Exercise is fundamental to physical and mental well-being. It can help reduce procrastination by providing the following:
Building and maintaining a habit of regular exercise is one of the most powerful strategies for overcoming procrastination. The benefits of exercise make it easier to maintain other positive strategies like good nutrition and sleep, setting up a spiral of positive actions and mental benefits.
Highly productive people often engage in strenuous exercise on top of their already demanding workload. It can seem like these people have superhuman energy levels, but its likely they can maintain their high levels of effort because of their consistent exercise routine, not in spite of it.
The best forms of exercise for reducing procrastination have the following features:
Aim for exercise that you enjoy. The pleasure you get from the exercise will encourage and reinforce the exercise and make it easier to maintain long-term. Having to force yourself to do exercise you don’t like can drain your energy to be productive and make that exercise harder to maintain long term.
Aim for a convenient exercise. The lower the barrier to start the exercise, the more likely you will do it consistently and long term.
Aim for strenuous exercise, where your heartbeat and breathing rate are raised for a prolonged period.
It can help to involve other people in your exercise, like with a sport or martial art. Not only can it make exercise more fun, having other people that are relying on us to show up makes us far more likely to do so, even when we don’t feel like it.