Is Procrastination Hindering Your Mental Discipline?

I am Dr. Hassan, a Board-Certified Physiatrist and Independent Practice Owner. I help physiatrists start and grow their own profitable practices so they can achieve financial independence and live without limits.

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Call it mental strength, mental toughness, or willpower. We all need to draw upon it from time to time. It’s the ability to push through difficulties and overcome hardship to reach a desired result. Everyone has it to some varying degree, and we can all do certain things to raise our levels of mental toughness.

Develop good habits. Do things that are good for you day after day. Get plenty of rest. Generate small wins and recognize them. These are simple steps to show yourself that you can create positive outcomes. Your brain then logically believes that you’ll be okay when you’re presented with a more difficult situation.

You displayed the ability to routinely make good things happen. So when a hurdle appears on your path, you easily clear it and keep moving forward.

Another way to improve your mental discipline is to stop justifying that you can put off until tomorrow what you should be doing today.

Procrastination is powerful, but so are you!

The words “tomorrow” and “later” can lead to a watered-down version of your best life. That’s because they don’t exist in reality, just in word form. Tomorrow is never here. It’s perpetually one day further down your timeline than right now.

The same is true with later. It’s in the future, so it will never exist in the present. Always telling yourself you’ll handle some difficult situation later or tomorrow means you’d prefer to never face that issue.

This is how powerful procrastination is. You justify ignoring a difficulty or setback when it needs to be addressed. You might not be making a conscious choice. Your ego and your survival instinct may be subconsciously telling you to do nothing at all. They always prefer no action over an action that may potentially deliver a negative result.

When you procrastinate rather than face some difficulty, no matter why you made that decision, you’re just putting off the inevitable. Sometimes this makes an already troubling reality even worse.

Mental Discipline or Procrastination – It’s Your Choice

Sometimes we are presented with obstacles that seem impossible to overcome. It’s easy to put off dealing with them when that’s the case. However, you’re telling yourself that you don’t believe you have what’s required to make wonderful things happen in your life.

You can create any outcome you desire, if you choose to believe it.

What happens if you take action to defeat one of life’s difficulties and you fail? Honestly, who cares? It’s not the end of the world.

You showed the mental strength to stand and face something difficult. That’s incredible. Most people don’t do that. When you decide that you are going to take action and overcome some setback or roadblock in your way, that decision immediately fills you with incredible power.

So many times when this happens, you realize that the obstacle standing in your way wasn’t that big of a deal after all. This happens because we often paint a much more potentially disastrous picture than will ever come to be.

It really is your choice. You can improve your mental discipline and determination simply by taking life’s hardships head-on instead of procrastinating and convincing yourself you’ll act later.

Tomorrow never comes. Greet life’s inevitable difficulties with determined willpower now. Win or lose, you’ll be better off choosing mental toughness over walking away.