Here's your detailed report.
Your Main Procrastination Type is Pivoting
What is it?
If you’re someone that tends to procrastinate by pivoting, it means that you are actively looking for the best plan or strategy to achieve your goals in the most efficient way possible. Procrastination by pivoting is very similar to procrastination by planning except in this case, once we finally have a plan that we think is perfect, we change it.
Before putting the plan into action and seeing if it actually generates real-life results, we come across a new strategy, a new idea, or a new plan that is much simpler and easier to execute on than the one we have right now and we decide to make the switch.
This is also known as Shiny Object Syndrome and is more common in entrepreneurs.
Why does it happen?
There is a novelty element to something new. It is exciting and fun and has a temporary hit of dopamine which feels good and rewards our brain. This is comparable to the honeymoon phase of relationships.
Once the dopamine wears off, our brains want more and get us to seek out and search for that new novelty again so we can experience the same reward. That’s when we start looking for a new and exciting plan so that we feel the same “high” as we did with our original plan. Once we find a new strategy or plan, we feel that dopamine hit again and our brain is satisfied for the next little while until it wears off.
What does it feel like?
Procrastination by pivoting feels like expending a lot of energy only to get nowhere. Like running on a treadmill or being on a hamster wheel.
Once we've identified our plan and have laid out all the work that needs to get done, we can feel a bit overwhelmed by knowing just how much work there is to do. That's when new and other strategies seem most appealing and we ditch our plans thinking that 'the grass is greener on the other side' only to find out it never is.Once we create a new plan, we come to one of two realizations:
In either one of these cases, the logical conclusion is that the current plan we have is not good enough and that we need something better and easier to execute. So we begin the process of creating a new plan all over again without actually taking any action on any of the plans we've created so far. This cycle can repeat endlessly until we actually start executing on one of the plans we lay out.
Your Possible Root Cause is Overwhelm
What is it?
The most likely cause of your procrastination is that you are feeling overwhelmed. This happens when we know what our goals are but have no idea how to accomplish them. Our goals feel like big, tremendous tasks and we can't figure out what the next step should be. When that happens, we are constantly ruminating on our goals and we can't see how we'll ever accomplish them.
Why does it happen?
Knowing our goal but not knowing what the next step should be causes us to feel an overwhelming amount of negative emotions. We start dreading the task that is supposed to make us feel good and excited.
When faced with these negative emotions, we understandably seek out short-term mood repair strategies rather than focus on long-term goal achievement. One common, but self-defeating, way to deal with these emotions is to completely avoid the thing causing them in the first place — the task at hand.
This is when overwhelm turns into procrastination because it is obvious to us that our task is what's causing us to feel these negative emotions, so we subconsciously choose to avoid it.
What does it feel like?
The negative emotions experienced by overwhelm can be a mix of fear, frustration, anger, shame, guilt, or anxiety. We often feel dread towards our goals and main tasks.
The inability to make progress on these tasks may also stir up feelings of low self-esteem, feelings of unworthiness, and feeling like we're stuck and unable to make any progress or move forward.
It is true that these emotions and feelings are being caused by our task but it is important to realize that our task is stimulating our irrational beliefs. Irrational beliefs come as a cluster in our lives, snowball, and quickly build energy. This causes us to constantly think negative thoughts and perpetuate the suffering we feel inside.
We know deep down inside that if we were able to make progress on our goal or task, we would stop feeling this way. But the problem is that we have no idea how to move forward with the task.We end up getting stuck in an endless cycle of:
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