Right in the middle of this show, this program of this episode, I'm going to tell you about a really cool thing for about 5 minutes, but just in case you don't listen to that. What I'm going to tell you about requires you to go to a website. You can go to kittdkit.edu.shop and use the code Smart5050. You'll get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out. In the middle of the show.
Welcome to The You Are Not So Smart Podcast. Episode 290. The Intention Action Gap is the researcher's word for you're not doing the thing you know you're supposed to be doing that's going to make your life good, so get off the damn couch and do the thing. We call that the Intention Action Gap.
That's the chasm between what you very much intend to do and what you actually do instead. You may very much intend to work out, to start doing yoga, to meditate, to check on a particular person, to write a certain email, do an errand that's been on you to do this for a while. Learn a language, organize a shelf, clean out a garage, something.
But instead you binge a show or scroll on social media, watch TikTok or YouTube or play a video game, something, or sometimes nothing. You do nothing for a while. You have a stated known outcome or goal in mind. Maybe something you've even written down somewhere. And you want to do it. You wake up thinking today's the day.
You have an intention, but then you don't follow through. And knowing you are actively not doing what you ought to be doing, while persisting in you're not doing of that thing. So common, so ubiquitous, so human. There's a term for it in psychology. And that term is the Intention Action Gap. In psychology, they sometimes ask you to visualize this as being on a riverbank with another riverbank in view.
You just can't get there because well, there's a river between you and the other bank or perhaps it's a shoreline in view of another shoreline with a narrow sea between, or maybe you can imagine yourself on a cliff across from another cliff with a canyon in between. Wherever you're at, that's the zone of intentions and whatever is in view across the gap, that's the outcome, that's the goal, that's the thing you know you ought to be doing. You ought to have achieved by now.
And they use these visualizations because to get across the gap, you can't just jump. You can't just leap right to the end. You need a way to get there, a bridge, a bridge made out of a plan, a plan made out of specific measurable, achievable, intermediate goals. And to reach those intermediate goals, each one of those needs its own smaller plan, easier plans.
And you need a lot of these things back to back until you've built a bridge to your outcome so that you can make today's goal just taking one step either onto the bridge or along that bridge in the direction of the other side. So that's it, that's the whole idea. On one side, your intentions to produce the outcome on the other side, the outcome itself. And you persist in a soup of these intentions, they're always with you.
I should do the thing, I should do the thing. I really should start that thing that I keep saying I'm going to start doing. And sometimes months, years, sometimes a life goes by. And this concept is part of something called the theory of plan behavior. We'll talk about that in a minute. And this intention action gap within that framework is a major component of procrastination and bed rot and doom scrolling and so on.
And we will get into all of that in about two minutes. If you want to skip ahead, like reading one of those recipes that want to just get to the actual instructions, skip ahead two minutes. And I'm telling you that because before we get to the tips and tricks, I'd like to reintroduce you to the person you heard at the very beginning of the episode talking about the intention action gap.
That was the singular, incomparable, incredible, and amazing Brit Frank, who has been a guest on this show several times because she is a therapist, an author, an lecturer, and yes, circus performer who gets shit done. But she'd be the first to tell you she wasn't always the sort of person who gets shit done. In fact, she was the kind of person who avoided getting shit done. And that's why she's a great source of advice on this topic.
And she wants you to know she escaped and she knows how she escaped. And if she can escape using these methods, then so can you. Brit Frank has for more than a decade now been a professional therapist with plenty of clients, because she has helped escape the loops, get out of the holes and swamps and pits of despair that they've fallen into,
either by accident or by mistake, or perhaps because they were born into them, they found themselves in some repeating cycle after a series of poor decisions or a mixture of all of these things. Brit Frank just released something new titled the Getting Unstuck Workbook.
So since I love talking to Brit Frank and I endorsed this book completely, I sent her a message and asked, would you like to come on the show and promote your book and talk about something new, which would be this intention action gap, she said, yes, and so she did. And here is the audio of that conversation right now.
I love you did a workbook and I thought about doing a workbook, I think a lot of authors do it as soon as you get in there, if it's well made, you're like, OK, this is a good idea because if you've ever gone to a recipe site to try it, I did this just recently, because I wanted to make chia seed pudding, because I got some of the airport and was like, I can make this.
And then it was that person, it was like in a land before the dawn of the ages, and they're going into there, they're doing their token fan fiction. And then I'm like, I'm like, I'm scroll scroll scroll scroll. It's like they say my entire childhood was a woman when you get down to it. I'm like, oh my God, where's the chia seeds.
And then some people just give you the recipe. So the workbook version of your book is for people who are like, can I just get the advice please, can I just get the steps. And sometimes authors are very bad at doing that. It feels like you would have been better off actually reading the book. I do feel like everyone should read your book. It's the most gifted thing I've ever, everyone who's ever come on my podcast is the most gifted book I've ever, I've ever headed out.
But I also have people in my life that are like, I just, I want to do the things. I want to do the things and they need one little extra nudge into do do things,ville. This seems like it works in that way. You tell me what is, what was the inclination to go, okay, let's make a workbook out of this thing.
So there never was an inclination to make a workbook. I had never aspired to do one. I had never wanted to do one. And then after I wrote science of stuff, I'm like, this is this should be a workbook like each chapter I could, I could do like, okay.
So the problem with workbooks, and you know this because we've tried it about it, they're either so technical, they read like neuroscience textbooks, which snooze nor not helpful, or they're so fluffy. It's just like I've ordered workbooks where it's 20 pages of empty space and the journal prompts, which again, no shade like there's room for that. There's a place to the table for everything. I don't know.
I will put shade on that. That's easier than, yeah, no, I don't like this. But I really, I wanted to make, if I was going to do a workbook, the best workbook I've ever read my entire life was the artist's way by Julia Cameron, and it was a fully customizable like pick through and just grab what you need not let's sit here and read every single word from star to finish.
And so based on the, you know, different learning styles, I created a workbook where if you're a thinker and you want you don't want to mess with feelings or mindfulness or close your eyes and go inward, you're like, I just want to think about stuff. Great. That's for you. Or I just want to do stuff. I don't want to feel my feelings. Great.
There's stuff in there for you. So I made it so you can customize it to your specific learning style and you can jump to what you need. It really is that what do I do about, like let's not too theory, let's not do origin, let's not do why and how and analysis, which I love, which was why writing a workbook.
It's hard. I'm like, I want to explain this. No, just like do this. Here's this. Do these step one, two, three. I love the recipe analogies. I don't cook, but I really struggle where if I want to make something, where's the damn recipe? So that's genius.
For people who are like, okay, I'm in a rush. I want to or at least I've come to the workbook to get the stuff done. Make it easier for me. You do that. You give people this nice questionnaire and the beginning where people can figure out whether they're a thinker, a feeler, a doer or a beer. Tell me a little bit more about these different kinds of information processing system brain mind things.
Sure. And the academic world calls them like, are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a visual learner? But like, let's not use large words to say what we're saying. Do you like to think about things, feel about things, be about things or do about things and based on those four learning styles, which corresponds to the well researched and longstanding.
I just took it and destroyed it and made it really simple. But like, if you're not a feelings person, there's an entire world of cognitive based exercises available to do. I also put stuff in there that if you only have two minutes, do this. If you want to invest half an hour to do that, sort of like at the gym. It's like, you can do a micro workout or you can do a marathon prep.
Like, there are lots and lots of options. So that workbook is is my answer to the dilemma of I don't want to feel feelings. I have no time. I don't want it. And I'm a different kind of learner. All the workbooks I've seen are generally geared towards feelers thinkers. I want to sit and get my feather quill and dip it in my ink and right. It's like, not everyone needs that.
Not everyone likes that. Not everyone will do that. So this was myself for that particular dilemma. It works. You do the questionnaire. You get the. It also helps because everybody likes to get labeled psychologically. So this is. And take quizzes. Yeah, yes. So this. So you get that right out the bat. But you everybody likes to get labeled psychologically. You're an actual psychological expert person who created a thing that helps a person understand how they might want to go through this book.
And then when you go from section to section, you can just skip to the thinker part of the field or part or do what I wanted to do, which was I want to read every variation of this to see how they compare contrast. And I thought that was really fun. The other thing and I love this your daily practice. So instead of me telling it to people, please tell people your daily practice. I love this so much.
It's just two things. One, make your bed or your side of the bed. And it doesn't have to be like a whole like home blogger situation. Like get up, smooth the sheets, fold the blanket, done. Boom. Daily practice. One.
Daily practice too is you're going to pick two things at the end of the day. And this is old school pen and paper stuff. Keep a post it by your bed. Write down one good thing that happened that day. And I'm not talking about journal, your gratitude list. It's like what's one thing that didn't suck that happened to you today. Great.
That frimes an area of your brain to start scanning for like confirmation biases. We see what we're programmed to look for telling yourself that today sucked, but here was one good thing that happened does set your brain. So when you wake up in the morning, it's primed to scan for that.
And then the second thing is what's one small microscopic easy to do thing you want to get done the next day. Like what's what like I don't care how long you're to do list is minus two, but this practice is right one thing that didn't suck and write one tiny micro step that you're going to get done the next day.
Something so easy to do. It's easier to just do it than argue with yourself about doing it. And that's it. My daily practice takes less than a minute to do and the bang for your book the ROI, if you will, is is really like remarkable. Why is this bed thing an actual evidence based this does actually work thing like I please do be skeptical. I would be very upset with anyone who hears about this and isn't like, but there we've got so it seems to work. It seems to work pretty well.
What is it about the making up your bed right away thing that seems to get people on a certain path. I was so mad about that. I'm like, are you kidding how many years of therapy grad school destroying my life with drugs and shenanigans and you're telling me I'm going to make my bed and that's the thing. Like this stuff is infuriating because it's so simple. So like and the make your bed thing is a thing there are research studies and people writing books about it and it's like a whole thing.
The very first thing that happens when we wake up in the morning is we get our phone. We start scrolling and now all of a sudden we're in this brain spin making your bed at its core is a somatic mindfulness activity. That's a fancy way of saying you're doing a thing when you are tactile like using your tactile senses you're touching your sheets you're making the bed from a purely physiological standpoint that does bring your nervous system down out of the rafters.
Having a nervous system set to steady is a very good way to start your day versus I'm looking at my phone and now I'm in 90 miles an hour and fifth gear and I can't think and I can't see so making your bed is a somatic practice number one. So that's the body based component the psychological component is making your bed keeps a teeny tiny little micro promise to yourself that you say to yourself unconsciously.
I am worth doing this thing I am making my bed and that one simple activity one tells me I'm worth doing therefore that sets my brain in a certain way. But to you get a release of a reward chemical every time you just like little treat culture has taken this and run with it way to the dark side like every time I do a little thing I'm going to get a little thing.
This is make your bed get a micro dose of happy juice in your brain making your bed has a somatic component thought component a psychological component and a subconscious like shadow work or young component it does a lot of jobs doing that one stupid damn little thing. I want to give people one of their little tidbit this is not a little treat.
I want people to know you've got the book goes into relationships and decluttering your mind and getting what you want out of life the illusion of work life balance anxiety trauma all sorts of fun stuff your inner critic I love the part on the inner critic how to how to reframe your inner critic and imagine it in different versions.
I want to get a little just talk about procrastination for a second we've done a whole episode about this but there's something completely new in here something completely fascinating and wildly easily accessible and app and quickly applicable what is the intention action gap what is the sea of stuck and what is this bridge you're going to build across it.
So the intention action gap is the researchers word for you're not doing the thing you know you're supposed to be doing that's going to make your life good so get off the damn couch and do the thing we call that the intention action gap meaning I know I want to do a thing and over here when I have done the thing yay life gets better and in between is this chasm and that's the
reason where stories and narrative and what's wrong with me and why can't I do it and why didn't you know my second grade neighbor feed me her lunch when I act like we don't need to get in I call that the sea of stuck we don't need to dive into the sea of stuck what we need to do when there's a giant intention action gap and everyone wants to go down into the into the
this and go into the why like I do analysis by trade I'm happy to analyze it but we can analyze why you're in the water and you're still going to be in the damn water so like instead let's build a bridge from the intention that you have to the action that you want to be in the water and across that bridge are I have like the four I have like the sticky four S's thing like we need to solve for certain very practical things and once you solve for those things you can
then if you want to analyze why the sea is down there like call me and we'll figure it out I yeah that's great I I love the S's there their systems support starts and safety each one gets its own section clearly you need to have systems in place clearly support is a very good thing safety has its own thing what is starts I loved I read that I was like what do you mean and then it was like wrong this is such a
big thing I loved it I love it this what just very briefly what is the starts pillar yeah that let's get to the recipe like most people know the feeling of once I get to the gym I'm fine once I get to the events I'm fine it's I can't seem to get myself there and so a lot of people want to solve for mile nine of a marathon like we need to solve from your bed to the starting gate like how do we solve for starts and it's not sexy and it's not like Instagramables so no one really likes to do it.
Instagramables so no one really likes to talk about how to solve for starts but we have to generate not motivation that's a total not a thing like motivation comes after you start not before and so we have to start with here are some microsteps you can do to sort of like trick your own physiology into giving you mobility that will then generate the motivation that will keep you going so starts is let's solve for initial momentum and then like you know laws of physics take over one.
So you have momentum. This is so good people listening do you hear you hear this this is what I'm talking about every diet book could be eat less exercise.
It's how do you eat less an exercise board that's what we're worried about here so these starts conversations are this beautiful meta moment and you kill it and you get it comes across in the way that things and you take the language that you've created in these metaphors and the similes and you talk about how procrastination there are two types and you say this is quoting Brit procrastination is a fancy way to say quote I tried to cross the intention action gap but fell into the sea of stuck.
I will use that for years I will attribute it to you I love it and that's one form procrastination and you say how the other form is sort of a sign you've shifted into survival mode so guess what people who get the workbook this is a completely new way for Brit to tell you about how to get out of procrastination it's advice for anxiety and trauma and your inner critic and how to OK you those are not things you're worried about right now what you were to go right now is
you're trying to get be mindful and declutter your maybe you're worried about work maybe you're considering oh I think maybe I am co dependent what does that mean though I wish Brit Frank would tell me what co dependency is and that's what you get with this workbook you get the recipe you want the other thing Brit has a book with that full of that too we'll talk about all about her history at her past and her fun strange Byzantine path to becoming one of the world's greatest therapists fine but here's a workbook that's going to be a lot of work.
But here's a workbook for you to get your stuff done this is my full endorsement get this thing do you have anything else to say Brit. I think you said it all thanks so much for having me on it's always a pleasure always a pleasure let's hang out soon.
OK I want to give you some things so that you can actually do stuff after listening to this episode or you can just go all the way through this episode back and forth back and forth and refer to things one of those things I want to give you is the entire
the entire episode that we did with Brit Frank about procrastination and that's going to be at the end of this after I stopped talking after the advertisements that episode will play it's the most downloaded episode of the show it's the most popular episode of the show it's a good episode that comes up after this but also thought you might want to know about the timeline of the intention action gap how does this become a thing how do we label this well the short story of it is in the
1950s behaviorism was all the rage with leaders in the field like BF skitter who focused on the observable the measurable behavior you could quantify and also observable measurable stimuli and reinforcements that influenced those behaviors and since internal states weren't directly observable it wasn't really until the 1960s and 70s that cognitive psychology began to emerge with emphasis on internal mental states including intentions that's been leaders in the field of cognitive psychology
developed the theory of reasoned action which emphasize that human behaviors are very much influenced by intentions which themselves are shaped by many external forces like social norms and prevailing attitudes the expectations and judgments of the people with whom you spend your time
and further still we produce all manner of justifications and rationalizations and reasons for our intentions to behave and that gets into the very essence of you are not so smart about what we talk about here what we've been talking about here for a very long time biases, fallacies, heuristics and motivated reasoning because over the next 20 years work in the lab and in the therapist's office and in the psychiatrist's rounds all that stuff contributed to this theory of reasoned action
and it became a comprehensive framework for understanding both how people get stuck in loops and how they get out of those loops so from the mid 1980s to the 2000s the intention action gap became a centerpiece of this theory of reasoned action and in the world of health and medicine psychologists studied why people did and did not follow their doctors instructions or take their medicine or exercise or eat well in economics
researchers explored how cognitive biases and heuristics affected decision making and judgment often causing people's intentions and outcomes to become wildly misaligned and they studied how people could be nudged psychologically in the direction of what they actually intended to do or be nudged away from their intentions
and in pretty much all of the social sciences and the fields that they advise like politics and education researchers studied how reputation and status the imagined judgment of others affected everything that we've talked about in this episode and beyond that's how we got this thing, we got this incredible framework that is really well understood and we know it works in therapists and psychiatrists and doctors use it everywhere
we're going to get into more of that in a second but a couple of things that I don't think we were able to get to that are important that are inside this framework there's the if-then planning system if you create a if-then sort of algorithm for yourself the research shows that this really works like if it is 7 a.m. and it is Monday, Wednesday or Friday I will put on my running shoes and I will go for a walk or a run or something like that
creating these automated responses reduces cognitive load of decision making and you're more likely to do the thing something else that is definitely effective is tracking keep a journal or use an app use one of those posters that has little check marks in it something what gets tracked gets changed keeps you accountable but also provides insights into your patterns and it works and meditate learn how to do it get better at it
the more you meditate the more mindful you become the more that part of your brain becomes better at engaging and mindfulness and mindfulness is a force multiplier for all of the things we talked about in this episode and everything that we're going to talk about and maybe most importantly everything you do when it comes to getting stuck in these loops and not doing the thing you ought to be doing
there's a context for it there's a reason for it. Britt Frank says that the question that new clients most often ask her is am I crazy and she usually tells them well when you see somebody flailing their arms and screaming after walking through a spider web you don't think that they're crazy you just think they're responding to the situation to the inputs to the stimulus and that's what you're doing right now
so no you're not crazy and even though it's great to understand why you're doing what you're doing you don't have to you have a great freedom here you don't need to understand what's causing the response even if it's something like deep inside of you to get unstuck and it's one of the great takeaways of Britt Frank's work not that isn't awesome to understand it's just you don't have to what's more important in the beginning is building momentum
and the getting unstuck workbook it's great for this because Britt wrote it in such a way that you just do the exercises one page at a time that's how it works that's how it's meant to work the change model here is built around building momentum
which you can do with a book like this by reading it one section at a time and doing the activity that section tells you how to do bit by bit you will build momentum and at a certain point there's a good chance you will surprise yourself when that momentum sling shots you out of the stuck place and we'll get deeper still into all of these things with even more actionable advice after this break okay here's the thing I was talking about at the very beginning of the show before the show started
I just accepted a position as vice president and director of the school of thoughts so there's some news it's a nonprofit organization I love this place I've been a fan of the school thought for years that I was very happy to join because this nonprofit organization provides free creative commons critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide you have most likely seen some of the things that they produce
I guess now I should say we produce and their mission I suppose I should also say our mission now is to help popularize critical thinking reason media literacy scientific literacy and desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility so you can see why I would totally be into this so one of my first actions is to tell you that the founders of the school of thought have just launched something new called kitted thinking tools k it eity kitted thinking tools
and the way this works is you go to the website you pick out the kit that you want and there's lots of them and the school thought will send you a kit of very nice beautifully designed well curated high quality each one about double the size of a playing card Matt cello 400 gsm stock prompt cards
in a nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions optimize user and customer experience and design elevate strategic planning and decision making mitigate risks and liabilities much much more that's right the school thought is expanding into helping institutions organizations startups campaigns and businesses become better at thinking by offering discrete
mental modules that you can use alone or together by mixing and matching them to vastly improve your and your teams decision making skills and this is a tangible way to master those skills by integrating them into your everyday workflows each kit can if you want to use it that way interact with this crazy cool app the kid at app and each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more
each kit features modular tools in a comprehensive range of practical exercises so you can become well-kitted get it that's the name well-kitted to design and facilitate a workshop that gets the best out of everyone involved yourself included you even get PowerPoint and keynote templates to make slides kid it gives you thinking superpower is using a modular system of mental model cards and you can think of it like building blocks for higher order
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and now we return to our program welcome back to the show what follows from here is the procrastination episode as promised and here it is as Oscar Wilde once said I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after as Bill Waterson the creator of Calvin Hobbes once said you can't turn on creativity like a faucet you have to be in the right mood what mood is that last minute panic and as Bill Waterson also said a day can slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do
and that's usually when we start to wonder what the hell is wrong with us when we notice days have passed because we've been working really hard to not do the thing it could be putting off laundry putting off dishes putting off emails putting off work putting off school
but it's putting off something we all do it but there are times in life when we do it to excess when it causes real problems that's what I want to talk about how to get out of that pro is Latin by the way for four and crass is Latin for tomorrow so pro-crass is for tomorrow
and two procrastinators to continuously put off things until tomorrow and then tomorrow do that again and again and again as Zé Frank once said a good procrastination should feel like you're inserting lots and lots of commas into the sentence of your life
I've always wanted to do an episode about procrastination but I never got around to it 13 years ago I made an animated short a video to promote the launch of you are not so smart the book and the topic of that video was pro-crass denation manifest itself within every aspect of your life
you wait until the last minute to buy Christmas presents you put off seeing the dinners for getting that thing checked out by the doctor Wow 13 years ago but I kept putting off doing an episode about this because I didn't want to just give you a bunch of descriptions of what this is
I wanted to give you some advice some prescriptive advice from a scientist from an expert about what to do when this gets on top of you and it really starts to mess with your life as Britt Frank puts it, procrastination is not a character flaw nor is it a sign of weakness nor the sign of laziness
procrastination is quote an indicator that internal consent has not been given when our inner parts are distressed afraid, sad, angry, grief-stricken or anxious is important to listen to their concerns not to shame them or curse them into action in the quote
one of my favorite studies into procrastination by Dan Arelelli involved students in three different classes each one told that their entire grade would be based on how they did on three essays those essays had to be turned in all three of them by the 12th week, the last week of the class
but each class that was told this was given different options about deadlines one class was told, turn them in whenever you turn them in, find with me the second class was told you must pick your own deadlines for essays one, two, and three and you have to do that one week from today
they were told that on the first day of class and a third class they were just given deadlines by the professor essay one, fourth week, essay two, eighth week, essay three, twelfth week so of these three classes which one do you think had the highest grades on average
well the best grades were earned by the class whose professor set the deadlines and enforced them they procrastinated the least or they spread their procrastination evenly the second best grades the students who had to pick their deadlines and lock them in in the first week
in that class people tended to spread them out kind of evenly but a large portion chose the very last day or they chose deadlines they couldn't actually meet and they pulled down the scores of everybody else the worst grades the class with no deadlines at all
why? because they procrastinated the most Dan Erielli writing about all this said that he felt the findings suggested quote not everyone understands their tendency to procrastinate and even those who do recognize their tendency to procrastinate
may not understand their problem completely in the quote but he also wrote quote interestingly these results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize
available tools for pre-commitment and by doing so help themselves overcome it in the quote the research suggests if you fail to believe you will procrastinate or you become overly idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time
you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weaknesses and in a previous era I think that would have been the big takeaway for an episode about procrastination but thankfully we have learned a whole lot since then and we have people like Britt Frank
who work with clients to get out of loops generated by procrastination so her advice takes it a lot further than these laboratory derived suggestions to just get better at thinking about your own thinking so what does therapist Britt Frank have to say about all this?
well this is the segue into our interview Hi I'm Britt Frank and I am a licensed psychotherapist and human behavior expert and author of The Science of Stuck Breaking Through Enersha so this whole procrastination thing that's sort of my thing and I am a recovering disaster of a human and I have done this work from both sides of the couch for a long long time so that's me in a nutshell procrastination, what is this thing?
it seems very human because it involves planning and metacognition and thinking about thinking and imagining yourself in the future world and prospection and all those things I don't imagine like storks and trout and like slime molds
procrastinate so it feels almost like yeah this is this almost feels like in the world a free will and what makes us more than animals but also this is sucks because I'm not the person I want to be and now I hate myself and oh look at you piece of shit for not doing what you're supposed to do and all that starts coming in so what is this thing? what is this is a general overview?
so we can get into the science of it and I love that that's what we're here to do but this whole everyone gives up on their resolutions thing is pragmatically it makes sense you've spent all of fourth quarter everyone spends fourth quarter being burned up
I holidays and demands and culture and family and then we wonder why in January we don't have the emotional and physical bandwidth to go follow through on all these huge plans like New Year's resolutions should be set in April after spending first quarter getting your battery recharged
set New Year's resolutions in April and they're going to get done January your tank's empty and then we're wondering like you don't need an advanced neuroscience to create to be like I wonder why January goals don't make it you know past the starting gate
it's because you're tired and you're burned out and seen okay so the word procrastination is problematic because I really think the semantics that the language that we use to describe our dilemmas have a huge part in whether or not we're going to find mastery over them
so when you think of procrastination you think of the person sitting on the couch and not doing the thing that they're supposed to be doing and they're lazy and they're unmotivated and all of the research on procrastination by and large approaches it as a mindset issue
you know and then we talk about metacognition and what's the nature of free will and thinking about thinking and we can think our way into a lot of things but you can't think your way out of procrastination because if you could it would have worked by now
procrastination is a physiological nervous system response and if you go to the research you're not going to see a whole lot about that because procrastination is funneled into the mindset world not into the physiology of how we do and why we do what we do world
a nervous system stuck in freeze is what we call procrastination a nervous system stuck in freeze isn't going to do a damn thing until you get it out of freeze but we're not taught that that's what it is nor are we taught how to do it so procrastination is a physiological response
that doesn't make any excuse that doesn't mean it's okay and that doesn't mean we have to stay stuck there but it does change the nature of the problem if you're not solving the right problem and you're not going to give anywhere so procrastination is a physical problem not a mental one I think a physiology versus metacognition thinking stuff is brain versus mind is that a where you're at too?
okay so like brain is this goop wiggling around in your skull that has all sorts of things that affected your entire evolutionary history of our species every input coming through the senses every synthesis within there that you're not privy to this stuff happening that you don't get to experience
it's not offered up to consciousness brain stuff physical brain stuff so like if I touch a stove, ow, mostly brain then my thoughts of like you're a piece of shit what would you look at that or whatever I'm thinking or I shouldn't have done that or hey I tell a story about it or I laugh to myself getting more into mind stuff in the right space?
absolutely and you know when you burn your hand on a stove you may yell at yourself for being dumb enough to touch the stove but no one is wondering why your hand hurts it's like hand ow stove hot that makes sense it's when we attach the narrative of why did it happen and how did this happen
and what kind of a person am I that I burned my hand on the stove it's like if you don't want to burn your hand on a stove you learn stovs are hot and you don't touch them it is that simple and with procrastination we get stuck in this mind loop of I wonder why
and what does this mean about me as a person and where in my childhood did someone not hug me or listen to my problem so now I'm stuck binge watching hour six of my thing but if you know the physiology of it you don't have to sit and swirl in the metacognition
most people don't want to understand why they procrastinate they just want to stop doing it I'm a therapist I love understanding but insight doesn't get you moving right yeah that may be what am I biggest flaws it's like I need to understand this if I'm going to accomplish anything
but yeah I don't necessarily understand how muscle fibers work for me to lift weights and get the benefits from it so I hear you I don't need to understand I don't need the degree involved in anything gastrological to reap the benefits of a better diet so okay so let's think about the brain
as a physiological organ body part made of stuff and then mind is something that it does okay this helps a whole lot and you've written about this in other places and one of the things I love is you you come right out of the gate whenever you do write about this saying
that this is not a character flaw and it's not a sign of weakness and it's not a sign of laziness that seems like a hot take that can be something that I can feel people pushing back on modern Western cultures are especially a lot of the United States Western cultures are just like if I'm not working the point that other people are like wow and if I'm not losing sleep because I'm so devoted to profits and I am really a poor example of being a person what are your thoughts on that stuff?
People get so mad at me when I say that procrastination is not a lazy problem it's like are you say I don't know where people equated explanation with excuse they're not synonymous you know understanding the physiology procrastination is not be co-signing on it
or saying that you should subscribe to it like they're just lazy okay well let's go into the science if I'm laying on the couch and my nervous system is shut down and I'm procrastinating and then I say I'm so lazy I suck I'm unmotivated that will create
more cortisol that will create an amplified state of the thing that I am trying to break out of so the whole you're not lazy is not a let me patch you on the head and give you a pass on not doing what you're supposed to be doing it's a physiological reality
that when you beat the crap out of yourself you create more stress hormones and more of the fear response that created the inertia in the first place so laziness is not the explanation but knowing that it's not laziness doesn't mean like okay just don't do things because it's a fear response
it's like knowing that your car is out of gas doesn't make it okay that you should just leave it it means you just get to the gas station like go fill it up I'm imagining that kind of person is like will cars out of gas? I'm done and if you do that people do that every single day like this is just this is where I'm at I'm stuck so I should just be this way it's like now the gas station is right up the street okay Doug wow wow people are so good okay well let's get to this braid versus mine thing
this illuminating and empowering first of all just knowing the procrastination is a physiological thing is incredibly freeing and you go in deeper details saying that procrastination is what happens your brain receives a real or imagined threat so the perception of threat has occurred
possibly without your knowledge or your awareness and then you receive the downstream effects of brain feels threatened help me understand that a little bit so we know that the nervous system has the the on and the off switch the sympathetic the aparice empathetic the gas pedal the brake pedal
and so if we get threatened for any reason inexplicably subconsciously physiologically this is the beautiful part about this work is you don't need to know why your brains freaked out in order to get it moving but you can get stuck in a sympathetic response getting stuck on on
and that's when you're racing around and you have insomnia and your house gets really clean but your email doesn't get sent or you can get stuck in the off direction and that's what we call laziness or fatigue or lack of motivation or all those other things but the physiology of the nervous system
is it gets stuck on on or gets stuck on off or it goes back and forth and rapidly switches between the two and knowing that there's an on switch and an off switch is not just are you procrastinating it's what direction are you procrastinating are you stuck on up or are you stuck on down
and the logical state requires a different set of tools to help it get unstuck okay I fully heard you I did I do understand I don't actually have to know what has generated this what my brain without my awareness has determined might possibly be a threat
and is starting to encourage me to behave in a certain way but I would like to know what are some examples that just come to mind immediately of things that could possibly generate this response sure and sometimes it's as simple as procrastinating going to the gym because going to the gym hearts
and I don't want to be uncomfortable it doesn't have to be code red super deep childhood trauma stuff it's an energy conservation strategy to not do things and we know that our brains prefer to conserve energy because that's what brains are designed to do
to seek out patterns to find ways to go on auto pilot and to keep us alive and energy conservation is a physiological default doesn't mean we have to stay stuck there and it's going to be easier to not do the thing then it won't do the thing and you have to program it you have to train it
that no, no, like long term it's better if we go this way because of these reasons but again you can sit there and analyze well my brain shouldn't feel unsafe I don't know why I'm feeling unsafe why am I so freaked out it could be energy conservation it could be image preservation
if you get up and do things people are going to expect more from you there are financial resources that you have to risk by getting up and launching the business there are a lot of reasons that people benefit from inertia and from doing nothing but no one wants to admit that
but again the good news is it doesn't matter why your brain is scared it can be scared for any number of reasons it's cold, I don't want to get up at five in the morning and go for a run because cold is bad cold hurts, hurt is bad so okay we can train your brain out of that response
but if you don't know that it's a fear response and not a character flaw you're not going to be able to intervene in a successful efficient way when I'm doing that most of all usually it's going to, when I'm like okay I am going into bunker mode I'm not answering emails I'm not doing things for a while what gets me more locked into it is trying to figure out why am I doing this? what caused this? was I triggered by something? what are these triggers?
what is this thing that I haven't really, a strange form of nostalgia it feels almost like wormholes or popping up inside of my conscious awareness going back to previous times in my life where I've done this before and I start remembering the emotional state and mindset of a younger version of myself or a more troubled version of myself and then that starts make me feel like okay so you're going crazy now
right? like that's what this is because then it starts to feel more threatening as you described and I start to dig in deeper to bunker mode which is procrastination where I'm like becoming really good at it becoming matrix dodging emails like bullets like I'm great and then I'm like
oh no now I'm developing a skill as a great procrastinator and it starts to freak me out the only way I have to like shove myself back into the world and just take it partly why I want to talk to you about this so the I just open the hatch on the side of my plane and jump
and back into life and I'm like oh and that's how I usually escape that loop but probably not a good way to do it there are so many gems in what you just said I'm like oh wait no that point no that point no that point but what you said about your brain left unchecked
left not in action is going to start associating and if you're free associating you're going to start on a procrastination state like you said you're going to free associate back to the last time it felt like this and what was going on there and then this association thing creates loop
and the solution to those unchecked free associations is to find a this is my little sticky thing I call the micro yes it's smaller than a small step it's smaller than a baby step it's the smallest possible step you can say yes to where your nervous system isn't going to freak out on you
a micro yes we'll stay out of moving but yeah for associating while your procrastinating is never going to leave somewhere good I should have talked to you sooner at least I noticed it so I give myself one micro high five for noticing it
and then I never thought of procrastination as having these two modes and I think that's super cool parasympathetic nervous system procrastination we're going to say that's one of these modes this is the break pedal of your body what does that mean and what it how does it
how does it usually manifest and what are some ways out of that one so you're a nerve in your head that vagus nerve has gotten super trendy which I think is absolutely hilarious that now it's all about biohack your vagus nerve and create vagal tones
you can stay out of parasympathetic it's very strange to me that that's now trendy nevertheless there's a nerve in your head that when it's like danger for whatever reason perceived real historical whatever it shuts you down and they put you in a state of freeze
and there are really cool videos about opossums playing dead that you can look at when we're talking about this and we say that they play dead they're not actually playing dead in the face of a threat their body is go completely limp and they look like they're dead and if you went over and poked it
it looks dead but it's not that's their nervous system preparing them for threat or if you've ever watched this is like every shark week on Discovery Channel every time someone I have a point here promise every time someone describes getting like bit by a shark
they all say the same thing I felt the pressure I felt the crunch but it didn't hurt it wasn't until I got to the shore that I realized what had happened and that's called shock and the shock response is a very extreme version of what we're talking about parasympathetic procrastination is like a very low level shock response it's your body deploying all of those nummies so we don't move because getting bit by a shark hurts great comfort in knowing that if that were to happen
the body shock system makes it so you don't feel it happening while it's happening so if you're listening to this and you're like I already finished Elden Ring and I'm playing this 150-hour video game for the second time and I seem I got to put all these plans and then I
but then I went and sat down and sort of planned this game and then at some point I was like well it was too late to get started on anything or it could be a Netflix you're like I'm going to go ahead and watch that documentary everybody's talking about and well that wasn't long enough I'm going to switch to well I'm going to rewatch parks and recreation and go through the whole thing this feels like we're in are we talking about something similar here?
Yes although you could make a case for depending on what video game you're playing that could be a sympathetic arousal state versus a parasympathetic shutdown state but it's the same thing but again these narratives that we attach to these physiological states perpetuate the loop so rather than saying why am I doing this? I wonder what's contributing to this? I wonder why I'm triggered? That's not going to break this loop.
Micro-yeses break the loop and they need to be micro-yeses because most of the steps that we want to take are too big for our nervous system it's like I want to get up off the couch and go do a thing my nervous system is going to go no all right well I want to go
at least get off the couch and go get a snack the system might say no like you have to find a micro-yes and that breaks the loop and then we can figure out the how and the why and the where and the who I want to break out if I remember correctly I think it's called fanatosis
whenever a possum does that thing you get that whole structure in your brain that you fight flight freeze all valuable tools handed to us down through the ages to survive really bad things okay I'm in the freeze place I'm in the fanatosis place I'm in the
parasympathetic breaks are being applied I'm getting the nummies what are some things I could possibly what are some micro things I can do to like get these little yeses get that momentum started up and this is the other place where people really push back hard
and you know my defense is I didn't come up with the brains designed so you know don't get mad at me sometimes a micro-yes can be as simple as if you're sitting on the couch with your feet going one way shift your orientation on the couch so your feet are going in another way
any time you shake the snow globe of the brain up in any direction in any way it could be if you're wearing socks take them off and then put your feet on the ground it could be sort of just movement usually is the best way to intervene on a parasympathetic state of shutdown thinking won't ever do it
sometimes thinking will work in the sympathetic state but if you're in a parasympathetic shutdown the most effective intervention is just move like even if you're just moving your head to the other side of the bed that sometimes can be enough to break that particular loop move a little bit
bit and then jump on the couch do you know that might be too big but like yeah if you jump up on down on the couch and people go that sounds so stupid i'm like great that's fine you don't have to listen to me try your way see how well it works and then we can talk
after it doesn't but movement is a very quick way to get things going things like cold if you have a glass of ice water in front of you while you're quote procrastinating take the ice and shove it down the back of your shirt because cold
will help your system come out of that state of shutdown ironically freezing cold breaks freeze in your nervous system which is odd we want to escalate hopefully i'm assuming to get to get on a bicycle and take a walk and things like really move like get out there and walk around
and do things are i'm going too fast too soon too fast too soon most people want to do that but they won't i had a guy i worked with and the first two months of our therapy it was cold i don't know if there's snow if you're listening to this but take off your shoes and stand outside barefoot
in the snow and that's a really good starting place like this client we we weren't going to get into trauma we weren't going to get into how do you feel or what do you think it's hey bro you live in a body and your body is a biological organism and this person was so detached and in such a
state of shutdown that their physiology couldn't even register basic sensations let alone emotions let alone metacognitions so we started by standing barefoot in the snow i was not a happy camper but that was a very successful intervention and then from there we were able to build onto the micro yes
like James clear we call these atomic habits it's in the same zone it's like the micro yes will get you to a small step and that small step will lead to a bigger leap but everyone wants to go from start to yeah i'm doing the thing i want to do and that's just not how our physiology is
designed we're not wired to go from stuck to awesome we need to go from stuck to point one and then that'll compound and then we can get moving so i mean a micro yes is even smaller than a baby step because what people will label as a baby step if you're not doing it that's not because you suck it's
because that step is too big for your brain and if you want to build capacity for larger steps we can build what they call in the somatic world your window of tolerance but you can't increase your window of tolerance while you're stuck and locked in a freeze response order of operations break
through the freeze response get moving and then we can work on developing more capacity later okay so the other mode is sympathetic of nervous system procrastination i am sorry to the entire world that we name these things this way mode one that's breaks mode two this is gas pedal
how is this different from the other thing i i again it blows my mind there are two kinds of procrastination and this is the other side there's the other kind this is the kind when you really want to stop you really want to be done and close your screen and not answer another email or like
i know that i've like i'll go to the restroom after i answered this email no now this email now this email then it's oh crap like now we have trouble but it's when you're racing around and you can't we call this insomnia we call this ADHD and a disclaimer i'm not saying ADHD is not real and i'm
not saying you shouldn't take meds often a sympathetic arousal state will get mislabeled and misdiagnosed as ADHD but oh we talked to your doctor first and i'm not here to diagnose you but again that's stuck in the up stuck on the gas pedal requires a different set of tools or i mean the easiest way to understand this is if you've ever been angry at your partner and they tell you to calm down or to take a
deep breath and you want to punch them that's what we're talking about you can't take a deep breath and calm yourself down when you're stuck on up that's not what your brain wants to do your brain wants to
go and run and get the hell away from whatever things is happening and you can't deep breath your way through that sometimes you can but not often i dig this side of procrastination is something that i have done many times and i didn't think it was procrastination this is working really hard at
the thing that you're not supposed to be doing you wrote you called it productive procrastination like like it feels like i'm well i'm not i don't i'm not experiencing the shame of being not being on the couch i'm not experiencing the shame of not doing anything but you are actively
attempting to avoid the thing you ought to be doing and push it down the line and i find that uh really neat that we can trick ourselves so so effectively what do you do to get out of this this seems this seems way harder well partially this one's harder because it's so commended
look at you you're working so hard you're so productive you can get all of the things done so if you're not recognizing that and again if you're doing all of the things and it's coming at no personal cost to you those are not the situations to which i refer this is i know i should go to
sleep but i'm still i feel stuck on my computer i feel like i can't power down i feel like i can't leave i feel like i just can't stop doing the thing and i should really be eating or sleeping or humaning with other humans or whatever that's what we're talking about and it's counterintuitive
but the solution to sympathetic procrastination is not to slow down because again if you could you would it's not to take a breath it's not to sit there and to box breathing or try to settle or take some big stretches it's to make it faster and this is an intervention i learned as a play therapist
early in my career when children are dysregulated you're not going to tell a toddler calm down you're not going to tell a seven year old who is just buzzing around the room having the zoomies that like they just need to take a deep breath what you do in those situations is you make it bigger
like if someone is dysregulated let's make it really in a safe contained way but like if you can't get off the computer i'd be like like air type as fast as you can what we want to do is engage your physiology to know it's getting away like if we boil it down to what's happening on an animal
level your body is trying to get away from something so if you go fast enough this is where running in place is really useful this is where pushing on a wall is really useful if i'm with a tantrum in kid i'll match their intensity and stop my feet as hard as i can with them because doing that
actually gets that thing cycled through their body that's not magically going to cure your insomnia just air type really fast for 30 seconds and you'll magically get eight hours of sleep i'm not saying that i am saying if you want to break the loop make it bigger make it faster the same client that
was standing out in the snow we did a lot of planks and a lot of pushing on walls because when you get stuck on on our intuition tells us to slow it down but what we actually need to do is speed up there's a work version of it too i used to work in cubicle land and wow you can come up with all
sorts of ways to be busy that aren't the thing you you are trying to avoid and then working from homeland oh yeah like like one of my go-tos is like i really should research that a little deeper your research rabbit holes yes i really should go to learn everything there is to know about
whistles where did they come from like this feels very productive i'll put that into a file and then look at all the work i did it's the it's the narrative in both directions that keeps us stuck in the the off parasympathetic mode the narrative that keeps you stuck is i'm lazy in the sympathetic
mode the narrative that keeps you stuck is look at me go i'm awesome so we have to un couple these narratives from the physiology and just address the physiology know wise no thinking required so what about the at this brings us to the big caveat question i shouldn't i wait like what i
want is motivation like should i be doing what a desire is some way to get me to feel motivated or or i need someone to motivate me or i need to engage in a behavior that will result in motivation for the other stuff that i'm concerned about and motivation is the is the secret sauce
that i'm trying to find and once i get it and drink it everything's taken care of what are your thoughts on motivation bit frank i have many thoughts on motivation the biggest myth of motivation thanks for that tia that was nice so the biggest myth of motivation is that it's a mindset issue
but just like procrastination motivation is physiological motivation is a state of your body doing and being and going motivation happens after you start doing the things not before like uh and this whole motivation a secret sauce thing what people don't realize is that once your brain feels
safe and you get it out of fight flight freeze a nervous system that's regulated doesn't need to seek motivation it just is motivated your body is always motivated it's either motivated to conserve energy and survive a lion attack or it's motivated to do what you want it to do so it's not like once
i feel it then i'll do it that doesn't work it's like start doing it and then you'll feel it and then also to know that motivation because it's an affect state that you don't need to feel like it to do it oh my god if we all wait until we felt like doing things to do things no one would do
things because motivation is not the thing that comes before you do the things motivation is the feeling state that happens after you do the things for people who are listening to this and they're like okay give me advice on how to get started
if you were bullet pointed or number it or just something simple to just something to get people out the door today metaphorically what what is what would you recommend the actionable i have a three step formula it's great here's the three but no one wants to do it because it sounds too
simple so again i would say okay do it your way and then try it this way and then we'll talk the three steps to breaking through procrastination regardless of your motivation state step one don't ask why stop thinking just know that there's a reason why and you don't need to know what
it is so step one don't ask why step two ask what are three micro yeses available to me right now in this moment that i can do step three pick one do it repeat again i want to reiterate there's a book this person you're listening to wrote called the science of stuck uh which has more than this is
this is like a page and a half of the kind of stuff that's in there so i really recommend it i do feel empowered so thanks but also i feel berated in a way which which it helps it's just just just really don't i need to hear some don't do that's is uh that's how i function and and which helps
me be more open to do do these other things i'm looking forward to the next stuff you you put out if you're interested in listening to brit frank talk about things or write about things what are some places where you're putting stuff outside of that book right now so come find me on instagram at
brit frank or on my website scienceofstuck.com oh that is it for this episode of the you are not so smart podcast for links to everything that we talked about head to you are not so smart calm there's a link in your show notes inside your
podcast player you also find a link to my book how minds change and to my new newsletter disambiguation for more brit frank go to scienceofstuck.com her book is the science of stuck her social media is usually b-r-i-t-t-f-r-a-n-k and here i am dropping into let you know the new book is the getting
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