This works like magic not only because your dopamine crashes become less severe but also because reducing potency of your quick fixes is “productive task” itself. And as we have learned before, completing a productive task additionally increases your dopamine level.

REMEMBER: It doesn’t matter to what degree you reduce potency of your quick fixes. Even if it is just 1%, it will be enough for you to naturally feel like wanting more!


Stabilizing your energy level

Taking action feels much harder when you have no energy. How many times you procrastinated by thinking to yourself: “Today I’m too tired for this”.

Energy and motivation go hand in hand when it comes to your willpower, because if you have no energy, even extremely high motivation will not help you take action. Imagine I offer you a million dollars to walk for 20 miles right after you spend last atom of your energy hiking for 3 days straight. Motivation is high, but without energy you will still not be able to take action.

Fortunately stabilizing energy works the same way as stabilizing your motivation. Every time you eat sugar or other food with high glycemic index, like bread, rice, potatoes and so on, your energy will spike but then quickly crash.

Sugary foods don’t just spike and crash your energy (glucose) but also in dopamine (motivation). Eating a cheesecake feels good and rewarding. The more rewarding your food feels, the deeper your crash in motivation will be right after you finish it. So It makes sense for you to begin moderation with your diet. I am not saying you should order salad instead of juicy burger for your next meal. Just follow the 5% rule of moderation. Choose a SLIGHLTY less fun option and you will stabilize your energy and motivation in no time.

NOW THE BIG QUESTION

Look, I’ve worked with hundreds of procrastinators until now. Every single one of them noticed a massive difference in their levels of motivation and energy after less than a day of moderation. The big question is: can you do it for a day? Can you “sacrifice” just 1% of your “fun” today to get your snowball rolling and become the fulfilled high-achieving individual?

The good news is, overcoming procrastination doesn’t get any easier than that. However this is also the bad news, because if you can’t do it, you will not be able to do and achieve anything in your life. If you belive the first step requires too much effort for you, rest of the book will not be of any value and you should request a refund.

On the other hand, if you follow moderation method today, tomorrow you will be ready for the next step: Increasing motivation and energy, which will teach you how to invest motivation and energy you gain today for even more energy and motivation tomorrow.

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