Mindfulness Techniques | ProductiveandFree

Few of us haven’t fallen into the trap of procrastination at some point. It rarely has positive outcomes, either. In the workplace, you might find yourself putting off important tasks, affecting your productivity. Procrastination about elements of your personal life, like reaching out to friends just to talk or getting the motivation to exercise, can impact your quality of life.

It’s clearly in your best interests to take some steps to overcome procrastination. Fortunately, some simple acts of mindfulness, when you perform them regularly, can make a real difference in your life. By exploring how you can address different influences of procrastination, you’ll be empowering yourself to move forward with your life healthily and proactively.

Gaining Clarity

Procrastination often crops up due to a lack of mental clarity. Sometimes, this is because you may need to decide between various courses of action but aren’t clear on the potential outcomes. It could be that you simply don’t know where to begin when approaching a task. It’s not usual for this inability to focus the mind and set on a decisive course of action to have a kind of paralyzing effect.

Meditation

Regular meditation is a great way to improve your mental clarity. It helps you to draw in your focus, observe your present experiences, and direct your attention more effectively. Importantly, a recent study — Functional Connectivity of Prefrontal Cortex in Various Meditation Techniques – A Mini-Review by Mrithunjay Rathore et al — found that some forms of mediation support improvements in neurological functioning, particularly concerning cognitive control and working memory.

Focused attention meditation was one of the mindfulness exercises highlighted as particularly useful. This involves finding a quiet space for a few minutes every day. From here, you decide on a point of focus, which could be your breathing, a mantra, or an object in your field of view. You then spend some time maintaining your focus on this element, exploring the sensations and feelings you have about it. With consistent effort, this practice can boost the focus that helps you push through procrastination.

Sleep

It’s easy to forget the importance of sleep. There’s a reason our body wants us to dedicate a third of our life to sleep — it allows our busy cells to take a break and relax for the day ahead. Not getting enough of it can negatively affect your physical and mental health.

For instance, many college students fail to prioritize sleep in favor of studying and socializing. However, doing so causes harms physical and mental health, contributing to anxiety, fatigue, and other health problems. Due to college’s high-pressure environment, a lack of sleep can impact day-to-day life and contribute to procrastination issues.

Whether you’re in college or not, getting a full night’s rest is simply a must to protect your mind and keep it sharp.

Exercise

Both physical and mental wellness are essential ingredients for success. They are two sides of the same coin, allowing you to stay motivated with a clear mind.

Exercise is a perfect example of this universal truth. Getting outside and moving improves cardiovascular and cognitive functioning, alongside providing natural sources of vitamin D. Combining your exercise routines with periods of focused meditation — perhaps through yoga — can boost the impact on your wellness and help you make solid decisions in your life.

Addressing Fatigue

Feeling overly tired can be a cause of procrastination. After all, when you don’t feel as though you have enough energy, this can make it seem like you don’t have the mental or physical capacity to take action. There are various reasons that you need rest, and identifying the underlying causes can help you address them.

For instance, stress can put your body into fight-or-flight mode, which can disrupt your sleep patterns and drain your energy. Poor diet, too, can leave you feeling tired and inhibit your cognitive functioning. It can even lower your metabolism, which can make it difficult to lose weight while causing fatigue, brittle hair, and low body temperature.

Alongside directly addressing the medical roots, adopting some mindfulness techniques can enable you to overcome tiredness and get past the procrastination slump.

Body Scanning

Body scanning is a form of meditative mindfulness that can help address fatigue on several levels. Firstly, it can allow you to identify some of the areas of yourself most impacted by your tiredness. It can also be a powerful way to relieve stress and anxiety that leads to fatigue.

This process doesn’t usually take longer than a few minutes for each session. You start by adopting a comfortable sitting position. From here, you close your eyes and perform some deep breathing. As you breathe, you mentally scan the body from top to bottom, paying attention to how each part of your physical self feels at that moment. As a result, you benefit from a focused connection to your body, giving you greater insights into areas of discomfort and allowing you to more directly address them or rest them. It also tends to have a grounding effect, bringing your mind in sync with your body, inducing calm, and relieving stress.

Managing Negative Emotions

Procrastination is often either driven or influenced by the negative emotions we feel about the situation at hand. For instance, you may find that you struggle to make choices in your career due to the internal voice that makes you feel like an imposter. Changes in your personal life could be hampered by fear of the difficult feelings that lie ahead. Indeed, procrastinating as a result of these negative emotions can turn unhelpful self-talk into a self-fulfilling prophecy by your inaction. Therefore, adopting mindfulness techniques that empower you to manage and address negative emotions is important.

Emotional Awareness

One technique is to use mindfulness for better emotional awareness. When you start to experience difficult emotions, take the time to stop what you’re doing and turn your thoughts inward. From here, you need to identify what the emotion is, acknowledge the reality of its presence, and consider the reasons behind it. Naming and recognizing your hurdles is essential if you want to overcome them. These thoughts and feelings are not permanent, and they will pass. Importantly, recognize that you get to decide how you respond to them, allowing you to push them aside, replace them with positive thoughts, and be proactive in affecting change.

Self-Compassion

Another type of mindfulness that manages negative emotions is being a little kinder to yourself. This isn’t always easy, as most of us are our own biggest critics. One useful technique involves watching your own movie. This requires you to sit comfortably, close your eyes, and imagine you’re in a theater watching the movie of the current situation you find yourself in. This act of stepping outside of yourself can make it easier to more compassionately empathize with the “character” on the screen. You can gain insights into your challenges and what compassionate and patient acts might help you to move forward in a kind yet decisive way.

Conclusion

Overcoming procrastination is important for living a full professional and personal life. Mindfulness techniques can help you take care of some of the causes of procrastination, including fatigue and your experience of emotional negativity. Remember, though, that sometimes there are deeper psychological and emotional reasons you might be procrastinating. If this is a disruptive part of your life, seeking therapy and embarking on a deep exploration of your inner self may be helpful alongside your mindfulness routines.

Katie Brenneman

Katie is a passionate writer specializing in time management, marketing, and education-related content. When she isn't writing, you can find her with her nose buried in a book or hiking with her dog, Charlie. To connect with Katie, you can follow her on Twitter.