By: Nutritionist S. Keith Klein IV CN CCN

Procrastination is the act of delaying or postponing tasks or actions that require immediate attention, often resulting in suboptimal outcomes and increased stress. It is a common behavior that affects many people, and it can manifest in various ways, such as constantly putting off tasks until the last minute, getting easily distracted by other activities, or avoiding tasks altogether. Procrastination can be a result of poor time management, fear of failure or success, lack of motivation, or other psychological factors.

When we feel good, it’s because our life is in balance. We live in congruence with what we say we want, and our actions align with that. For example, when you say something like, “I want to be in good shape,” or “I want to lose weight,” or “I want to feel better about myself,” and you begin to eat right and exercise, your thoughts and actions are lined up with each other so that you can now create what you say you want. But whenever you express a desire to change something about yourself or your circumstances, and your actions work against those goals, you will feel incongruent and upset with yourself. To feel good about yourself, you need to do what you say you will do, not just for others but also for what you tell yourself.

Being “up-set” implies there is an imbalance. But what exactly does it mean when we say “out of balance?” For something to be out of balance, there has to be something that’s in balance or equal proportion in the first place. That something is the degree of self-talk between our inner mental environment and the exterior environment where we experience our lives. There is nothing worse you can do to reduce your self-esteem than constantly being at battle with yourself by saying you will do something and then not doing it. It will have a negative impact on your sense of self-worth, pride and sense of accomplishment.

Why is this? Because when you tell yourself you will eat right or exercise today and you don’t, it’s a form of lying to yourself. Everyone hates it when someone lies to us, we learn quickly never to trust them again, and we don’t listen to what they tell us anymore. So when you lie to yourself by saying you’ll do something and don’t do it repeatedly, your subconscious quickly learns to quit listening to what you you’ll get done. In other words, you no longer trust yourself to do what you tell yourself. And get this; it starts with the little things you say you’ll do, like, I’ll clean my room tomorrow, and three weeks later, you still haven’t cleaned it. Every time you walk by that room, a sense of angst emerges in your subconscious as you have a nagging feeling that you need to do that. As these little procrastinations pile up in your mind, the result is a sense of unbalance.

Now, think back to when many things you kept putting off suddenly got done. One day you just decided to clean the room, and that leads to getting your garage straightened, which leads to you paying your bills, etc. Think for a moment about how good doing all that felt. You feel terrific because your sense of accomplishment just went higher. You feel great because now your thoughts have aligned with your actions. Our needs and desires are generated in our internal self-talk and fulfilled in the exterior environment. If these two environments correspond, we’re in a state of inner balance and feel a sense of satisfaction and happiness. If these environments are not in correspondence, we experience dissatisfaction, anger, frustration, or emotional discomfort.

When you see a happy person, you see a person that lives in congruence with their thoughts. They do what they say they will, which in turn increases their sense of self-worth and their sense of accomplishment. Part of being in Lean Body Coaching is trying to help you see how this state of incongruence affected you when you expressed the desire to lose weight in your past. Usually, before people started with us, they lived in a state where they were saying they wanted to lose weight, only to find themselves starting and stopping repeatedly. Our job is to help you find a balance between doing what’s right to reach a better state of health and the other areas of your life. So in the future, to help you discover a higher sense of self-worth and sense of accomplishment, I want you to begin paying attention to everything you tell yourself you will do and doing it. Not putting it off until later, but doing everything you have been telling yourself you will. And once you start doing this, pay attention to how much better you feel about yourself and how the feeling of being overwhelmed and stress begins to go away.

Copyright 2006 S. Keith Klein IV CN CCN