Get your bonuses!
Bonuses
Companion Workbook
Compassionate accountability
(printable PDF)
With your copy of Anxious Procrastinator, you’ll also get a companion guide on compassionate accountability, a workbook full of exercises to practice of staying honest about your choices while treating yourself with kindness.
It’s accountability without shame, designed to help you create lasting change with warmth and self-respect.
Webinar
How to tackle procrastinating behaviors
You will spend 60 minutes unpacking the core psychological processes behind procrastinating behaviors. You will learn practical skills that are research-based, compassionate and actionable so you can get back into your life.
At the end of this webinar, you will have five skills to tackle your next project.
How is this workbook organized?
Procrastination has nothing to do with laziness or passivity. Nor is about learning endless productivity hacks. It’s about not-knowing how to manage the psychological processes that drive you to procrastinate.
This workbook, based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, helps you to understand why you put things off, and more importantly, how to overcome these patterns. From the first to the last chapter you’ll learn to compassionately recognize and tackle the roots of procrastinating behaviors while practicing essential psychological skills. You’ll learn to tame all that mental noise that pops up when you’re facing important stuff-whether it’s work, hobbies, or anything else you care about before diving into action.
Whether you’re facing looming deadlines or day-to-day demands, these pages provide you with the tools you need to move from abstract intentions to values-based actions.
Learn to align your actions with your values, get things done, and build a life you’re truly proud of.
Finally, a book that unmasks the roots of procrastination rather than simply scolding you to try harder! Dr. Z provides an empowering, compassionate toolkit for navigating the barriers to starting a project, so you can learn to fully engage your life with creativity and flow.
Dr. Zurita Ona’s clear, practical guide offers a more direct path between you and the things you want to accomplish. It reveals how even the way we set goals or apparent efforts at “increasing productivity” can be traps. This is a book about changing your relationship with time, and letting go of the exhausting struggle to avoid doing the things that matter. I highly recommend it!
Bringing a deep expertise in ACT to one of the most common and frustrating struggles, this book offers practical tools to move forward and the invaluable gift of greater self-understanding.
This practical workbook guides the reader past those processes that block action, making you overlook what truly matters. You learn about “compassionate accountability”, “ruling thoughts”, and” pesky feelings”. The wise “Tale of Two Arrows “illuminates your relationship with your critical self. I highly recommend it!
Twenty years of planning, hoping and avoiding writing a book. I know all the tricks and excuses the anxious mind can come up with. I’m now deep into writing my own. Open this book and get to work.
A well-written, easy-to-use guide for transforming your relationship with anxiety and dissolving the barriers that hold you back from doing the things that matter.
Wise, compassionate, and extremely practical.
Who is this workbook for?
If you’ve ever said…
“I know what I need to do… I just can’t seem to start.”
“I wait until the last minute and then feel overwhelmed.”
“I’m so tired of beating myself up for not following through.”
… this workbook is for you.
Whether you’re a college student paralyzed by deadlines, a perfectionist professional avoiding the first draft, or someone who’s simply stuck in the loop of overthinking and underacting, you are not lazy, broken, or unmotivated. You’re human. And you deserve compassionate and evidence-based skills that treat you that way.
This workbook is especially designed for:
- Students who freeze at the thought of writing papers or studying for exams.
- Professionals who keep delaying projects, emails, or big decisions, even when the pressure builds.
- Perfectionists and people-pleasers who delay action because they’re afraid of making mistakes or disappointing others.
- Creative minds who have a million ideas… but struggle to finish what they start.
- Neurodivergent folks (including ADHDers) who want compassionate, structured strategies that go beyond “just use a planner.”
Anyone who wants to stop procrastinating not just by forcing productivity, but by healing the fear and self-doubt underneath it.
What’s inside this workbook?
Chapter: How Did I End Up Here?
Chapter: Breaking the Myth of the Typical Procrastinator
Chapter: Finding the Compass of Your Life
Chapter: Be Good to Yourself!
Chapter: Compassionate Accountability
Chapter: Aligning Your Choosing with Your Being
Chapter: Working Skillfully with a Clockless Mind
Chapter: Doing the Doing with a Focused Mind
Chapters
Pages
Exercises
About Dr. Z.
I’m originally from Bolivia, South America, and am a psychologist by training. I’m formally trained in empirically supported treatments, and when I say “formally,” I mean that since 2004 I have received intensive training in them, particularly in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT).
Over the past 18 years, I have created resources for and worked with overthinkers and overachievers dealing with all types of fear--related struggles: perfectionism, procrastination, productivity anxiety, uncertainty intolerance, indecision, impostor phenomenon, overthinking, phobias, rumination, panic, worry and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I absolutely love my job!
In 2019, I was nominated as a fellow by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science because of my contributions related to the applications of ACT for fear-based struggles. I’m the author of six books and the co-author of three (see the section on previously written books).
I’m the founder and director of the East Bay Behavior Therapy Center, a boutique private center in the San Francisco Bay Area that offers therapy and coaching for anyone experiencing anxiety-based struggles.
In 2023, I gave a TEDx talk, “Stop playing-it-safe and start living” that has more than 264K downloads.
While I’m a psychologist by training and science-based by passion, my style is jargon-free, accessible, caring, and lighthearted; teaching ACT skills doesn’t have to be boring or inaccessible, so I do my best to make every skill I teach—in any format—as engaging as possible.
I believe that learning to navigate fear-based reactions is one of the key skills of the 21st century, and I’m passionate about it.
