Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 252.

That's the voice of psychologist, therapist, trauma expert, author, speaker, science, advocate, and science communicator.

Written Frank, who you may remember from her appearance on this show around this time last year, an episode about her book, The Science of Stuck.

In that episode, we talked about her therapeutic approach and, as the title suggests, the science behind what gets people stuck and unstuck in life.

I highly recommend that episode. It's number 230. It's definitely one of the overall audience favorites for the show.

So I wanted to bring Brit back because, well, it's February. And I'm thinking that by now you must be feeling a bit overwhelmed.

And I want you to know based on the science, based on the evidence, if you only just now started working and answering emails like in earnest and eating properly, it just means you're a normal human being living in a really weird time.

And everyone else around you, I promise, is slowly and begrudgingly starting to accept the fact that it's 2023.

Yeah, it's 2023. COVID-19? The 19 was for 2019. So for many of us, there's an expectation to get back to work, to redefine work, to get our lives back on track with this new year appearing, to put the pandemic behind us or something like that, and to make up for lost time.

I'm not saying that's actually possible, but it is going to be an expectation. And so a lot more to do this material has arrived in our lives recently, asking for our attention and our effort.

And deadlines are multiplying and spreading across work and life and family and friends for many of us.

So I suspect that right above now, you are starting to reap the rewards of your particular flavor, a pro-crastination.

As Oscar Wilde once said, I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after.

As Bill Watson, 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 Watson 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, progress is for tomorrow. And to procrastinate is 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.

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