Today I Choose to be Pleased – How to be Pleased

A Medicare Competitive Bid Rule response I’d been moving from one day’s to-do list to the next for ten days straight. Ten days of seeing that task, feeling dread about its complexity, and deciding today was not the day. Finally, I couldn’t procrastinate any longer – not because the deadline had arrived, but because the mental energy I was spending on avoidance had become more exhausting than the task itself.

What I discovered changed my relationship to procrastination forever: the thing I’d been avoiding for ten days took ten minutes to complete. The ratio was so absurd it would have been laughable if it weren’t so perfectly representative of how avoidance works – and how pleased we can feel when we finally just do the thing.

Why Private Satisfaction Matters More After 50

Here’s what we understand at this stage of life: the most sustainable pleasure often comes not from external recognition or dramatic achievements, but from the quiet satisfaction of personal completion. It’s the deep relief of no longer carrying around the weight of something undone.

We’ve accumulated enough experience to recognize the difference between tasks that deserve procrastination (because they’re genuinely complex) and tasks that we’re avoiding simply because they feel overwhelming in our minds but are actually manageable when we sit down to do them.

Research shows that completing avoided tasks triggers a satisfaction response in the brain similar to achieving larger goals, while simultaneously reducing the cortisol levels associated with unfinished business.

Why This Becomes More Important with Age

The wonderful news? We’re finally old enough to value internal rewards over external validation. We understand that some of the most meaningful pleasure comes from victories that nobody else needs to know about – completing the workout you didn’t want to do, tackling the project you’d been avoiding, wrestling chaos into reasonable calm.

We also have enough self-awareness to recognize when we’re expending more energy avoiding something than it would take to just do it. We can see our patterns more clearly and make different choices.

The challenge? We may feel like our standards for what “counts” as an achievement should be higher at this stage of life. We might dismiss these private victories as “too small” to matter, missing opportunities for genuine satisfaction.

Common Obstacles to Feeling Pleased

Many of us struggle with perfectionism – we avoid starting tasks because we can’t do them perfectly, or we discount our completion of tasks because they weren’t done as well as we think they should have been.

Others get caught in the comparison trap – measuring our achievements against others’ visible successes instead of appreciating our own private victories for what they are.

Some of us have become so focused on external metrics of success that we’ve forgotten how to recognize and appreciate internal satisfaction when it appears.

How to Cultivate Pleased Satisfaction

Start by noticing what you’re avoiding and honestly assessing why. Is it genuinely complex, or does it just feel overwhelming in your mind? Sometimes the anticipation is worse than the reality.

Break overwhelming tasks into smaller components. Instead of “complete Medicare response,” try “gather relevant documents,” then “organize thoughts,” then “draft response.” Smaller steps feel more manageable and create multiple opportunities for pleased satisfaction.

Use the right tools for the right tasks. Don’t make work harder than it needs to be out of some misguided sense that struggle equals virtue. If there’s a better way, use it.

Practice celebrating private victories. When you complete something you’d been avoiding, take a moment to acknowledge the relief and satisfaction. Don’t rush immediately to the next task.

Questions for Reflection

What task have you been moving from day to day that might actually take much less time than you’ve been imagining?

What’s one area of chaos in your life that you could wrestle into reasonable calm? What would that completion do for your mental energy?

When did you last feel genuinely pleased with yourself for a private accomplishment that nobody else needed to know about?

The Compound Effect of Completion

When we stop avoiding and start completing, finishing one avoided task affects everything else. With that mental weight removed, everything else feels more manageable. Procrastination creates compound stress – each day we don’t do something, it takes up more mental space and casts a larger shadow over our other activities.

But completion has compound benefits too. Each time we tackle something we’ve been avoiding, we prove to ourselves that we’re capable of handling what feels overwhelming. We build confidence in our ability to move from avoidance to action.

Permission to Feel Good About “Small” Accomplishments

The pleased satisfaction that comes from completing routine tasks, from wrestling chaos into calm, from finally doing something you’d been avoiding – this matters more than external achievements that leave you feeling empty.

You don’t have to accomplish extraordinary things to deserve to feel pleased. You have permission to feel genuine satisfaction about workouts completed, projects finished, tasks checked off your list, chaos transformed into manageable calm.

Today, choose to be pleased – not because you’ve accomplished anything extraordinary, but because you recognize the deep satisfaction that comes from completing what you’ve been avoiding, from wrestling chaos into calm, from proving to yourself that you can handle what feels overwhelming.

If you have your own version of the Medicare response lurking on your to-do list, remember this: the anticipation is usually worse than the reality. The doing might take minutes. The avoiding might take weeks.

Pick one thing. Tackle it today. Let yourself experience that quiet, private, deeply satisfying pleasure that comes from finally being done with something you’ve been carrying around as mental weight.

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