Procrastination Is Not the Problem: Science-Backed, Soul-Led Strategies for Success

Have you ever beaten yourself up for procrastinating, assuming it meant you were lazy or unmotivated?  That you should do more?

What if your scrolling, fridge-checking, or mental fog is not a flaw — but a wise signal from your nervous system asking for safety?

In this validating episode, Dr. Amen Kaur reframes procrastination as a freeze response — not failure. Drawing on trauma science, nervous system healing, and feminine-coded success psychology, she explores how the brain's amygdala, cortisol response, and prefrontal cortex interplay when fear of failure or rejection is triggered.

✨ Inspired by the work of Bessel van der Kolk and others, you'll discover how trauma lives in the body and why procrastination often protects you from unseen emotional threat.

You’ll also explore:

• Why moderate “delays” enhance creativity (Einstein & Beatles style)
• How dopamine and incubation can restore motivation
• 3 powerful strategies to shift from freeze to flow (without shame)

You are not lazy. You are intelligent. And your body is doing its best to keep you safe while you grow.

🕊 If you’re ready to soften into success, create from safety, and embrace a new relationship with productivity — this episode is your invitation.

Subscribe, share with someone on a healing journey, and leave a review to support this movement.
Real success is possible — and it begins with self-compassion.

About Dr. Amen Kaur
Dr. Amen Kaur challenges the belief that procrastination is a flaw or failure. Instead, she sees moments of freezing, scrolling, or emotional shutdown as wisdom — signals from the nervous system inviting us to pause, reconnect, and realign.

Through her trauma-informed lens, she teaches that true productivity doesn’t come from pushing harder — it comes from healing the patterns beneath the pressure. For Dr. Amen, procrastination is not the problem; it’s a sacred pause. A chance to breathe, reset the nervous system, and align with the version of yourself who can lead, create, and thrive from safety.

Her work invites ambitious, intuitive individuals to move from hustle to heart, and from fear to embodied success.

Chapters

• 0:00 "Procrastination as Productive Pause"
• 1:31 Nervous System Protection Response
• 3:00 Trauma and the Freeze Response
• 4:59 Creative Incubation Phase
• 6:00 Overcoming Procrastination: Three Science-Backed Strategies with Love
• 8:37 Final Thoughts and Call to Action

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

What if procrastination actually isn't the problem? What if the moment we start to freeze, or we're scrolling, or we're feeling demotivated, or we check in the fridge again, and it's actually coming from a very wise part of us? We've been taught that doing, doing, doing is the path to results. Hustling harder, pushing through, dominating your to-do list, ticking everything off. What if that path actually begins somewhere else and maybe science is helping us to look at? What is it that we need to do to become the version who gets the results, by becoming the person that we want to become and then taking action from that identity? So what if procrastination is like a pause? You know you're doing so much, but you're hustling and you're coming from a space of someone that hasn't got what they want, and actually it's like a pause for you to step into that version of you that already has it and then create from there. That inability to push through isn't laziness, but a message from your nervous system saying hey, not yet I'm trying to protect you. Just take a moment to pause, to reconnect. So let's start by taking in a deep breath together and really allowing yourself to have this space for a nervous system reset. Take a deep breath in and just let it out, knowing you're safe right now. Let's start to stop making procrastination wrong. Let's get curious instead.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Procrastination isn't a character flaw, you know. It's not that you're lazy or that you should be telling yourself that you should be doing more. Science is now telling us that it's a protective nervous system response. It's your brain sensing a threat or danger, even subtly, and that kicks in where your amygdala, triggers stress, elevating cortisol, and it reduces access to your prefrontal cortex, your thinking, your decision-making hub. They're basically the tools that you need for the task and they're going offline. They're like, no, we're gone, we're not hanging around here, we're off. So obviously you're going to lose clarity. You haven't got all the tools, the resources to be able to do the best job that you can. You're not able to be bring your best, be motivated and creative. So is it worthwhile pushing through at this point? It's just stress on top of stress and more stress. So your brain isn't sabotaging you. It's actually protecting you. It's giving you some breathing space. Or maybe it's trying to help you understand that what is comfortable isn't necessarily safe, or what is safe might feel, might not feel comfortable and is the unknown at the end of the day. So it's not going to feel comfortable. But we need to allow our body to feel safe so we can separate comfort and safety from each other. See, we need to know that it's not going to be comfortable getting into our dream life, because if you're living your dream life now, then it's going to be comfortable, but if you're not, it's going to feel like danger moving towards your dream life.

Speaker 1: 3:15

See, I used to think my motivation was a real problem, like I don't feel motivated anymore. Really, what I didn't realize was that I had unprocessed fear, I had trauma, I had fear of rejection, fear of tasks were being delayed, and I just couldn't get myself to do it because there was all these invisible threads of fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of being seen, fear of being good enough. My nervous system didn't need like a productivity hack, like more, like how to be successful. It actually just needed to feel safe, to expand. And Dr Bessel van der Kolk says that trauma isn't an event. It's actually something that gets trapped in your body when we weren't able to fight or flee, so we had to shut down. And guess what procrastination is? It's just a shutdown response, it's a freeze response. It's your body whispering hey, I don't feel safe because of something else that happened in my life before. We need to honour that intelligence because it is intelligence, it's not a flaw. So take a deep breath in Our release, knowing that you are just perfect. Every time you take a deep breath in and you release it longer, you're telling your brain to relax. I'm safe, it's okay to do what it is that I want to do. So we're practicing. I just want you to know you are not broken in any way. You're not lazy. It's not that you're a failure. You're actually working perfectly and you're not. It's not that you're a failure, you're actually working perfectly and you're wise.

Speaker 1: 4:50

Dr adam grant found something fascinating people who delayed a creative task moderately were more often original, more often creative. But that only happened when they really truly cared about it. Because there's this process of incubation your, your brain has like a default network that goes to work when you're walking, you're talking, you're showering, you're doing things. It's connecting ideas and it's solving problems. So sometimes you need a break to allow yourself to almost download wisdom, to actually allow yourself to make connections in a creative way. You need to have some fun time.

Speaker 1: 5:32

So sometimes, maybe what you're calling procrastination is actually the incubation phase. So ask yourself the question like when was the last time you had one of your best ideas whilst you weren't working? And Einstein and the Beatles and so many others had these ideas when they weren't working. So let's move on to another area. Let's move from shame into strategy. Here's three science-backed ways to meet delay with love and with logic. So you're bringing your soul and science into this.

Speaker 1: 6:10

When you feel like, oh my gosh, I don't feel like doing this, you know something goes into shutdown just say out loud like I'm safe to begin. I'm safe, I can do this, I'm not in any danger, I'm safe to do this. I know it sounds crazy, but just saying that out loud will allow those deeper fear to surface. So you become conscious of it. And if you find that that isn't working, you're still procrastinating. Maybe there's some trauma, there's a deeper trauma there that you need to release so that you can get to that success, that visibility, to really believe that you are good enough and not worry about that fear of failure. This creates that sense of safety so that you can re-engage with life and with achieving in your life once more.

Speaker 1: 6:57

The other thing that you could try is like if you really don't feel like doing something, just say I'm just going to do it for five minutes, and what happens is the brain likes completion. So even though you're saying five minutes, you'll probably do more than five minutes. So just start for five minutes and then you'll find that you'll want to start to complete it. You'll get into it. If you find that doesn't work, then there might be again some deeper trauma or there might be some nervous system reset work that you need to do. The other thing you can do is like preload dopamine hits, where you're giving yourself a reward if you finish that task. If it's a completely mundane task that you really don't want to do, then maybe you say, ok, I'll do this, and then I'll go and have a cup of tea, or I'll do this and I'll have a little dance. So then your brain starts to associate joy with that action.

Speaker 1: 7:45

See, sometimes high achievers are high achievers because they have got to that point through grit. But grit doesn't lead to safety long term in every way you want and enjoy life and that will rewire you so that you're not experiencing high levels of stress, but you're allowed to be brilliant, to create, to enjoy, to be in flow. That way, you can allow structure to hold you and allow your genius to unfold. If this spoke to the scientist and the seeker in you, if you're watching, please do subscribe, comment and like. I really appreciate your support. If you're listening, please rate the show and share this episode with someone that really needs to know that they're not lazy, they are wise and they need to know. And then, if you're ready to start releasing the trauma and fulfilling your potential, you can also book in a one-to-one with me to explore how you can move forward and create soul-led success and leave that hustle behind. I'd love to support you to be able to do that with purpose. Let's build a community together. Sending you love Till next time.