Self-Sabotage

They say the brain is designed to protect us. Have you ever thought of doing something and ten minutes later you thought otherwise? That is because you only have a 5 seconds window period to get up and do that task, however if you haven’t done it after the 5 seconds then your brain will convince you that it’s not worth it therefore do not take action.

Of-course I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, but from the books I’ve been reading and the motivational videos that I’ve been watching- I have come to a conclusion that we are our own worst enemy. We tend to come up with excuses on why things are not working out or many reasons why we are not focusing on our dreams anymore. The sad thing is that we blame the world and never ourselves, I guess it’s easy to point fingers because it makes us feel good about ourselves.

I’ve had my fair share of self-sabotage in the past 3 months.  I have strangely convinced myself that I cannot blog anymore as I have a new job and I am trying to get a hang of my new role. It would’ve been understandable in the first month, but time has lapsed its already three months later and I am still holding on to that excuse (LOL). The truth is whenever I think of a topic, I procrastinate over researching and writing it to a point that I become uninterested then move over to other things. Procrastination is my biggest problem in life!

Like most human beings, I tend to postpone tasks for the future instead of doing them immediately. In economics this is called ‘time-inconsistent preferences’, where humans value their time now than later when determining the cost and benefits of completing a task.

Despite having all the information from past experiences regarding postponing tasks, procrastination is recurrent as humans tend to be short-sighted in the current moment. As much as humans are self-interested and optimistic about their future-selves, our weakness of immediate satisfaction persists hence we hardly learn from the past.

At times the future seems far-fetched but that should not derail us from fulfilling our long-term goals. We should always picture the sense of relief, happiness, and satisfaction that will ultimately come from completing a task. In addition we should increase the speed in which we do things so that we do not leave room to overthink completing the task at hand. Hence I have decided to be more forward-looking and adopt habits that will eventually lead me to attaining my goals, like waking up earlier for instance (LOL).