I’m a Therapist Who Procrastinates—Here’s How I Get Unstuck
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Quick, what are you procrastinating on right now? For a lot of us—cough, me—the answer might be, “Uh, what am I not procrastinating on?” It’s common to put off your responsibilities, whether that’s an innocuous task on your to-do list or making a huge life change. Heck, you probably even drag your feet on doing things you know you’d enjoy. If you don’t, at least occasionally, you might be the odd one out, Britt Frank, LSCSW, a therapist based in Kansas City, Kansas, tells SELF.
As the author of both The Science of Stuck and The Getting Unstuck Workbook, Frank knows a little something about, well, feeling stuck. Understanding the brain science behind procrastination doesn’t save her from falling prey to this nearly universal habit. “I procrastinate because I’m human,” she says. “I do it with small things, I do it with big things, and I do it with silly things like answering an email that would take two seconds.”
Why are most of us like this? Thanks to the complicated tapestry that is humanity and neuroscience, there are plenty of theories behind our tendency to delay despite needing to act. In Frank’s view, it can be helpful to think of procrastination as part of the body’s natural reaction to stress, particularly the freeze response—you know, the lesser-talked-about sibling of fight-or-flight. “You freeze because, for whatever reason, your brain perceives a threat,” Frank says. If you’ve ever clammed up while speaking in front of a large crowd, you likely know that something doesn’t have to be actually life-threatening for our brains to yell, “Danger!” In fact, it might be something mundane—including, yes, seemingly harmless tasks that we’ll move heaven and earth to avoid knocking out.
So what do you do when you’re frozen in the face of going to the DMV, texting your friend back, or—in Frank’s case at the time of our call—putting away clean clothes that’ve been sitting there for two days? Here are her best tips, a.k.a. exactly how she plans to finish her dang laundry.
Don’t ask why you’re procrastinating.
Look, you could sit around and unpack why, exactly, you’ve been putting off Doing The Thing. I, for example, could look deep within myself and tell you that I’m not just procrastinating on sending a follow-up email—I’m grappling with my deep desire to never annoy people so they like me, okay! And you, perhaps, could reflect on the connection between your fear of failure and your inability to start that project, and Frank could certainly offer all sorts of insight on all the common reasons why anyone procrastinates on anything.
BUT RESIST THE URGE. “Stop asking why,” Frank says. “That is the most important first step.” Don’t get her wrong—sometimes a little self-reflection can yield helpful insight. It’s just rarely a useful first step. “You can analyze your why, but then you’ll just be insightfully stuck,” she continues. “Insight is good, but movement is better, at least at first. If I’m feeling really stuck, analysis and awareness can come after momentum, but not before.” You might be surprised how often you can resolve the issue without having to go full therapist on yourself. “And once you solve the procrastination problem that you’re facing, you might not even care why you struggled in the first place,” Frank adds.
Instead ask, “What can I do?”
“We want to get out of our heads and into our choices,” Frank says, suggesting listing potential small steps on paper or out loud to really cement them. For example, Frank might decide she could put away one sock (“Not even dig around for a pair—just one sock”), move the laundry basket to a more convenient location, or even just stand up and shake out her muscles “to create momentum.” All those sound better than “put away the giant mountain of laundry,” right?
Of course, your options might not feel as easy and straightforward as one sock or two. Realistically, resources and bandwidth come into play too. “Someone with four kids and three jobs is going to have fewer choices than someone with all the time and money in the world,” Frank says. “So without shaming ourselves or ruminating on our circumstances, we want to ask, ‘What is one thing that’s within my power to do right now?’”
After you list a couple of options for Step Number One, pick whichever feels most doable and knock it out ASAP, even if it’s super tiny. “It might seem too silly and easy to move the needle, but from a brain-science perspective, it’s what we need to get moving,” Frank explains. “If you don’t want your amygdala, which is sort of like the panic button of the brain, to put you in a freeze response, you need to take small enough steps to avoid triggering the alarm.”
Okay, but what if baby steps don’t unfreeze you? Then, it might be time to try Frank’s next tip….
“Snow-globe” your brain.
You read that correctly. Before I explain what it means, though, here’s another factoid about your brain: It loves to function on autopilot, which isn’t exactly conducive to getting things done. “Our brains are designed to conserve energy, not to be productive and succeed all the time, which makes them seek out predictable patterns,” Frank says. She adds that procrastination is just another pattern your brain likes to follow, whether you’re distracting yourself on TikTok, sitting (literally) frozen on the couch, or ruminating on why you can’t just do it already.
This brings us back to snow-globing your brain—which means doing something that shifts you from inertia to action. “Shake your head around, suck on an ice cube, spin around in a circle three times, walk backward for 10 seconds, sing randomly—it can be anything to get you out of that frozen state,” she says. “It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, but it works.” Think of it as finding ways to interrupt your brain’s procrastinating pattern—and setting yourself up to maybe even take the next step.
Okay, now you can ask why.
After you get some momentum going, you might hit another wall. Frank recommends trying to knock out more of the tiny actions on your list before switching to reflection mode, but at some point you might find your next steps by turning inward. After all, sometimes our procrastination habits signal larger, underlying issues we need to address, whether that’s by tackling perfectionist tendencies with a workbook, treating a mental health condition that exacerbates your avoidance (like anxiety or ADHD), or identifying deeper emotional triggers. (Don’t pressure yourself to figure out the root cause or the solution on your own, though, she advises—working with a therapist or even bouncing ideas off a trusted friend can get you out of your head.)
Frank emphasizes the importance of still doing something with that information, whether it’s establishing a game plan for next time or solving the most immediate problem at hand. Identifying that you’ve outgrown your job probably won’t magically put you in the mood to finally tackle all that busy work your boss keeps piling on, for example. But it could inspire you to request a meeting to discuss your workload, switch your LinkedIn to “open to work,” or read reviews for a new task management app to try. In some cases, it might be as simple as flagging, “Actually, I’m too stressed out to figure this out right now”—and then focusing on practicing some stress-relieving self-care instead.
Don’t beat yourself up for procrastinating.
Again, procrastination is human, so there’s no magic bullet for overcoming it completely. When you inevitably put something off for too long, resist the negative self-talk. That means no calling yourself lazy, ruminating on how you should’ve started this weeks ago, or whatever other way you’re tempted to blame yourself for your current predicament. “No one has ever shamed themselves into productivity sustainably,” Frank says.
This self-compassion isn’t just about being kind to yourself, though that’s important too—it’s about not making things even harder on yourself. Because that freeze response you’re trying to overcome? Yeah, yelling at it isn’t going to help. If anything, per Frank, it’ll just make you clam up more. So, instead, extend yourself some grace, even if it’s as simple as saying, “I froze up and it’s not the end of the world.”
Now, if you’re feeling ready…maybe it’s time to go put away that sock?
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