How to stop being lazy and depressed in 9 practical steps

 

Are you thinking about how to stop being lazy and depressed? How long would you try to fight a war that never existed? Please stop! 

Your heart is telling you that you’re lazy. But in reality, you’re not. You’ve only allowed certain habits to rip you off your motivation and energy to be productive and not allow you to live the life you want for yourself. 

Are people really lazy? “People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals — that is, goals that do not inspire them,” says Tony Robbins, American author, and renowned coach. That’s to say, being lazy has a link to procrastination and lack of motivation.

So, in this article, you’ll learn how to stop being lazy and procrastinating while you stay motivated to pursue exciting goals for yourself. But first, you must be able to pinpoint the underlying factors to laziness in a person’s life. 

 

7 Causes of laziness you should know to stop being lazy and depressed 

Many people want to learn how to avoid laziness. But without conscious effort to identify those things that lead to laziness such measures may end in futility. Remember, you can barely address an issue whose cause you’re yet to point out. 

Thus, below are seven things that cause laziness:

1. Struggling with stress

Stress can come from different angles. And you may indeed feel stressed out sometimes. So taking time to rest becomes a must. 

At such times, you may be lazy because you lack the energy and enthusiasm to get some things done– until you’ve duly relaxed your brains and nerves. 

2. Poor feeding habits or dieting

Your mind and your body system need to be working fine to be able to be actively engaged in any meaningful task. But how your body functions depend, to a large extent, on what you feed. 

That’s why one should eat good food (at the right time) by maintaining a sound diet. For example, someone who’s stooling because of eating inappropriate food will most likely be lazy at work. 

3. Physical or mental illness

You sure don’t need anyone to tell you that ailments keep people down. It could be at home or in a hospital sickbed. Therefore are incapacitated to get things done that they need to do. 

4. Fear of failure

“Stop sleeping, get to work. You will have much time to sleep when you die,” says Michael Bassey Johnson. While sleeping is not bad in itself, when done out of fear of failure, one becomes unproductive. But frankly speaking, that’s the case for thousands of people. We quit even before we start, and we later ask ourselves, “why do I feel so lazy?”

And that could be due to seeing oneself as not-good-enough, often due to low self-esteem.

5. Depression 

Depression is a mental state that can keep you stuck as your productive energy gets sapped in a way you can imagine. Indeed, when depression sets in, by default, one loses the ability to move forward and chase his goals. In other words, inaction takes over. 

6. Abnormal level of exercise

It’s true that as humans, our body needs exercise. But when one exercises more than required, it adversely affects one’s body system and how one spends the day. 

If you’ve exercised more than your body needs on any given day, you’d be able to relate to the outcome— you feel tired and sleepy for most of that day. And as a result, you hardly would possess the ability to concentrate and effectively perform the remaining items on your to-do list. 

“Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.” — Jules Renard 

 

How to stop being lazy and depressed [in 9 steps]

While we’ve looked at why people feel lazy and unmotivated to chase their goals, it’s paramount to consider how to stop being lazy and unmotivated. Thus below are helpful steps: 

How to beat laziness through a healthy lifestyle 

1. Trace the cause of the laziness

Handling the feeling of being extremely lazy starts with realizing its source. Upon discovering the causes why you feel tired and unmotivated, it becomes easy to implement practical steps in overcoming laziness. Some of which we shall consider in the points below. 

2. Don’t be hard yourself with unrealistic goals

Have you been overwhelmed before by the things you have on your to-do list? If yes, you’re not alone. That’s exactly the experience of thousands of people who still ask this question: why am I so distracted and unmotivated?

Setting goals is lovely, but you’ve got to learn how to do that properly without beating yourself up. On this note, you must say that your goal must be SMART— meaning it must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. 

In other words, you shouldn’t set a goal that should be goals for the week as your daily goal because you don’t want to end up being awkward, restless, and at the mercy of laziness. 

3. Break your tasks into bits

This point quite explains itself. “To be effective in fulfilling your goals, you must break them down into little tasks and then spend most of your time working on the task in front of you. Instead of being overwhelmed by the enormity of the big goal,” says Sunday Adelaja, author of “How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time, or investing time?”

4. Pat yourself over your little wins

At some points, you may want to entertain laziness based on the outcome you can see; that’s because it appears you’re not achieving much as you desire. But you must be careful to recognize your accomplishment in your success journey and give yourself some pat on your back while you continue to press forward. 

5. Seek help from others

Seeking help from others would require you to connect with others who share the same vision as yours. And it may mean joining a mastermind group, or the case may be. Remember the saying, “Iron sharpens Iron.” 

At such a time, you may feel weary due to a lack of skills, experience, or resources to do the things you need to do. At such a point, the best thing you should do is to reach out to those who can help you— those who speak the same “language” as you.

The words of Kobe Bryant explain that better. “I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you,” he said.

6. Avoid distractions

It’s not enough to write goals down on paper, but following them through is where the payoff is. But often, we let distractions have the best of us– our time and resources. Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries, yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries,” says Blaise Pascal. 

7. Exercise frequently but not too much

As stated earlier, our body needs adequate (and frequent) exercise to function optimally. Both physically and mentally. But when you overdo it, you experience the reverse– laziness takes over you from exhaustion. Thus, you may need the guidance and assistance of personal fitness (and your doctor) to work out something that is best for you. 

8. Establish and maintain excellent dieting

You’ve heard the saying that you become what you eat, right? Do you believe that is true? While you have your answer, medical practitioners (especially nutritionists) believe that humans should place a premium on what they consume and how they consume it. That’s because it affects your overall well-being, both physically and mentally. 

9. Learn to take a break from time to time

With that said, you don’t want to be a workaholic. Take time out for relaxation, resting, and adequate sleep. Remember, taking breaks is a sure way of managing stress as you refill your “energy tank”.

 

Do you need to know the Symptoms of laziness to be able to stop being lazy and depressed?

Often people are confused about the relationship between laziness and depression. And for that reason, they misconstrue some of the symptoms of depression with those of laziness. Psych Central pinpointed some of them in a post, and they include; 

• Having a hard time jumping out of your couch or bed
• Experience difficulty carrying out some basic chores at home, which include cleaning, washing, etc. 
• Having difficulty executing work or doing essential assignments— which could be academic assignments for students.

 

Conclusion

While laziness appears to be the unwillingness to act, it’s related to depression, procrastination, and giving excuses. In any case, learning the root cause of being lazy is the first step in your quest to get rid of it. So that you can go on to smash great goals without limiting yourself in the absence of a pragmatic plan.

Let’s conclude with the words of Larry Winget, an American orator and motivational speaker, “Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan.”