How I Stopped Calling Myself Lazy and Started Showing Up

For most of my twenties, I had a running monologue in my head that sounded like a bad gym coach. You're being lazy. You're wasting your potential. You should be doing more. If you really wanted it, you'd already be doing it. I thought that voice was motivating me. It wasn't. It was paralyzing me.

Gizella Nagyne Palinkas

5/15/20264 min read

Here's what I've learned in the years since, especially as a mom of two with about three usable hours in a day — that calling yourself lazy is almost never true, and it's almost always making things worse.

"Lazy" is usually a cover story

When I actually pulled apart the moments I was labeling as laziness, none of them were really about laziness. They were about something else hiding underneath.

• The morning I didn't work out wasn't lazy. I'd been up three times with my youngest. I was exhausted.

• The week I didn't post on the blog wasn't lazy. I was overwhelmed and didn't know where to start.

• The afternoon I scrolled my phone instead of cleaning wasn't lazy. I was drained and needed a break, and I hadn't given myself permission to take one.

Real laziness — the unwillingness to do something you fully have the capacity to do — is actually pretty rare. What people call lazy is usually one of these instead: exhaustion, overwhelm, fear, perfectionism, or burnout. None of those respond well to being yelled at.

The shift that changed everything

The thing that turned this around for me wasn't a mindset hack or a planner. It was a question I started asking myself any time I noticed the lazy thought.

"What would I say to a friend right now?"

If a friend told me she was too tired to work out after being up all night with a baby, I wouldn't call her lazy. I'd tell her to lie down. If a friend said she'd put off a project because she didn't know where to start, I wouldn't shame her. I'd help her break it into one small step.

Why was I treating myself worse than I would treat anyone I love? It's a strange question, but it cracked something open for me.

What to do instead of calling yourself lazy

Here's the practical version of all of this, because mindset shifts only matter if they change what you actually do.

1. Get curious before you judge.

When the lazy thought shows up, pause and ask: what is actually going on right now? Am I tired? Hungry? Anxious? Avoiding something specific? Just naming it usually softens it. "I'm avoiding this because I'm scared of doing it badly" is something you can work with. "I'm lazy" is not.

2. Shrink the task.

Most of the time, the thing I'm calling laziness is actually resistance to a task that feels too big. If I tell myself "work out for an hour," I won't. If I tell myself "put on workout clothes and do two minutes," I will — and once I'm in the clothes, I usually keep going.

The trick is making the first step so small that your brain can't argue with it. Two squats. One paragraph. One minute of stretching. Start there. Momentum is real.

3. Separate rest from collapse.

There's a huge difference between intentional rest — sitting down with a tea, watching a show on purpose, doing nothing because you chose to — and collapsing in front of your phone for ninety minutes because you ran out of gas.

The first one fills you up. The second one drains you more. Once I started taking real rest, the "lazy" scrolling went way down. Not because of willpower, but because I actually wasn't depleted anymore.

4. Track what you did, not what you didn't.

Some nights I lie in bed and the only thing my brain wants to do is list everything I didn't get to. The unfinished laundry, the emails I didn't send, the workout I skipped.

I started doing a thirty-second mental note at the end of each day of what I did do. Made breakfast for two kids. Walked the dog. Sent one work email. Listened to my friend when she called. It sounds small, but it slowly retrained my brain to stop measuring me against an impossible standard.

On the days you really can't

Some days you genuinely won't have it in you to work out, eat well, or do anything productive. Those days are allowed.

The body is not a machine. The mind isn't either. We have seasons of high output and seasons of recovery, and the seasons of recovery aren't a moral failing — they're the price of being human. Athletes rest. Farmers leave fields fallow. Even the trees lose their leaves.

You're allowed to have a hard day. You're allowed to have a hard week. What I'd push back on is letting one hard week become a story you tell yourself about who you fundamentally are.

The bigger picture

Here's the part nobody tells you: the way you talk to yourself becomes the way you treat your kids, your partner, your friends, and your body. When I was constantly calling myself lazy, I was less patient with everyone. When I started being kinder to myself, I was kinder across the board.

Self-compassion isn't soft. It's not letting yourself off the hook. It's actually the most reliable engine for change I've ever found. You don't shame plants into growing. You don't shame children into thriving. You don't shame yourself into a life you love.

So the next time you catch yourself thinking "I'm being so lazy," stop. Ask what's really going on. Talk to yourself like you'd talk to a friend you love. And take one tiny step in the direction you actually want to go.

That's not laziness. That's just being a person.

Talk soon,

Ella