Estimated Read Time: 9 minutes
There are a lot of conversations practitioners have behind the scenes that never make it into the marketing. The “I know what to do, but I’m not doing it” conversations. You’re avoiding the thing, you’re telling yourself you’ll do it tomorrow, and in the meantime you’re carrying around this low-level anxiety that never really turns off. The real question isn’t “how do I manage my time better?” It’s how do I stop procrastinating when something feels emotionally loaded?
So when I had the chance to bring Grace Brodeur into the WELLth Collective to talk about procrastination, I was immediately like: yes. Because I know the practitioners who are deeply skilled, deeply capable, and still find themselves procrastinating on the very things that would move their practice forward. And what Grace teaches is a relief because it’s not another “try harder” productivity lecture. It’s a completely different lens: procrastination isn’t a time problem. It’s an emotional management problem. And once you see that, you can actually change it.
The Advice on How to Stop Procrastinating Everyone Knows (And Why Most People Still Don’t Do It)
A huge percentage of the advice out there on how to stop procrastinating can be summarized in three core strategies:
First, narrow your focus through daily, weekly, and quarterly planning. Write your goals down instead of keeping them in your head, and prioritize the 80/20 rule of the small percentage of work that tends to create most of your results.
Second, do the hardest, most important task first. You’ve probably heard the phrase “eat the frog.” The idea is simple: if you don’t do the hard thing early, you’re even less likely to do it later.
Third, stop multitasking. Every time you switch tasks, you pull yourself out of deep work and it can take a while to re-enter a flow state. Monotasking and batching similar tasks together makes it easier to focus and follow through.
Here’s the thing though: most people already know at least two of these. And almost nobody consistently implements them. Which leads to the usual storyline: “I’m lazy,” “I have bad time management,” “I lack discipline,” “I’m just not motivated.” Those stories miss the real issue. Because what’s actually happening isn’t a character flaw. It’s fear.
The Real Reason You Procrastinate Has Nothing to Do With Time
You don’t avoid actions. You avoid uncomfortable feelings. Most procrastination isn’t happening because you don’t know what to do. It’s happening because when you think about doing it, something in you tightens. You feel uncertain, overwhelmed, exposed, or scared you’ll do it wrong — and your brain decides that discomfort is a threat.
So you avoid the task… and then call it a time management problem. Grace shared that this took her years to understand for herself. She described being a “closet procrastinator and perfectionist” in corporate telling people something would be done tomorrow when she hadn’t even started it yet, carrying anxiety constantly, feeling like an imposter. She tried the timers, the systems, the calendar blocking, all of it. And it still didn’t work. What finally shifted it wasn’t a better planner. It was understanding what was happening emotionally underneath the avoidance.
🌿 WELLthy Woman Tip: Perfectionism shows up strongest when your work actually matters to you. Inside the WELLth Collective, practitioners learn how to take grounded, imperfect action without spiraling into self-doubt or over-editing everything into oblivion.
Why Your Brain Treats Certain Tasks Like a Threat
Certain tasks are almost guaranteed to trigger procrastination because they activate fear responses in the brain.
Ambiguous Tasks
These are the tasks where there isn’t a clear step-by-step path. Content creation is a classic example. The rules feel endless, the options feel infinite, and it becomes hard to know what the “right” move is. Your brain reads that ambiguity as danger because it increases the chance you’ll do it wrong.
🌿 WELLthy Woman Tip: If content, marketing, or decision-making feels overwhelming because everything feels vague and high-stakes, this is something we actively work through inside the WELLth Collective.
Large Tasks
Anything that feels like an overhaul tends to get delayed. Presentations, projects, launches…essentially anything with multiple moving parts can feel too big to start.
High-Visibility Tasks
If other people will see it (especially people you don’t know), it can create friction. Again, content creation lands here for a lot of practitioners.
Tasks With a High “Threat to Failure”
Launching an offer. Making a big business decision. Anything where the outcome feels personal.
Deadlines, Disappointing People, and Embarrassment
This is why so many people say, “I work better under pressure.” But what’s really happening is that pressure becomes the bigger threat and it forces action. That doesn’t mean you’re doing your best work. It just means your nervous system is in survival mode. We work best when we are relaxed and regulated. So if your workflow depends on panic… it’s not a strategy. It’s a coping mechanism.
The Sneaky Ways Procrastination Disguises Itself as “Productive”
Avoidance often looks responsible on the outside. It’s not always Netflix and scrolling. Sometimes it’s “productive procrastination,” and it can be hard to catch because it looks like work. Grace called out a few patterns that show up constantly for entrepreneurs:
- Waiting for perfect conditions to start (a long time block, a clean space, the right mood)
- Consuming more strategy instead of implementing what you already know
- Researching small decisions way beyond what’s needed (Airtable vs ClickUp rabbit holes, anyone?)
- Checking competitors for “inspiration” that turns into avoidance
- Waiting until x, y, z is in place before moving forward
- Endlessly tweaking details instead of sending your 80% version and refining later
The through-line is the same: it’s not about the task. It’s about the discomfort the task triggers and the way your brain tries to escape it.
🌿 WELLthy Woman Tip: If you’re ready to stop waiting until things feel perfect and start building momentum in a way that actually feels sustainable, this is the work we do together inside the WELLth Collective. It’s support for practitioners who are done white-knuckling their growth and want to move forward with clarity instead.
How to Stop Procrastinating When It’s Not a Time Problem
Grace mapped out a simple model that explains why most people keep trying to “fix the action” and still stay stuck.
We all have beliefs (many of them unconscious) that drive our thoughts. Those thoughts create feelings. And we act based on how we feel. So if you believe “I’m bad at content,” your thoughts start spiraling: I don’t know what to say. It has to be perfect. Let me check what other people are doing. What if this is stupid?
That creates feelings like overwhelm, uncertainty, embarrassment and your body responds with tension, dread, or a pit in your stomach. Then the behaviors follow: drafts that never get posted, more research, more rules, more avoidance. The problem isn’t that you need a better calendar. The problem is that fear is running the process.
How to Get Unstuck and Stop Procrastinating
Here’s a simple first step for how to stop procrastinating that is deceptively powerful: get it out of your head and onto paper.
Pick the thing you’ve been procrastinating and write down, stream-of-consciousness style, what comes up when you think about doing it. What are you worried will happen? What are the thoughts — even if they feel irrational? The irrational thoughts are often the most important ones to capture because they tell you what your nervous system is reacting to.
Then take it one step further: tune into your body. Where do you feel tension as you think about the task? Your throat? Chest? Belly Because that sensation is usually the reason you’re not doing it. It doesn’t feel good — so you avoid.
🌿 WELLthy Woman Tip: This is exactly why time management alone rarely solves procrastination long-term. Inside the WELLth Collective, emotional regulation and self-leadership are treated as foundational business skills.
Make the Task Smaller, More Specific, and Less Mentally Expensive
When a task feels ambiguous, your brain will keep postponing it. “Work on presentation” is huge. “Write an outline” is doable. Here’s a simple breakdown method which helps you know how to stop procrastinating:
- Write out the steps you need to take (even if not all of them are clear yet)
- Break the project into small, specific actions
- Time-estimate each step
This matters because “write an essay” feels like a mountain, but “draft the outline in 20 minutes” feels like a starting point. And your brain is far more willing to start when it knows where to begin.
Four Ways to Lower the Fear and Start Moving
Grace has four practical ways to reduce the “threat level” your brain is attaching to the task:
Regulate Your Nervous System
Breathwork, EFT, bilateral stimulation, sleep — anything that helps you return to a more regulated state makes action easier.
Build Awareness First
Use the brain dump and the step-by-step breakdown. When you’re overwhelmed, those two tools in sequence can change everything.
Sell Yourself on the Next Step, Not the Full Picture
Don’t write “work on book.” Write “edit one paragraph.” Don’t write “batch 30 pieces of content.” Write “brainstorm three ideas.”
Make the Goal a Messy Step, Not a Perfect One
A draft. A rough version. An 80% attempt. The goal is movement because refinement can always come later. The more perfectionism is involved, the higher the barrier to entry becomes. And the more you practice messy action, the less your work depends on panic to get done.
The Work Gets Easier When Your Inner World Gets Safer
At the end of the day, procrastination isn’t a character flaw — and it’s not something you fix by forcing yourself into better discipline. Most of the time, it’s simply a signal that something feels emotionally unsafe: the visibility, the uncertainty, the pressure to get it right, the fear of wasting time or being judged. And the shift to knowing how to stop procrastinating is learning how to stay with yourself through the discomfort long enough to take the next clean step forward. You don’t have to work through these patterns alone. The WELLth Collective exists for practitioners who want consistent momentum, cleaner decisions, and support that understands the emotional side of building a practice — not just the strategy.
Ready to dive deeper? Join us inside The WELLth Collective. It’s full of health practitioners building their online practices, and inside, you will get instant access to exclusive trainings, monthly group coaching calls for personalized feedback, practitioner spotlights for inspiration, and early access to new programs and discounts. Join the community here.
About the Author: Michelle Rogers, ND, MSAOM, FDN-P, is a clinical mentor and founder of The WELLthy Woman™ movement. A practicing clinician since 2012, she pivoted to mentoring fellow practitioners in 2019 after experiencing her own transformation from clinic burnout to online business success. She has since guided hundreds of health professionals to build profitable online practices using her unique integration of functional medicine expertise and scalable business strategies.
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