“I am the laziest person in the world”. I have said this to myself and to others so many times. I have heard my friends say this over and over again. Looks like there is a tough competition for the title of “The Laziest Person In The Word”. The crown and the sash are not going to be easy to earn, no matter what you think about your own level of laziness.

Obviously, this blog post is not to determine the award winner, or to encourage anyone to embrace laziness. This blog post is to help each of us reflect on our laziness quotient, to help us change our perspective about why we think we are lazy, and to get things done despite being lazy.

Laziness is described as the disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to act or to exert oneself. I thought the definition of laziness was important because when we do not have the ability or energy to do something, and we do not do it, it is not counted as laziness. So we can all discard such acts from our laziness list.

The main point here is that We are not always lazy. Most of us are selectively lazy. It only means that we are not motivated enough to do the task that we feel lazy about doing. If it is an important task and we have to do it anyways, there are two ways we can get around doing it:
1. Use Positive Distraction to get through the task.
2. If the task requires complete focus and a positive distraction cannot be used, rewarding oneself with a treat after finishing the task could be a motivating factor.
I am always amused by the ways in which we can trick our mind into doing something. Using this technique to overcome laziness for the tasks that we are not motivated enough to do, is a good idea.

Understanding the reasons for laziness is very important. People have identified- low motivation, fear, lack of strength, lack of purpose in life, non commitment, etc as reasons for laziness. There could be medical reasons that require medical attention, and they are; anxiety, depression, hormonal imbalance etc.
In case of fear or lack of motivation, it is a good idea to understand the demands of the job that we are avoiding and attributing the reason for avoiding as – laziness. This can be done by talking to people about the job and spending time preparing for it before actually taking it up. By increasing our Readiness Quotient to take up a job, we can kick out the fear and lack of motivation to some extent.
The way to tackle lack of purpose in life is only by bringing back purpose to life. Everyone can have a purpose as big or as small as they wish to have. We will talk about this in detail in another blog post. To begin with, it is a good idea to have a To Do List and the purpose being to tick off the items in the list.
For a lot of us, making a commitment or seeing a deadline works as the best antidote to laziness. If that works, make commitments. Enroll for an exam, register for a marathon or take an advance payment for your work. Most of us will meet the deadlines and forget laziness when we have made those commitments.

Personally, all of the above options work for me. That is, when I make up my mind to kick myself off the couch and to do something about my laziness.

According to Dr. Nando Pelusi, who is an evolutionary psychologist and a contributing editor to Psychology Today, laziness is a mechanism we inherited from our ancestors to try and conserve energy. During a time of scarcity of resources and constant threat, our ancestors had to conserve energy to use when needed.

No…….. Don’t even think about it! 🙂
We cannot give that as an excuse to lay on the couch all day, today. Most of us have sufficient resources and the threats we face today are better dealt with by being the opposite of lazy.

But understanding that it was a coping mechanism that we inherited will help us go slightly easy on ourselves when we beat ourselves up for being lazy.

Rather than beating ourselves up, it helps to focus more on the next day and how we can do things differently the next day. And, it is okay to embrace a lazy self once in a while. Once in a while only……

What to you think about laziness? How lazy are you? What antidotes do you use to combat laziness? Do post your comments in the comment section below.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

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