corbin on X: "my best summary: - at any moment, someone has many different competing wants/urges, and we arent exactly conscious of all of them - this can show up in many forms. writers block, cognitive dissonance, conflict avoidance, […] - procrastination is specifically what we call the experience when the specific competing urges look like “i want to do [task]” vs “i want to avoid it but i wont fully consciously admit that” - for some reason, it’s near impossible to simply repress your wants (they still exist but youre just not looking at them, and they kinda just get expressed in a clunkier messier way) - so, you actually have to learn how to feel into the competing wants and “integrate” them into coherence (e.g. sometimes this looks like sitting down with yourself as if youre trying to get all the parts of yourself on the same page, like a group of messy kids) - in other words, it turns out that you can become really coherent by learning to skillfully “feel your feelings” properly - BUT, one key bottleneck to this is that it can be really scary to feel into all the dissonant parts of your mind! there might be a lot of stuff in there that you subconsciously stored away when you were younger and decided to never look at again because it was way too overwhelming (eg a mean parent can be cosmically world-shatteringly scary to a toddler), and it may still feel similarly overwhelming when you bring it back into the light - procrastination is especially connected to a lot of these scary emotions, because one common reason that people avoid tasks is because it brings up an overwhelming emotion - so, safety and regulation are incredibly important in long-term sustainable solutions to procrastination! (or, setting up good external environments, like becoming friends with good med school students maybe lol) unfortunately, many people use more fear and self-hate to try solving procrastination, which may work in the short-term but rarely addresses the internal root causes"