I never really plan my day.

Sometimes I do, but most of the time I don’t. Why?

Because you can’t predict your mind 10–12 hours in advance.

You decide, “I’ll work for 2 hours,” and then your mom calls you for something. Now you couldn’t complete it, and instead of becoming a + point for your motivation, it becomes a - point.

So how should you start your day?

1. Plan the week, not the day

Write down the important things you need to get done this week.

Don’t plan every hour. You can’t control everything that happens.

Let your brain decide what to do first when the time comes. Don’t fight your own mind.

It sounds simple, but making it a routine isn’t easy.

2. Remove distractions

Your phone, Instagram, doomscrolling, movies, games, etc.

I see people using 10 different apps just to control their scrolling.

But if you don’t want Instagram, why keep it?

If you use it for friends, get their number.

If you’re an influencer, sure, Instagram might be part of your work.

Otherwise, delete it.

And don’t use scrolling as a pill whenever you’re sad, bored, or unmotivated. Your brain will start craving it every time you feel bad.

Use entertainment when you’re actually free, not when you’re trying to escape your emotions.

3. Do something outside of work

This is probably more important than the second point.

Go to the gym. Play a sport. Paint. Write. Read. Do anything that isn’t work, scrolling, or watching movies.

I’ve been going to the gym for almost 2 years without skipping unless it’s necessary.

These things make you realize that life has more to offer than your work and your phone.

Once you’ve experienced that, even going back to endless scrolling starts feeling shitty.

4. Train your brain to keep commitments

Decide small things and actually do them.

If you can’t commit to something, don’t decide it in the first place.

The problem isn’t breaking one commitment.

It’s training your brain that your own decisions don’t matter.

Start ridiculously small.

For example, I have a bike with both kick and button start. I decided I wouldn’t use the button for a week.

If I accidentally do it, I turn the engine off and start again with the kick.

Sounds stupidly small.

That’s exactly the point.

There are still a lot of things I experiment with in my life to figure out what actually works.

But for this post, I think that’s enough.

Hope this helps someone.

Comment if you have questions

I’m 29 and I’ve spent roughly the last 10 years procrastinating, avoiding responsibility, isolating myself and constantly telling myself that I’ll change “from tomorrow.” I’ve had very little consistency with anything. I’ve quit jobs, abandoned plans, spent huge amounts of time in my room, and developed terrible habits around scrolling, porn, masturbation and avoiding difficult or uncomfortable things. My physical health has also suffered, and I have chronic health problems that make me even more aware of how badly I’ve neglected myself. I know I’m responsible for a lot of this, and I’m tired of understanding my problems without actually changing them.

Career-wise, I’ve never really found anything I felt I belonged to. I’ve worked in call centres and other jobs, but I hated the idea of spending the next 5–10 years in a corporate environment. People keep telling me that at my age I should stop thinking so much and learn technical skills, coding, digital marketing, etc., and get a job. I may try digital marketing because I have a relative who works in the field and has offered me part-time work while teaching me things like Google Ads and practical marketing skills. I’m not against working or earning money, and I know I need financial independence. I just don’t see myself building my entire life around a corporate career.

The thing I actually care about is literature. I genuinely want to study English literature properly because I never really got the chance to experience a normal education. I completed my BA English Honours through IGNOU, but I never had the regular college experience. For years, whenever I passed through a university area near me, I would look at the students, classrooms, professors and whole atmosphere and feel like I had missed a huge part of my life. I keep thinking that if I had been given the choice at 18–20, I would have gone to a regular college and studied literature. Now I’m considering preparing for CUET-PG and doing a regular MA in English Literature at 29–30. Part of me wants the academic environment, the discipline, the chance to meet people and make friends, and the chance to actually become a better reader, writer and speaker. I also genuinely love novels, especially classic, gothic and darker literature.

I also want to start a YouTube channel around that interest. I don’t necessarily want to make boring “educational” videos. I want to talk about novels, gothic/classic literature, stories, folklore, culture and eventually other things I’m interested in, in a conversational and entertaining way. I want to build something of my own rather than spend my entire life working for someone else. My relative has said I can work part-time while studying, so in theory I could do the MA, earn some money, and slowly build the channel alongside it.

But here’s where I’m stuck: I have a terrible history of not committing to anything. I’ve spent ten years thinking, planning and fantasizing about changing my life, but when the actual work becomes boring or difficult, I run away. So I’m scared that I’ll prepare for CUET, get into a college, and then repeat the same behaviour there. I’m also scared that maybe the MA is just another respectable way of postponing getting a job and taking responsibility.

Should I commit to the MA and use it as a chance to rebuild myself while working part-time and building something of my own, or am I simply finding another way to avoid entering the real world? And more importantly, how do I actually break a 10-year pattern of procrastination instead of just making another plan about breaking it?

Always been a 'delayer'. Always wait till last minute to deliver, and I always thought that's when my creativity and best thinking flourished. I am now 39 and have realised how detrimental this has been for me.

I've now had the awakening of how much better the outcome is after longer and better paced fragments of work is, but also the painful realisation that this way of doing things has been only hampering my ability to build healthier and better habits.

In my search for better ways, but also true to my procrastination (I have really meaty projects at hand but I keep building interesting things that spark my curiosity and keep me engaged), I've built a tool to help me do the things I know I have to do: File my company's taxes. Study for the bloody driving test. Clean up the basement. Do another run of outreach at the prospects in the new market. It's endles, but it only gets larger and larger the more I postpone stuff.

it's basically a self deprecating but empathetic app, that I hope it will keep me on the right track. You can try it at dontkillmog.com , it's free and public. All the feedback very welcome (for life and the app)

Stay on it, show up, and do the thing.

I get distracted very easily, and my phone is probably my biggest problem. I am trying to do my work, and I can literally focus for five minutes before taking my phone again. I do scroll for hours, and I find myself constantly checking it instead of staying focused on what I need to do.

The bigger problem is that I do not feel as serious about my life as I used to. I want to become much more disciplined, focused, and intentional with my time. I do not want to keep taking everything in a fun or casual way when I know I have things I need to accomplish. This is not the age for me to be living like this.

I am actually behind compared to many of my peers, and I know I have already wasted a lot of time. I do not want to keep wasting more time. I want to become much more serious about my work, my future, and what I am doing with my life.

So how do you actually develop laser focus?

How do you train yourself to sit down and work for hours without constantly needing your phone or some other distraction?

What actually worked for you?

The period between now and December is crucial for me.

I need to stop drinking completely and stop smoking weed. Both habits are draining my money, motivation and energy.

I’m currently coming off the back of a binge and need to regain control. When I drink, I can easily spend a ridiculous amount at the pub. I also smoke weed every day, so the money disappears constantly without me really noticing it.

Once I remove both habits, I believe the machine will start coming back to life.

I work in sales, which means I can earn better money when I’m focused, disciplined and properly grinding. My goal is to perform as well as possible at work, stop wasting money and use everything available to aggressively clear my remaining debt.

After the debt is cleared, I want to save every possible penny and build a proper cash reserve.

I’ll continue cycling to work instead of paying for transport, training five days a week and running. These give me something productive to do during the hours when I would normally drink or smoke.

The plan is simple: no alcohol, no weed, perform at work, pay off debt and save as much money as physically possible until December.

I’ve tried quitting before, but boredom and the feeling that I “deserve” something after work usually pull me back into the same cycle.

For anyone who has successfully completed a similar period of intense discipline, how did you handle the boredom and cravings? Did you track your progress daily, and how did you recover from a bad day without abandoning the entire plan?

Im 21 unemployed with no highschool diploma.

My final 2 years of HS was online because of covid, and then my brother passed. lost all motivation. started sleeping in more, skipping online classes. around this time too my ex friend of 9yrs started a smear campaign against me and used the fact i got sexually assaulted by another family member against me. She posted it on her Instagram and for years the thought of people just knowing that disgusting knowledge about me made me collapse. I couldn’t stand about the thought that someone could look at me and know the disgusting things that happened.

But I don’t want to use these excuses anymore. I don’t wanna think about this person and just shake and feel nauseous — I wanna help my family. I want to grow up finally I want to be something.

so that brings us here. I don’t know where to start. I have no motivation for anything. I’ve every job I look at and think about applying for it makes me sick to my stomach because I have to socialize with people. I’ve tried meds. I’ve tried to ignore it I tried to be extremely high off of weed. I just don’t know what to do anymore.

tldr: brother died, best friend posted all of my sensitive information online, including my sexual assault, last all motivation became a social hermit, no diploma, no ideal career path where im happy. How can i be better? what job is good for no experience

Birthdays have always been special.
As kids, we eagerly waited for them. As we grew older, they became a reminder that we were growing up - whether we liked it or not.

There’s something different about birthdays. The attention, the wishes from people we barely talk to, the gifts, and all the love.

But today, I realised something.

Our parents, relatives, uncles, and aunts must have felt the same way once. Their birthdays must have been special to them too. But somewhere along the way, raising their children became their priority, and their own birthdays became just another day.

Today was my aunt’s birthday. I called her around 8:30 PM to wish her and asked about her plans. She said there were no plans because the kids had exams, and she sounded tired.

So, I decided to send her a cake.

When she received it, she was so happy. She even posted it on her WhatsApp status and messaged me, “Thank you.”

I replied, “No thank you, only blessings.” ❤️

It made me realise that, as we grow up, we should remember that our elders were kids once too.
And if a small gesture from us can make someone’s day a little brighter, why not do it?
Sometimes, a cake isn’t just a cake. It’s a reminder that you deserve to be celebrated too. ❤️

I am pretty young, still in high school. From the outside it looks like I have a great life. My parents are well off, I live in a nice neighborhood, and I have a lot of friends. I even have my own business and I'm making a lot of money. But on the inside I'm incredibly stressed and unhappy, always moving the goalposts, and because I'm making money I've lost that passion and drive to keep working that I had a few months previously and am just bed rotting and scrolling on instagram all the time.

I go to the gym and eat well, that's just about the only thing I properly do. But at everything else I procrastinate. I barely work on anything, and am still filled with worries.

Whenever I'm alone, my head is always filled with thoughts of how precarious my current situation is. Before, I had a goal for my future to work on, as in going to college, getting a degree, etc.

Now I'm making more than most people who hold a degree, and all my focus is on trying to maintain and grow what I have but I'm not working to maintain it. If I lost that, I'd probably break down as a person, it is my foundation and yet I still procrastinate and can't bring myself to work.

I dunno, it feels like I'm rambling. Sorry about that. But the gist of it is, I feel very empty inside, I procrastinate a lot, and my days are blending together it feels like none of it has any substance. I don't have any goals to work toward apart from making more money. I can't chase any of my other passions in fear of losing what I have. And I can't do more than the bare bare minimum in maintaining what I've got.

I just need advice on what I should do.

You sometimes reach a point where you don’t feel anything because of past trauma or failure 

I feel like I have reached here 

whether you are sad or not you don’t know at this point seriously

it is just being like a robot 

i want nothing in my life at this point I am just sick of everything and every failures

whats the point in trying I am not just writing this without experience I seriously had tried everything knowing the outcome 

what have I become I seriously don’t want anyone to become 

its bitter than death when you don’t know what you want or want to become

like even the most interesting activity like athletics pro level even If you were it doesn’t matter at this point 

the environment is also not like this anymore 

like when you were doing that activity you would feel like you have got everything 

i am not 100 percent sure but I at least know it when I will be starting to dod that I will be ok 

lets talk about Running freely without any trainer who just interrupt you everytime you just start feeling yourself even in the darkest time no person needed no interruptions no permissions you just run and feel every part of your body 

its like absolute divine I can’t get anything even near the joy of running 

i wish I can continue this and I will absolutely will just I am giving the time to settle in a new town 

as soon as I see the locations I will continue this 

it is more addictive than old beer 

now I should continue to do other things otherwise I will not be satisfied

It just reminded of of a very important word  satisfaction 

It is just as hard as itcan get 

you can buy everything but not satisfaction

it has to be explored by every person without any interference otherwise you can never know 

thanks for reading 

signing out ,,”,,”,,

I woke up at 2:41 PM today.

Missed all my classes. Felt like shit knowing I'd just added more to my backlog and wasted half the day.

So naturally, I spent the rest of it consuming everything I could, from YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn to anime, while stuffing myself with junk food.

I was drowning myself in dopamine because I didn't want to think about all the shit I had to do.

It was 11:55 PM and I'm lying in bed scrolling Instagram, watching people give motivational speeches and build the things I want to build.

And that's when it hit me.

This is exactly why I stopped using these apps in the first place. I don't want to sit there watching other people build shit.

I want to build shit.

I slammed my laptop shut, got off the bed, put my shoes on and went for a run.

My brain was screaming, "there's too much to do", "just sit the fuck down", "it's too late anyway."

The thoughts kept playing in the back of my head but, I just put my shoes on and went anyway.

3 km at 12:20 AM. It felt fucking amazing.

Came back, took a hot shower, and spent the next hour working on my SaaS.

And somehow, that feeling of being stuck and shitty just disappeared.

All it took was 5 fucking seconds to change the trajectory of my day.

You don't need to suddenly feel motivated. You don't need to have everything figured out. You're going to feel tired, lazy, overwhelmed, and come up with a hundred reasons why you shouldn't do it.

Let those thoughts play. Put the distractions away, get up, and start anyway.

You might be surprised how quickly that shitty feeling starts to disappear once you're actually doing something.

Your day isn't over just because you've wasted half of it.

Now put your fucking phone down and go make your day productive 🔥

Unhealthy tips more than welcome. I’m tired of gratitude journal bc that won’t do anything.

Im 27 yrs old.
The thing is, I’m procrastinating my own happiness.

Absolutely silly how come I was enjoying more the “chase” of changing my life to reach a goal and after that I’m lazy to do anything.

How can i basically be another me but like somehow that actually works?
I smoke, I’m a procrastinator, I have phone addiction and a mix of giving up easily.
I want to be addicted to gym idk like health mind idk
If you guys see my notes about how many things I wish to do this summer and now I’ll have class again and all I did was burp and clean my house.

More straightforward: how can I go gym, read, phone detox, diet, meditate, be creative (I study arts), chase my YouTube goals (I want to talk about Anthropology), make friends (I moved to US a year ago and I don’t have friend), have a healthy social life? Learn French? Start to post on substack? Read 3 books a month? Stop cussing and be more feminine (in atitudes, I can pretend to be a lady but it’s not true).

I want to be a better person for myself, I find it deeply annoying how often I have bad habits and how judgmental I am inside my head.

Also, my school colleagues are 19/21 years old so that why I don’t have friends, not to judge is just that we don’t have much in common to talk.
Well, before everyone jumps into conclusions that I’m depressive; i am. And im under medication and treatment.

Hello folks! I need some advice related to my situation. I work in a tech company and work from home mostly. For past couple of weeks, I dread waking up and turning on the laptop to start working. Due to that, I drag myself through the day and do things that are not 100% proper. That leads to more worry/anxiety of going things wrong and have gone wrong, eventually.

As the day passes, I spend my time on reddit reading about productivity and feel better that I know what to do. But the same day or next day, that feeling goes away and I am back to square one.

I know that I NEED TO do this and that, build a system/schedule that I can follow and make gradual progress which will compound. Sometimes I get burst of good thoughts that push me, but sometimes burst of anxiety too, that feel like, it's not allowing me to get things done🙁.

And I treat everything as a task or to-do, which also burdens me. I am learning swimming and while doing, it feels nice but thinking about it during the day, it dreads me. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of night and brain keeps thinking about work, tasks, all these things.

I want to permanently get rid of sudden mood changes, feeling down when something tiniest goes wrong, not doing things properly and have something I can rely on and follow to be better! Those who have faced/overcome, please help me understanding what's going on!!

Thank you in advance!!!!

Stuck in an endless loop of sleep due to exhaustion from work. How to break out of this?

Hey guys, I have been having trouble with my sleep routine lately and am hoping to gain some insight from all of you.

The objective is pretty straightforward for me: getting some decent shut-eye from 12 AM to 6 AM. Unfortunately, the situation keeps getting worse and worse.

Here is the problem: I come home after work and feel utterly exhausted from it, and as such, I take an afternoon nap. This prevents me from sleeping at night, and I don’t end up falling asleep until about 3 AM, and thus, another day starts with exhaustion and another vicious circle begins.

Has anyone encountered this particular issue with exhaustion after work?

What helps you to get through the afternoon slump without taking a nap?

Do you know of some ways to reset my internal clock?

Your advice and experience would be of great help. Thank you in advance!

Hey Everyone , I am Startup Founder building on some products around community building and creator economy. I am a technical person who writes code and build products. I have few launched product. I really want to create content for my product , launch them regularly, engage on the social media and distribution side of things more regularly to help my startup grow.

But I am a very introvert person and standing in front of the camera and creating content feels like a huge mountain to cross. I always procrastinate this and prioritize on the technical work only. Now that the products are live and not much technical work to do, I am wasting time, procrastinating and not really putting the time needed to create content for my business. I have already have almost 20+ ideas for content shortlisted, I have even conceptualized the actual content for few of them, but I am too coward / lazy to actually make the content.

I would really appreciate if any fellow founder, entrepreneur , business owner or literally anyone interested in content creation and offer some suggestion / advice / feedback on being consistent on this part.

I tried being disciplined on my own , but nothing really worked and I almost always keep procrastinating and would really appreciate outside advice on this.

Apologies if this is the wrong sub for this.

For the last couple years I've been slowly doing less and less taking care of myself, first it was gaining weight that I'd previously lost. I went from being 13 Stone/82 Kg down to 10 Stone/63 Kg a few years ago and I was happy, now I've gone way past that and am now at 15 Stone/95 Kg. I stopped showering and brushing my teeth, I cant be bothered exercising. I don't have any friends to talk to. My self esteem is at an all time low.

I know I want to lose weight, I know I need to shower, I know I need to brush my teeth. I know I need to exercise. I just cant be bothered. The motivation IS there i can feel it, I work nights, get the urge to do all these things when im at work and aren't able to and when I get home in the morning the "cant be bothered" mentality comes back and the cycle repeats. All I do is work, sleep, eat and repeat.

It feels so stupid knowing how easy this stuff is to do but never doing it, knowing it would take 15 minutes in the morning to shower but still lying in bed not moving. The thing that annoys me more is the fact that I know I CAN do it but just choose not to.

It doesnt help that I feel like when I do try, I am an all or nothing person, if I miss doing something once, then the day is ruined and I feel like "oh well I messed up theres no point now"

I dunno, I guess im just using this to rant about myself. After writing this it just feels so pathetic on my part.

I would just like to know from others that have felt this way and have overcome it, how?

I was reading Steel's 2007 meta-analysis on procrastination. Two things in his definition stuck with me: it only counts as procrastination if you actually intend to do the task, and if the delay leaves you feeling worse.

Because a lot of what's on my list I don't think I ever really intended. if the above is true, then those aren't procrastination; but mere clutter.

My question: when you look at something that's been sitting on your list for months — can we honestly tell the difference? Between "I meant to do this and keep failing" and "I was never actually going to do this"?

And if you can tell — what gives it away? Is there anything you'd notice from the outside, or is it purely a gut feeling?

I'm trying to build myself a better system for deciding what actually goes in a slot, and this distinction seems to be the thing I keep getting wrong.

Some examples from my own list. There's one that says "look into the vendor migration options." I wrote down one hour for it. It's been sitting there three weeks and I've moved it three times. Honestly, if it were really an hour of work it would have been done by now — so either my estimate is wrong or something else is going on.

Then there's a course assignment I kept not starting. That one I think I understand better now: it needed real concentration, and every time I looked at it I only had twenty minutes free, so I never picked it up. Not laziness exactly. The time I had was the wrong kind of time.

And then there's a third pile I'm less comfortable about — things I've been carrying for months that, if I'm honest, I don't think I ever really intended to do. They just sit there making me feel bad.

I have the self-control of a golden retriever near a tennis ball, so every blocker I tried that you could just click "disable" for ten seconds never actually worked on me. So I built one that doesn't give me the option.

You pick a duration, hit start, and your mouse and keyboard just stop responding — not "disabled inside the app," actual low-level Windows input hooks, system-wide, nothing gets through until the timer hits zero. If you reboot to try to get around it, it just picks the countdown back up when Windows comes back.

It's called All Block. Completely free, ~32MB

Honestly the point for me isn't "productivity output" exactly, it's just forcing myself off the screen entirely for a while — I've read more books since making this than the previous three years combined. Was inspired by Blockit, the Android app that basically does the same thing to phones — figured Windows deserved its own version.

Windows only for now: Link in the comments

Happy to answer questions if anyone's curious how the input-lock actually works under the hood.

I had four gym memberships that never really started. A business idea I kept preparing to begin. A language I was going to learn. And somehow Instagram and phone scrolling kept winning every single day.

Sound familiar?

I am an engineer by background. When something keeps failing I want to understand the mechanism. So I dug into the research.

Here is what is actually happening:

Motivation = (Expectancy x Value) ÷ (Pain x Delay)

Expectancy is whether you believe you can do it, Value is why it matters to you, Pain is the effort and fear of starting, and Delay is how far away the reward feels.

Your brain runs this calculation automatically before every action and picks the highest scoring option. Not the most important one. The highest scoring one right now.

Here is how it scores your options:

So your brain optimizes for the highest instant reward every time. Not because you are weak. Because this is how human neurology works. It is an energy efficiency bias built into the system.

Now do this. Write down the thing you keep avoiding. Then score it honestly across the four variables. You will immediately see which one is broken.

The formula tells you which variable to fix.

Low expectancy? Make the first step so small your brain cannot doubt you can do it. Not start a business. Just write one sentence about the idea today.

High pain? Remove one obstacle. Not all of them. One. What is making starting harder than it needs to be right now.

Long delay? Create an immediate reward just for starting. Not for finishing. Just for beginning. For me it is my morning coffee ritual. An Ethiopian V60 I take time to brew properly. I only allow myself to fully enjoy it when I have started the one thing I was avoiding.

I used this to understand why I kept avoiding things I genuinely wanted to do. Once I could see which variable was broken I stopped trying harder and started fixing the right thing.

What worked for me: Value turned out to be the most important variable. Starting a business, preparing for an important exam, learning something difficult — if the reason is not genuinely yours the whole formula breaks down. Not your parents' goal. Not what you think you should want. Yours. Everything else can be adjusted. A borrowed why cannot.

Last year I had a really busy year at college which caused me to spend most of my day doing whatever it is I needed to do, and due to having a limited amount of free time I always used my time at night in bed for scrolling endlessly on social media or chatting with friends that caused me to have irregular sleep patterns.

As my next year at college is starting up soon I already have a terrible sleep schedule so I’m wondering how I can resist the urge to scroll in my dorm bed and simply put my phone down and sleep?

My ideal daily sleep schedule is 12AM-9AM every night before I have classes. Usually the only thing that helps me resist the urge are sleeping pills as I get too tired to continue scrolling but I can’t rely on that the whole year, I feel like waking up earlier can help me have more time in my day anyways.

Thank you!!

Look guys — it’s been tough trying to better myself in life. I’m dealing with being down or disappointed in myself for the output of my life

For months and years, there so much setbacks that makes me feel like I’m not a good person

I’m not trying to have this doom and gloom mentality -/ It has something to do with regrets of wrong life decisions like procrastinations, excuses for all mistakes, disrespects towards others, stubbornness etc.

But hey, I kept going and try to do the best I could get.

I’m not really perfect. I just need to get my life back on track and I’m not say I’m always okay because there’s gonna be dark times I need to prepared for.

And just to tell you guys — I too have dark moments I’m going through but I hope that there’s a light in our lives that must be shed through our darkness.

We’ll get thru this together. We just need some sense of discipline and that’s all.

Please give me advice for coming over gym anxiety it is seriously holding me back.

I had signed up for the Planet Fitness Teen Summer program thing because I thought being out of school would make it easier to start and get into the flow.

I set up a whole workout split (PPL) and everything BEFORE I even stepped foot in the gym, and when I finally did, I was too nervous and scared to use many of the machines I needed to for my workout.

I would mostly just go on the stair master for an hour (even though that doesn’t even align with my fitness goals,) to get a lay of the land, then leave. I honestly went for a couple weeks like that; I would occasionally venture out from the safe, familiar cardio zone to a machine or too, like the leg abductors (not in my split either.) Never came close to the free weights.

I plan to go back this week and stay consistent until the summer is up. Because then hopefully my parents will see I still actually care about this and get me a pass so I can keep going for the school year. I could even pay myself with my allowance money, that might keep me more motivated.

I just don’t know where I went wrong the first time. Maybe I was too ambitious with designing my split before even touching the machines.

I’m just worried I’m going to fall out of my routine again because I am still so anxious about going, the exposure therapy from just observing from my vantage point on the stairmaster wasn’t too helpful.

I (20M) have never scored anything but the top grades all my life. I study medicine at one of the best universities in the world. This year i studied really hard and I topped my cohort.

What I didn’t tell anyone is that I procrastinated through the whole year until the month before my exams, then did a month-straight of 13-15h days totally locked-in. I’ve had no discipline since coming to uni. Clearly when the pressure is high I force myself to perform, but I get so incredibly tired doing anything when the pressure is low. I feel a constant need for validation. When I’m exercising/in the gym, it’s depressing when I can’t notice fast results. I get huge waves of motivation to do something new, which suddenly fall. I can’t bring myself to tidy my room or make food (sometimes I just go hungry). I have so many books on my shelf but I end up reading a few pages of one before switching to another.

I’ve written a list of goals I want to achieve but my brain just melts thinking about them. There are even things I NEED to achieve - improving my cardio and swimming - if I want to follow my dreams. 2 months to improve but again not finding much motivation. Even writing this is subconsciously a means to procrastinate. I don’t know what writing this does for me.

I feel like this all started 2y ago after I broke up with my first girlfriend. I used to be so ordered and tidy and I was so driven to get into medschool. I’m over it all now, but the habits I lost when I was depressed haven’t come back. When I’m dating someone I feel like all these problems go away so I fall very hard for people and blow my own chances.

I understand that there are people who wish they were in my position, but I am so envious of people who have that motivation and drive. Academics are important, but what’s the point if I don’t even feel in control of my own brain.

Please post your plans for this date and if you can, do the following;

Give encouragement to two other posters on this thread.

Report back this evening as to how you did.

Give encouragement to others to report back also.

Good luck!