You feel like you are in a constant battle with yourself, because a large part of your nervous system is a mechanism devoted to surviving. As a general rule, anything that feels painful is to be avoided and for this reason human beings continually seek instant gratification. On a simple, moment-to-moment basis, indulging in pleasurable activities means that you are safe and out of harm's way. On a long-term basis though, it's a strategy that just impoverishes your life.

Overcoming your survival instincts is incredibly hard and will power just isn't sufficient in the long-term. The main problem is that when you consciously set out to do something, you also send signals to the more primitive part of your brain about what you want to achieve. That part of the brain will continuously monitor what you are doing and what you want to do. If it interprets what you want to do as a risk (which means potentially painful), then it will resist and send out suggestions of other, easier and more pleasurable things to do.

The problem for most of us is that we consciously set out to do things that are difficult to do in the moment. In fact, for practical purposes, what we set out to achieve is impossible to fulfill in the moment of desiring it. It might be possible in the long-term but we operate on an instant gratification basis. Our survival response is, "This is impossible to have/do right now. To attempt the impossible is risky and failure is painful. Resist doing this and instead do something that is instantly possible, gets away from harm and is pleasurable."

To remove this battle against your primitive survival, you have to be very careful about what you set out to do. This is why breaking a large job down into small parts is so important. In order to work in harmony with your survival responses, you have to think and carry out your work on a moment-to-moment basis whereby everything that you want to do is possible at that moment. If it's not possible, then your primitive mind will force you to go off and do something that is possible right now.

On a fundamental level, procrastination hits us when we attempt to do something that is not possible to do. I don't mean absolutely impossible, such as jumping off a building and attempting to fly just by flapping your arms, but impossible to do at the moment of setting out to do or to have something.

Our minds operate on a very logical basis. Although our higher consciousness can fantasize and dream of all kinds of incredible outcomes, when we want something done, we assign the carrying out of that task to the more primitive parts of our nervous system. These parts are totally focused on real world practicalities. If we send signals to our nervous system to do things that are impossible to do at that precise moment, then it will resist. This is based on the simple and fundamental logic that we cannot do impossible things.

If you find yourself continually turning away from getting things done, then it is because you continuously ask yourself to do things that are practically impossible to have done in the moment of wanting them. The solution is to think about what you have to do, or what you want, and then break down the process of how you will go about getting that result. Keeping doing that until you have a series of steps to take, each of which you can do in the moment that you say to yourself, "Okay, I'm going to do this little thing now."

Sometimes you will have to do a lot of preparation in order to get through the whole process, but, on a practical level, you just have to do this. If you cannot make the thing that you want to have practical for you to carry out, then you will never have it. Period. Accept this point and you can start making some real progress.

Human beings are complex creatures and the most overwhelming drive that we have is to survive. That takes precedent over almost all other considerations. On a moment-to-moment basis, the easy method for surviving that works almost all of the time, is just to keep moving away from harm, danger, risk and pain.

Procrastination occurs when what we want to do seems more painful than doing something else that's easier to do. This is in essence a survival response and it's very difficult to overcome by sheer will power alone.

What often happens is that we neglect doing something (because it seems hard) until a change in the balance of what is perceived as threatening to our survival occurs. In the case of a deadline, the threat of failure, of letting people down, of embarrassing, shaming or humiliating ourselves, finally seems a lot more painful and threatening than getting on with the task (which we previously interpreted as being too painful to do).

This is the response of desperation. We neglect things until we have no other option available to us and then we fight and battle in order to survive and in order to avoid worse pain. It works, but it is very stressful. We feel guilty on the run up to the desperate response and we feel panic as we blitz things at the end. It works, but we never get the chance to do our best as end up with no time to do so.

The solution to this is make the task easy and pleasant to do from the beginning, so that the perception of pain doesn't exist and so procrastination doesn't start. That means that you must reduce all of things that you have to do, to a process of steps each of which is easy to carry out. Procrastination will strike you each time that you set out to do something that is not possible to do at the moment of wanting to do it. Instead of turning away, you must analyze that sticking point further, break it down further and make it possible. You will have to do that at some point anyway, if you are to succeed, so accept doing it now, rather than waiting until you are desperate enough to battle through it.

A 'To Do' list sets up a series of objectives for you to carry out. What these objectives do is that they create set point in the mind of what has to be done and what counts as success and what counts as failure. The problem is that this assessment of success and failure is done at the moment of considering what to do. You will consciously think to yourself, "I've got to do this report" but another part of your mind is saying, "I've got to finish this report right now. That's impossible so I'm bound to fail and that's painful. Let's do something easier, more pleasurable and possible right now instead."

The secret to getting things done is that you cannot leave things at the stage of a 'To Do' list. It's simply too vague and the practical part of your nervous system can't respond to that and so it either resists or just runs on idle awaiting further instructions. What you have to do is to create a 'How To Do' list.

You must break each task on your 'To Do' list down into a process. Create a series of steps that can take you from here to there in easy and possible steps. When you create the process steps there might be things that you don't know how to do. That's a problem and it will cause you to procrastinate, so you have to go even deeper into that area and break down the process even further. The only way that you can ever get something done is to make each step along the way possible for you.

The great problem with a lot of good intentions is that they are simply very unrealistic. They might well create a wonderful life, if you could follow-through on them, but more often than not you cannot follow-through because fulfilling your intentions is either impossible, or else highly-improbable.

It's very easy to set a standard, or expectation, of yourself to say, "I must do this and I must do that." You might feel good initially because you know that if you can do those things, then you are a hero and you will get great results. However, most of these expectations and standards are very high and so they are difficult to fulfill. Then, as soon as you get off-track once, you feel that you have failed and that you are no good. You feel pain and it becomes difficult to go back to performing at your high-standard because it's so difficult. You end up caring less and then your performance drops off even more and you associate even more pain with this activity and this level of performance. Before you know it, your performance has dropped right off and you feel disappointed and ashamed of yourself. You'd like to do better but it seems hopeless.

The solution is to build flexibility into your standards and expectations. Instead of having 'must have' constraints, instead have 'would prefer to have' guidelines. You can build in a tolerance band so that you don't have to be perfect on each and every occasion. Instead of saying "I must go to the gym five days a week" change it to "I would prefer it if I go to the gym five days a week, but anywhere between 3 and 5 is acceptable." Ultimately, it is important to accept that you are not perfect and that your performance will vary. That's okay and that's entirely normal. Only in comic books, novels and films are people perfect.

Making decisions is difficult because it requires taking a risk; the risk that things might go wrong or that a more difficult option will be taken. It's entirely normal to find decision-making difficult on things that you have never done before.

An easy way to help, is to seek out the methods of other people. So get advice and read books from people who have already gone through what you need to go through.

Very often though, many people find it hard to make decisions because they have not defined the problem clearly enough and they have not defined the solution, and the process for fulfilling that solution, clearly enough. When you are very clear about these things your ability to make decisions becomes better and easier.

There is a great problem with a lot of medical diagnosis and remedies and that is that there is a general failure to define the true root cause of a problem. What often happens is that a behavior will be diagnosed as a symptom of a deeper problem and yet instead of discovering that root cause the behavioral symptom will be suppressed, either through medication or through attempts to use will power to overcome the behavioral response.

Unfortunately, this only keeps things in stasis at best and very often those behaviors get worse or resurface in other ways because the true problem has not been dealt with. Our behaviors are responses to emotional difficulties that we have. They are our attempts to escape from pain and into pleasure.

What most people don't know, and here is one of the biggest secrets that you'll ever find out, is that our emotions are not the problem. Our emotions are a symptom of an even deeper problem. Our emotions are created whenever we set a desire for ourselves. If we fulfill the desire, then we feel good emotions. If we don't meet the desire, then we feel bad emotions. Most of us procrastinate because we keep setting desires for ourselves that we cannot fulfill. This keeps generating a constant stream of negative emotions because we can't have what we want. In order to escape this pain of not getting what we want, we indulge in behaviors that remove us from pain. In the short-term, this means procrastinating.

If this problem is left unchecked, then the repeated, day-in and day-out failures to fulfill desires will lead to some pretty devastating behavioral responses. OCD and ADD are examples of things going badly wrong. Suppressing those things with drugs or therapy will not work because the motor that drives these responses has not been turned off.

If we eliminate the root cause problem, then we generate no symptoms that annoy us, and if with no symptoms to annoy us then no behavioral response is necessary. The psychological problems just vanishes!

The root cause of the problem is that you desire things that you cannot have, or do, or be, in the moment of wanting those things. To eliminate the problem, you either have to eliminate those desires, or else you have to manage them so that they become entirely possible for you to fulfill. When you can do that, procrastination stops along with all of those unpleasant behavioral responses.