Procrastinate – To put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness. To postpone or delay needlessly.

I will hold my hands up and say that there are times when I could be classed as a procrastinator. Always thinking “I’ll start that tomorrow” , “I’ll send that email next week”, “I’ll wait for the weather to get cooler before starting that exercise routine”… and so on and so on.

But really enough is enough. I always find that the more I procrastinate about something, the more I worry about that task itself or I tend to feel guilty and disappointed with myself that I’ve been lazy and just wasting time on nonsense rather that sorting my stuff out!

But this month I’ve really been trying hard to make sure that all the important stuff gets done and it gets done right away. A bill comes in, I pay it, rather than hide it under some other junk mail and forget about it until the next one comes and suddenly it’s double – that’s a real pain, especially when you’ve perhaps forgotten to budget for it and causes stress that was needless if I’d just sorted it when it arrived in the first place.

One of the biggest examples of my stupid procrastinating has go to be when my skin started developing white patches. It was on my arms, chest, back and the bottom half of my legs, it was horrible. Me, being me, I got right onto the internet and started diagnosing myself with all kinds of nonsense, at one point I was convinced I had Vitiligo and then moved onto believing it was skin cancer. A friend had said that he had had a bout of white patches on his skin and that it was a fungal infection so he used Selsun and it cleared right up. I thought “great, problem solved” bought Selsun, smothered it over myself, spent days at a time looking like a smurf after covering myself in the blue lotion, only to end up with aggravating my eczema!

After 2 years of looking like a patchwork doll (yes that’s right, 2 years – told you I was a procrastinator) I went to see a dermatologist and together we figured out what was wrong, it took that dermatologist 4 weeks to fix me and my skin was good as new.  So I spent a whole 2 years in constant anguish (it’s not nice having bright white patches on your skin, you become very self conscious and it gets you down!). Had I gone to the dermatologist as soon as the white patches developed I wouldn’t have spent the next 2 years depressed about the state of my skin.

So I’m going to make a concerted effort to stop procrastinating and keeping my life running smooth and minimise the risk of inducing any kind of stress that should have been avoided with immediate action.

**As a side note to anyone who suffers from eczema like me, since going vegan I have not had a flare up (just another happy bonus!)