You know that exercising and meditating regularly are important self-care routines for stress management…but you find yourself procrastinating. This article is for you if you’re like “I know what to do, I’m just not doing it” when it comes to making stress management habits part of your daily life.
There are many different reasons why we procrastinate, and there is only so far we can go by trying to overcome our procrastination on our own. However, if you want to make a start today on your own, and you know that one of the reasons you procrastinate is because you have developed a habit of putting others’ needs before your own….read on!
How EFT can help with self-care procrastination
EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. It is an evidence-based stress reduction tool. When we do EFT tapping, it helps us overcome procrastination by moving us out of the stressed, emotional part of the brain, and into the decision- making, thinking brain.
People sometimes come to believe that they are “just lazy” or “just don’t have enough energy” to exercise or meditate at the start or end of the day. When the truth is that they are exhausted and have low energy, because they are stressed and overwhelmed.
Systematically working through your blocking beliefs and emotions with a professional EFT Practitioner can help you get to the bottom of your procrastination habit. Doing this, while tapping, helps to release the build-up of stress that has been weighing you down, so that you can feel lighter and more able to start protecting your daily self-care time from unreasonable external (or internal) care-taking pressures and demands.
However, if you are keen to have a go on your own, I’ll explain below one possible way that you can approach a self-care procrastination problem, as a short introduction in how to do EFT for procrastination.
EFT for self-care procrastination:
Below I will describe how you can get in touch with the emotional aspect of your procrastination using EFT, so that you can start to explore that and see what you can learn from it.
Part I: Making a note of your starting point
1. Describe the situation that is holding you back from creating a regular exercise routine or daily meditation routine. Examples include:
- ‘I work all day’
- ‘I focus on other peoples’ needs’
- ‘I’m too tired to exercise / meditate regularly’
- ‘I yo-yo whenever I try to start an exercise/meditation routine’
Write your situation down on a piece of paper (or type it into your computer).
2. See if you can identify what emotion comes up when you think of the situation that’s holding you back from taking care of your well-being needs (e.g. Frustration, sadness, resentment, anger, resignation)
3. Give the intensity of the emotion a number, on a scale of 0 to 10 (10 being the highest intensity possible). So, if you feel anger when you think of this situation for example, you may find the emotion is a 5/10 or a 6/10. Write that number down on a piece of paper (or type it into your document, if you prefer taking notes on your computer)
Part II: Creating your EFT tappping ‘Set-up statement’
In EFT, we always start by acknowledging the problem we want to work on using what we call a ‘Set-up statement’ – a statement that sets up the meditation practice in a way that helps us stay focused on the problem we want to solve.
Here are some examples of ‘Set-up statements’ so you can understand how to create your own using the words you used to describe your particular situation:
- Even though I neglect my need for regular exercise because I work all day, and I feel angry about that, I love and accept myself anyway.
- Even though I make my self-care needs a low priority because I focus on other peoples’ needs, and I feel sad about that, I’m willing to work on that.
- Even though I feel annoyed when I tell myself that I’ll exercise (and then I don’t), I’m here to work on that.
- Even though I never meditate in the morning like I say I will because I’m too tired, and I feel frustrated with myself, I’m willing to work on that.
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