How Procrastination (slowly) Ruins Your Life

No, I wasn't recording this whole time. Oh, that's so stupid! Imagine you're this guy and you've been putting off writing a thank-you letter to your grandma. She sent you socks or something for Christmas. You even went and bought the stationery to do it. You have a thank-you letter nicely wrapped in the... What?

Anyway, so basically every time you think about doing it, you start to feel this inner sense of resistance. It's a resistance you can't seem to break past. So instead of dealing with that resistance, you go and do an escapist activity like playing Apex Legends.

So let's continue this roleplay a little bit. You're playing Apex Legends for a couple of hours and things are going well. And then it hits you. It's an inner kind of disgusting guilty feeling. It's as if the anxiety of the thing that you're avoiding starts to pervade the activity that you're using to escape the thing you're avoiding.

Congratulations! In this short little role-playing, totally fictional experiment we just did, you just experienced the two types of pain: the pain of action and the pain of inaction. The pain of action is something we can all identify with. It's that discomfort we feel before we do anything constructive.

Any time you think about doing something that's constructive and a little bit difficult, there's that inner sense of resistance that seems to stop you from doing it. And in order to actually accomplish that thing, you have to break through that resistance, and then you get it done. That inner sense of resistance is like... it's a paralyzing feeling.

Breaking through this resistance usually takes some good old white-knuckle willpower. So while it's painful and uncomfortable up front, if you just take it on the chin and deal with it, you start to become stronger and more able to deal with it in the future. You start to become somebody who is okay with discomfort. Your confidence, your self-efficacy, and basically your whole life improves because not only do you feel better about yourself; usually, doing something constructive makes your life situation better anyways.

It's kind of like a lose-win. The lose is eating the pain, and that win is the redemption that comes from that pain. So that's the pain of action. The pain of inaction is far more subtle, and it's a lot more sinister too. That's because it doesn't usually feel like pain at all.

When you choose to play Apex instead of filing your taxes, it may actually feel good for a while. And you know, it's a lot more fun to play Apex than it is to file your taxes. But kind of like binge drinking on a Friday night, you're just stealing the happiness from Saturday morning, and the debt you'll have to repay afterwards is far more painful than just taking the initial pain on the chin to begin with.

The pain of inaction is a slow-burning, degenerative pain that ruins every aspect of your life. By choosing the inaction route, you become a softer person; somebody who flinches at the sight of discomfort, somebody who can't get stuff done. And the consequence of that, on a long enough timeline, is you start to dislike yourself. You start to not believe in your ability to get things done, and your life situation starts to fall apart around you.

You'll eventually dig yourself into a hole so deep that it seems impossible to get out of until you're pained by the misery of your own existence. Obviously, this is really morbid, but it's nonetheless true. Nobody can avoid pain in day-to-day life. Pain is just something that we all have to deal with.

But thankfully, we can choose which pain we deal with. If you choose not to fool yourself and take the pain right upfront, battle through the discomfort of taking constructive action, then you won't have this massive pain debt to pay. And the pain debt is the pain of inaction, which is a lot more crappy in general.

So yeah, that's all. That's all I got to say is choose wisely. I think that's pretty much all I'm gonna say. It's good to be back. I just wanted to throw... I actually put a lot of thought into this video, as short as it is. I've been thinking about pain in general and like how sometimes life sucks, but there's a lot of redemption to be found in this pain as long as you're aware of it and make the right decisions.

Anyways, not to get too preachy or anything, so I'm gonna do a giveaway. I've just decided this now. So the folks over at Habit Nest, they sent me the Nutrition Sidekick journal. I don't even know if this is good or not. I'm just gonna be straight up with you. I haven't opened it yet. It's brand new in its packaging, and you could be the first to tell me how it is.

Click the link in the description. There's just... it's like super easy to sign up for this giveaway. It's just a gleam.io, and you have a really good chance of winning this in general because we don't have a giant subscriber base of millions of subscribers. So your chances are pretty good.

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Anyway, that's all for today. Thank you for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video. [Music]