Your brain on dropping business tasks

Did you know that your brain may be addicted to checking off to-dos? 🧠

When you accomplish something, your brain gets a dopamine hit – which translates to pleasure in your brain. And the more instant the dopamine hit can be, the better!

(Ever written down a task you already did only to be able to check that off? I'm 100% guilty 🙋🏼‍♀️)

Quick dopamine hits come from doing easy, tangible, productive-feeling tasks and activities, like clearing out your email inbox, watching webinars, or scrolling and commenting on Instagram.

But when you threaten to take that easy dopamine hit away in favor of doing high-value activities that aren't as instantly gratifying, your brain gets anxious.

Like, super anxious.

And like in all addictive behaviors, your brain will try to steer you back to the instant dopamine fix.

That's why making space for high-impact activities like creative thinking, planning, business updates, relationship building – even rest and relaxation! – is hard.

Even if we know that we can create long-term benefits for ourselves and our businesses by doing [that thing], it requires us to go against that instant-gratification-seeking behavior.

So the next time when you're going for an easy-to-do instead of taking a step back to follow through on tasks and projects that you know would benefit you and your business long-term, check in with yourself.

👉 Does dropping this task for the day make me anxious because it will have actual negative consequences for my business – or is it just because my brain doesn’t wanna miss out on an easy dopamine hit?

This can help you ignore those less important tasks when you need to, even if your brain isn't too happy about it.

All that being said, it’s harder to go against your brain’s natural wiring if your Productivity Ecosystem is unbalanced. This might look like not feeling well, being overwhelmed with everything you need to do, or being unsure of whether or not the things you want to do are best for your business. If you’d like to dive deeper into what might be going on behind not following through on tasks, grab my new audio course Instant Insight.