The procrastination cure you don't want to hear

I think one of the most common problems that people have is not that they don't know what to do to dramatically move their life forward in a substantial way. Like, you know exactly what you need to do right now. There's probably something that you've been avoiding like the plague. But the problem is not that you don't know what that is; the problem is that you just can't bring yourself to do it.

And that's the common theme every single day. When you sit down to do this thing, you feel a feeling, and it almost seems unfair how potent this feeling of resistance is. Because it's usually only present when you think about doing things that are genuinely good for you. So, it's like, what's the deal with that? Why does it seem like life is set up that way? Wouldn't it be better if you just actually enjoyed doing difficult things? Wouldn't it be better if you actually had the motivation to be creative or to write a paper or to do your taxes?

Like, you probably want nothing more than to be someone who genuinely enjoys and looks forward to doing the things that are good for you, doing the things that empower you. Recently, I've been thinking there is one strategy that I have that works every single time. It always makes me do the thing that I need to do. It's not very flattering; it's not very sexy. We don't want to believe that this is the answer.

And I feel like there's so much self-improvement advice out there that kind of ignores this fundamental—not even tactic, it's almost a fact of life. When we ignore this fact, we'll try to do little tips and tricks like, "Oh, set a timer for five minutes and just really try, try really hard to do the work," or "Try to think more positive thoughts about your work." But all those strategies, like, they're kind of throwaway strategies. Yeah, they might work here or there, but they get old really quick.

This strategy is nuclear. So, if you need to do one particular thing, then if you do this, you will do it; like, you will have no choice. The solution is boredom. Ironically, that's also the problem. The solution and the problem are the same thing. You don't want to do that work because it's so boring to your brain. You want to gouge your eyes out.

All of these distractions that you have around sound so much more entertaining than doing that thing. So you always have a back door. Why in hell would you write an essay when you could be checking Instagram? When you could be watching YouTube videos like this one? But the key realization is that your brain doesn't see objective entertainment values; it's always relative.

A good analogy for this is when you're spending all day outside in the sun—it's a super bright day—and then you walk into a dim room or a store. That indoor space feels super dark. You're like, "Man, I can't see anything! What is this?" And then you see that weird, like, fake sun in your periphery that starts to fade. Everything looks like weird and purpley.

In a very similar way, if you've been asleep for a couple hours and you have to get up and go to the bathroom, you turn the lights on, and it's just blinding. It's not that that bathroom is any more bright than it was before you went to bed when you were brushing your teeth. It's just that your brain interprets things using contrasts; it uses comparison.

So the key is to utterly delete the back doors. The key is to strip away every single option—to sit in a blank room with nothing in it: no phone, nothing. Eliminate your ability to do anything other than the thing that you need to do, and you will do it.

Now you might be thinking, "Oh, it's not that simple. I can just do nothing." Well, you actually won't do nothing, and there's studies to prove it. There was a really weird study published in Science in 2014. That was a mouthful. It's not one of my freaking Neanderthal. That's not a mouthful; that was really hard to say.

So, in this study, they got a bunch of undergraduate students to sit in an empty room by themselves with absolutely nothing to do and be alone with their own thoughts. But they had one other option, and that was to electrocute themselves with a shocky button. And it turns out 67% of the men and 25% of the women decided that electrocution was better than boredom.

Some of the students electrocuted themselves multiple times. Even the ones that didn't electrocute themselves either strongly considered it or at least lamented as to how miserable the quiet time was and how boring it was. You might have heard about this study before, but I think it's a great example as to how much human beings dislike being bored.

It's the reason why solitary confinement is considered one of the least humane forms of torture imaginable. There's this ancient torture method where they basically just throw somebody down a hole under the castle and forget about them for their entire lives. Number 15: the oobliet. The last thing you'd want after stealing a cup of buckwheat is to end up in one of these. Isn't that—that sounds terrible? Because it's so boring.

If you are put in an empty room with nothing to do except one thing, unless that thing is, like, chop off your hand, you're probably gonna do that thing. And while you're doing that thing, that thing will feel so much more entertaining than doing nothing. So you have to ask yourself, what are you constructing your life around? How are you structuring things?

Are the things that you're supposed to do entertaining in comparison to the things that you use as distractions? Because the larger the disparity, the more agonizing that thing will be. And you'll find very quickly that if you delete distractions as an option, it works right away. It's insane!

This isn't like some dopamine detox that you got to do over weeks and months and years, although that will help you get used to finding the entertainment value in difficult things. This is something that works right away because your brain needs to survive. It hates feeling bored, so it will make whatever your only option is as entertaining as it needs to.

I even have personal evidence for this. One of the most productive, social, and energetic times in my entire life is when I was living in a little 900-square-foot basement suite in the middle of suburbia with absolutely nothing to do except edit videos.

Okay, so here's Alex looking in the pantry for stuff to eat. Um, these guys are cooked. It's our only good meal that we've had in several days. And basically, this whole video is just to show off what we have going on in our fridge right now: ketchup, a little bit of milk, some Korean honey, three pickles, salsa, and water.

I was absolutely broke, and to edit these videos that I had to do for my very few corporate freelance videography clients, I was sitting on an upside-down laundry hamper because I couldn't afford an office chair. But this was deeply motivating to me. Although I did live with my friend Alex, he was hardly ever around, so I had these long periods of loneliness.

But that sting of loneliness made me social; it made me make plans. It made me seek opportunities. My lack of money made me seek money, and most importantly, the lack of things to do in there—the lack of distractions that I surrounded myself with—made me extremely bored. Bored enough that editing videos and being highly creative and doing what I love actually felt entertaining as well.

So there's a perfect example of my environmental conditioning helping facilitate a mindset of creativity and an attitude of productivity. It's because I had very few other options.

So in summary, if you have something you need to do right now, then eliminate all your back doors. Turn off your phone, remove your gaming PC from your room, remove your Xbox, auto-hide the toolbar so when you're thinking of the next word to write, you don't look at Safari and automatically click on it.

And in living life this way and treating productivity this way, it's not that you're going to live a less entertaining life. In fact, you might find it far more entertaining and fulfilling and empowering than you ever knew possible.

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