How to Rewire Your Brain to Stop Procrastinating

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1:38Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, please do me a favor. Give us a rating and review however you listen to us. The more positive ratings and reviews that we get, the more that those platforms show this podcast to people who have never listened to it before, which allows us to grow and impact more people's lives. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to rewire your brain so that you stop procrastinating.

2:08Because what if I told you that your procrastination isn't a personality flaw, it's more so an old broken circuit in your brain. So your brain is literally wired to avoid discomfort because at some point in your life, in your childhood, you learned that discomfort meant danger. So now every time you try to do something hard, the same survival pathways light up in your brain like you're in danger, like you're being chased. And so your heart rate will shift, your body will tighten, and your brain is going to scream, danger, do something else, do anything else. And it's not that you're lazy, it's that you're actually running outdated wiring that is misfiring.

2:56And so the problem isn't that you need more motivation or more willpower. The problem is that your brain has been trained to crave relief instead of growth. And if you don't consciously rewire those circuits, which is what I'll teach you today, you will keep choosing comfort for the rest of your life, even though comfort is costing you the life that you want. And then you will self-sabotage for the rest of your life. So today I'm going to teach you how to retrain your brain so that your brain actually wants to do what is hard and it wants to do what is good for you in your future. So let's dive into it.

3:34See, most people think that there's something wrong with them. They think, oh, I'm lazy or I have no discipline or I have no willpower. I'm just inconsistent. I can't stick with anything. I never follow through. But what's really happening a lot of the time is that you're not lazy or undisciplined, it's that you're actually unconsciously trying to protect yourself. And so your nervous system is running old programs that say something like, if I try, I could fail. And if I fail, I could be judged. And if I'm judged, I could be rejected. And if I'm rejected, I'm not safe. And it sounds dramatic until you realize that your brain is just running ancient software and it's staying in the tribe equals survival mindset.

4:19Like I need to stay in the tribe. I need to be in the tribe. And if I get kicked out, it means danger. So it's running this old ancient software that you need to consciously update. And that's why something that's like as simple as your boss sending you an email saying, are you free at four o 'clock can spike your anxiety instantly because your brain goes straight to threat forecasting. That's what your brain is really, really good at, is threat forecasting. So when you go to do something that is challenging for you, that is out of your comfort zone, your brain doesn't evaluate it through a logical lens, like a logical adult would.

4:58It evaluates it like, does this feel safe in any way? And if the answer is no, it doesn't feel safe, it pulls away. And so procrastination, most people are like, oh, I have a procrastination problem. I need to get better with willpower. I need to get better with time management. It's neither one of those. Procrastination is a threat response. You're procrastinating because you're afraid of something. And so that's why doing hard things feels like danger. And so let's get really specific around this, right? Hard things like doing something challenging outside of your comfort zone tends to activate three different threat categories in some sort of way.

5:40So threat number one that's very common for a lot of people is incompetence. What if I'm not good enough? What if I fail? What if I suck at this? What if I look stupid? Right? Threat number two is that's very common for a lot of people as well as rejection. What if they judge me? What if they don't like me? What if they all, you know, have all of their opinions of me? What if I disappoint somebody? So that's threat number two that's very common. The threat number three that's very common for a lot of people is loss of control. Like, what if I can't handle it? What if all of this gets overwhelming?

6:11What if I end up messing all of this up? And so the truth of all of it though, is that your brain, when it starts to think of these, the loss of control or starts to think of rejection, it starts to think of incompetence in some sort of way. It doesn't need proof in this moment right now. It needs a pattern from your past. And so if at any point in your life, trying hard led to some sort of pain of being rejected or failing or feeling like an idiot or loss of control, your brain is going to connect the dots. And then later as an adult in this moment, you're not just avoiding a task. What you're really avoiding is the old emotional memory that that task wakes up from your past.

6:58Are you picking up what I'm putting down? So it's not like the thing in the moment that's actually the problem. The problem is that your brain is thinking of something that happened to you in the past and predicting that the same thing is going to happen to you now. And so I always say the pain in your past creates the fears in your future. And so whatever happened to you that had some sort of painful feeling in the past, whether it was being made fun of or left out or looking stupid or being heartbroken, it's going to create the fears in the future. And that's what's actually holding you back is the threat prediction in your brain.

7:33And so somehow your brain probably learned if you're procrastinating, it learned that effort feels unsafe, that effort is unsafe in some sort of way. And so this is where we can go deeper than just surface level than just like most people are just like, ah, just do it. Just force yourself to do it. We've all forced ourselves to do things before, haven't we? And we could do it for a little while, but can we do it in long term? No, we always fall off if we're just forcing ourself, right? Many of us learned that, you know, if you were criticized a lot as a kid, like your brain learned that, you know, trying equals getting picked apart or effort equals humiliation or mistakes equal pain.

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11:38That's it. There's no catch. $45 upfront payment required equivalent to$15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. And now back to the show. And so we have all of these things that happened in our past or all these different painful moments in our past. And so now your adult brain, it wants success. It wants to push itself. You want to get out of your comfort zone, but your nervous system wants predictability and it wants to stay safe. And predictability often looks like comfort in staying the same.

12:20And that's why people want growth. That's why you want to grow and you want to get better, but you'll choose familiar suffering instead. Because familiar suffering feels safe in the moment. And so what we need to do is we need to actually flip what is safe and what is not safe in our brain. We need to flip what we get pleasure from and we need to flip what we get pain from. Because your brain always craves what is safe, what feels safe to it. And so if we make this all super simple, your brain craves what it knows. Your brain craves what it can predict. Your brain craves what has given it relief before in the past.

13:00You know, so like if you had a really hard day at work at one point in time and it was just stressful and you're like, I just want to scroll on my phone. I just want to click out and just disappear from my brain. Right. Maybe you wanted to just calm down after that stressful day. then if your brain at any point in time in the past got relief from scrolling on your phone then your brain is going to crave scrolling over your phone most cases overtaking action because that it gave you relief at some point in time if you know snacks or overeating at one point in time or eating a tub of ice cream gave you some sort of relief then your brain is going to crave that in the future.

13:45If avoidance, avoiding the actual painful conversation or avoiding, you know, the chaos at the house, whatever it was, if avoidance had given you relief, then your brain is going to crave avoidance. Your brain is going to crave whatever has felt good before, even if it ruined your life long-term. Because your brain is not focused on the long-term. Your brain is mostly focused on like short term right now, reduce the pain right now. And when I say pain, of course, it could be physical pain, but more than anything else, it's usually some sort of psychological pain. And this is why willpower almost always breaks over time.

14:24Willpower is you trying to overpower your nervous system, which you can do for a little while, but eventually you're going to lose. It's like trying to wrestle a bear, right? You don't want to wrestle the bear. You want to retrain the bear instead. And that's what we need to do. And we need to basically flip, like I said, what we get pleasure from and what we get pain from in our brain. And so this is the skill. Hard things, we want them to become craveable. Like we want to want to do hard things, right? So hard things become craveable when your brain learns that effort and taking action will create safety later on in life.

15:06Like I will be more safe from taking that shot, this action, not less safe because we think, oh, less safe out of my comfort zone. No, no, I need to rewire to my brain that actually taking action outside of my comfort zone will create more safety later on in life. That doing hard things and will actually, um, you know, you're, you want, I want to train my brain that doing hard things in learning that discomfort is actually a good thing and not something that I should feel pain from, but something I should feel pleasure from because it equals progress. And I can think about how that progress is going to make my life better.

15:40I want hard things to become craveable and for my brain to learn that challenges equal reward. And so how do we go about doing it all that? Well, definitely not by yelling at yourself, because one of the things that I find with most people is that you'll do the thing that you need to do, like go to the gym, and then you'll look at yourself in the mirror and be like, oh, you're still fat. You didn't work out hard enough. You should have worked out longer. You could have gone an extra 10 minutes on the treadmill. And so you do the thing that you wanted to do. And then you beat yourself up for it anyways, or you guilt yourself or you shame yourself or whatever it might be.

16:13So what you need to do is when you finish a task, what you need to do is you need to celebrate yourself because most people are, you know, just assholes to themselves. Even after they do the thing they want to do, you could have done better. You could have stayed longer. You're still not where you want to be. And with that, you kill the motivation. And so the rule is very simple here. Okay. We pair discomfort with safety and meaning and reward, right? So discomfort, going to the gym, getting out of your comfort zone, making cold calls, whatever it is, it's discomfort to you. We pair it in our brain.

16:52We start to actually pair it and think of it as a way of creating more safety and more meaning and more reward in our life. And so this is how you flip the wiring in your brain, okay? You need to retrain your brain to think different about effort and challenge and discomfort. Instead of associating with pain, we must associate those things with pleasure. You must associate it with the pleasure in your life that you're creating and celebrate it in the moment so that there is immediate feedback to your brain so that it knows your brain knows the thing that you just did was a good thing. The thing that you just did, you want to do it again.

17:31And basically what you're doing is you're, you want to think of training your brain, or I guess you could say retraining your brain from this moment forward, the same way that you train a dog. Think about this, right? You train a dog and when it does what you want it to do, what do you do? You give it a treat. Why do you give it a treat? because that treat tastes good. It releases dopamine and makes the dog feel good. And that is positive reinforcement and that positive reinforcement because the dog got a treat because they got dopamine and it got positive reinforcement. The dog now wants to keep doing that thing over and over and over and over again.

18:07So they continue to get treats and it continues to get more dopamine. Like most people train their dogs with positive reinforcement and it works. and then they try to train themselves with negative reinforcement and they can't figure out why it's not working, right? You have to train your brain the same way you train a dog. Little treats, little positive reinforcement, little celebrations for yourself, dopamine rewards as much as you possibly can. And so when we retrain ourselves, we basically need to do it in three different layers, okay? First one is through your body. The second one is through your mind.

18:42And the third thing is through a dopamine reward. Okay. So layer number one is your body safety. Whenever you start to do something out of your comfort zone, your body is going to scream at you. Don't do it. Don't do it. Do it. Don't do it. It's going to say, do this instead, do this instead, do this instead. So you need to teach your nervous system. I can be uncomfortable and still safe. I can be uncomfortable and I can still be safe. Otherwise, it will always fight you. And this matters way more than I think people realize. Most people try to do hard things while their body's just like screaming at them.

19:21And then they eventually self-sabotage and they wonder why they're not doing what they wanna do. And so you wanna just give yourself 30 seconds to signal safety to your body before you do anything else. When you feel your body resisting discomfort, not wanting to get out of your comfort zone, making you feel fears and worries and limiting beliefs and all that stuff, and it's trying to hold you back from doing the hard thing, pause for a second. Drop your shoulders. Take a deep breath. Unclench your jaw for a second. And then slowly inhale through your nose and make your exhale through your mouth longer than you inhale.

19:57And do it a couple times. And then just say out loud to yourself, I am safe. It sounds, listen, I get it. It sounds stupid. It sounds like it does nothing. It will rewire your brain. Trust me when I tell you this, right? Say to yourself, I am safe. Say to yourself, this is just discomfort and that's okay. Here's the key. Your body can't tell the difference between something that is hard or something that is dangerous unless you teach it. You have to teach the meaning to your body, right? And so what this does is this interrupts the threat loop. And if you can stay regulated long enough, your brain updates the file.

20:36Oh, that wasn't dangerous. you know it turns the emergency alarms off now your body's on board with it takes just a couple minutes the second thing you need to do is you need to to pay attention to the meaning that your mind is giving it you change the label and you change the experience the brain responds to meaning for everything and so this is called cognitive reframing in cognitive behavioral therapy, right? You tell yourself, this is not dangerous. I'm okay. Fear, this feeling of discomfort is not a stop sign. Fear is just the feeling of standing at the edge of my comfort zone. I want to grow.

21:17So it is a good thing that I feel this way. This is not a bad sign. You see how I'm taking the feeling and I'm talking to myself so I can change the meaning of what's going on and what I think about it and tell myself, this isn't a bad thing. This is okay. It's okay to feel this way. You're not in danger. And so I'm first changing my body and then I'm changing my brain around it and I'm rewiring it. This discomfort is proof that I'm on the right track. If I'm not feeling the fear, I'm not growing. Okay. And I'm trying to get my body on board first. And then I need to get my brain on board by changing the meaning of the feeling.

21:55And then layer three is the dopamine reward. Your brain repeats what is rewarded. So it wants you to do what has given you some sort of relief or dopamine before in the past. So when you take a small action in the direction of the discomfort, don't beat yourself up like you have in the past. Celebrate yourself out loud. Say, I am so proud of myself. That was hard and I did it anyways. This is who I am. This is who I'm building myself into. I am building myself into someone that I love and I respect. I'm trying to literally celebrate that. And that will release dopamine in your brain because dopamine is subjective.

22:35You can release it whenever you want to based off of making yourself feel good. And dopamine creates repetition. It's like the treat to the dog. You're going to want to do it again. You want to get yourself to want to do it. So if you do this, you're rewiring your fear and your pleasure and your pain associations in your brain. And you don't rewire this through like one heroic day. You rewire it with repetition. You pick one hard thing and you make it small enough to feel safe. Just small enough to feel safe. You regulate the body first, you do the thing, you tell yourself and you put the meaning inside of your brain, and then you immediately reward yourself after, right?

23:16And you're rewiring your mind by doing it. And so what you're doing when you do this is you're shifting yourself deeply, internally. You're teaching your body and your brain that fear or discomfort does not equal danger. You're teaching your brain that effort leads to the life that you want. You're teaching your identity of who you think you are, that this is the person that I am becoming. And over time, if you do this enough, your craving of what you pleasure and the pain you're trying to avoid flips over time. So now you're not trying to avoid discomfort. You're trying to actually run towards discomfort because it's pleasurable because it creates the life you want because you've gotten dopamine over and over and over again and it feels good.

24:00And it's not going to happen immediately. It's going to happen through reps of doing it over and over and over and over and over again. And you'll eventually be able to take the actions you've always wanted to. Not because you're a superhuman because you have massive amounts of willpower, but because you trained your brain and body correctly. You updated the software. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you wanna learn more about coaching with me outside of this podcast, you can go to coachwithrob.com.

24:30Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day. Hey, Fidelity. Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app? With Fidelity, it's easy to get an outside opinion from independent experts in a single score. And then? When you're ready, trade U.S. stocks and ETFs with no commissions. That's right. I am always right. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Zero dollar commission does not apply to customers designated by Fidelity as a professional equity trader.

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