When I was a kid, my dentist had an embroidery framed in his office that said “Ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.” If I’m honest, I want all my to-do lists to follow suit.

The only problem with that is that avoiding, delaying, and procrastinating things always has an opposite effect… I always regret it in the long term. It’s mid-March as I write this, tax season in full swing, and every year, I am very much thinking about this resistance and procrastination problem.

When I delay and avoid tasks, they always get bigger and louder the longer I put them off. I’ve also noticed the same pattern show up when I experience conflict in my relationships. Would I rather ignore it and pretend like it’s all fine? Of course. But it’s always worse in the long run.

A few years ago, I realized I was spending disproportionate amounts of time anxiously ruminating about things instead of just doing them.

I hit a breaking point with resistance and procrastination. But even with that awareness, just doing them felt equally challenging… like I was forcing myself to do things instead of feeling any sense of intrinsic motivation.

Don’t get me wrong — I have to do a lot of things that I may never feel intrinsically motivated to do (like my taxes!) but I also know that nothing good ever comes from the feeling of forcing something. Forcing things usually leads to resentment.

I’m so used to the song and dance of avoiding and delaying things until they’re an emergency, it made me wonder is there a way to make the thing I’m avoiding less anxiety-inducing?

The research on procrastination shows that neurochemically, your body is simply trying to manage uncomfortable feelings. When your brain has a task that involves uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, even boredom, your body goes “Ohhhh, hell no. I’d rather scroll TikTok, thanks! That feels better.”

I put my overthinking brain to work and started really paying attention to my procrastination behaviors and feelings for the last few years. It’s led me to some really incredible realizations.

There are four primary bottlenecks I’ve noticed that kept me stuck in the resistance-procrastination cycle:

Significance: I am probably making this a way bigger deal than it needs to be.

Ambiguity: I don’t really know what the end goal is, or what steps to take.

Friction: There’s something mentally or physically preventing me from moving forward.

Expectations: There’s a very strong chance my standards are unrealistic to begin with.

When you’re dealing with a difficult or unpleasant task, project, or situation, remember that focusing on how you can reduce significance, ambiguity, friction, and expectations will take you much further than gritting your teeth and forcing yourself to do it.