Posted by So, there’s a specific job or task you need to get done. How often do you find yourself putting it off? How long will you leave it until you can’t avoid it any longer? What will you start working on, instead of the more urgent job?
Everyone procrastinates at one time or another. Procrastination is the voluntary delay of a task or action, even though we know we’ll be the worse off for that delay! It’s a problem that I think probably everybody has to deal with at one point or another (including myself).
So this week I’m looking at what procrastination really is, why do we do it to ourselves, and what can we do to stop it?
Making our own lives difficult
Procrastination, at its heart, seems counterintuitive. We know that delaying something is going to make life more difficult, and yet we still do it.
It’s because fundamentally, procrastination is a quick-fix mood repair. Not doing a specific task might make you feel better in the short term (‘Hooray, I’ve avoiding doing that horrible job!’), but when you stop to think about it, it’s actually quite self-destructive behaviour, because you’ll pay a price later. Not only that, you might find that procrastination triggers uncomfortable feelings, which explains why procrastinators will often start doing another task instead.
It’s their way of distracting themselves from feeling guilty about not getting on with the more urgent job. Say you’re supposed to start working on a big paper, but instead of sitting down and getting started, you decide to put the washing on instead?
You do something that needs doing, but is easier, and therefore more pleasant. You don’t put on the TV, or do something unproductive, because that wouldn’t alleviate your guilt at putting off the job – you’d just feel lazy: the guilt is alleviated by you picking up some other task… just not the one that you really should be doing!
It’s important to understand that the guilty feeling being triggered by procrastination is just the tip of the iceberg: in the long-term it can lead to shame, and even depression in some cases. You might start feeling like you never get anything done, which increases your negative feelings. So it’s definitely important to understand why you might procrastinate, and what you can do to stop it.
Why we procrastinate?
So why do we do it to ourselves? Quite often, it’s because there’s one of two things going on. Firstly, we almost always overestimate how awful the task is going to be. You think the job is going to be so bad, so stressful, so unbelievably terrible, that it gets built up to something huge, something that’s so unpleasant that of course you’re not going to do it right now!
Of course, the reality is that it’s never as bad as you imagine, but that’s how you feel in the moment.
The other thing that happens is overestimating the good feeling you’ll get from avoiding the task in the first place.
You’ve decided that something will be a horrible job and that you don’t want to do it right now, so decide that what will make you feel better is to go and organise your sock drawer… but you still feel bad!
That’s the guilt I mentioned earlier. The thing you chose to do instead, to make yourself feel better, isn’t doing what you thought. Instead of making you feel good, that guilty feeling is being exacerbated.
So how do you overcome procrastination? The short answer is learning how to regulate your emotions, but there are several steps to doing this.
Here comes the science
At this point, it’s worth explaining about what’s going on in your brain at a deeper level. There’s a part of your brain called the amygdala. That’s the part that’s responsible for the ‘fight or flight’ response.
Imagine you’re a caveman. You’re walking along and hear a rustle in the bushes. Maybe it’s a bear, or a tiger. Your blood starts pumping, your muscles tighten up and almost immediately you’re ready to either sprint away as fast as possible, or wrestle it to the ground so you can try to kill it for your dinner.
The amygdala is your fear motivation centre and triggers the release of hormones that hijack your brain and prepare you to fight or flee. The problem we have now is, because procrastination is also centred in the amygdala, what actually happens when you’re contemplating an undesirable task is that the amygdala pipes up and triggers a similar biological response, even though you’re no way in a life-threatening situation.
You don’t feel like having a fight (doing the task), and so you run away (organise your sock drawer).
Don’t put off overcoming procrastination
The good news is that in today’s day and age, you don’t need to feel like you’ve got to fight a wild animal every time you have to do your accounts/write a difficult email/start a new project: with a little bit of behaviour change, procrastination could be quite easy to overcome.
When you realise that you’re starting to procrastinate, the first thing to do is to take a moment, sit back and breathe. Try to be aware of the changes that might be happening in your body – tense muscles, shallow breathing – and address them.
Actively relax your muscles –lose your eyes, and just breathe in and out slowly for a minute or two. By regulating your breathing and relaxing your body, you’ll start to calm down.
Next, try to observe what’s happening to you in an objective, non-judgmental way. Try to recognise and name the particular emotion you’re feeling, so you can begin to change it. If you can tell yourself that you’ve probably overestimated how unpleasant a task is, and that you know you don’t want to feel guilty about putting it off, you can remove the emotion from it altogether.
Do not identify with, or define yourself by, procrastination, whatever you do. A lot of people will say they’re terrible procrastinators and it becomes an excuse to avoid things. Remind yourself that everyone procrastinates at one point or another, but that it’s not a permanent personality trait.
Procrastination is a state of mind, not a character flaw. It’s temporary, not a reflection of your personality, so you don’t need to create a whole narrative that you’re bad, lazy, etc etc. That just feeds your negative feelings.
The three-minute rule
Don’t avoid the task. It’ll need to be done eventually, so you may as well get on with it. I like the three-minute rule, telling yourself you can stop after three minutes. The reality is that at the end of those three minutes you’ll probably find you just carry on: sometimes simply starting the task is enough to get you going.
But what you need to do once you’ve finished the task is to reflect on what it was that caused you to procrastinate in the first place. Try to understand what caused you to feel the way you did. What was it that you wanted to avoid? Was it really as bad as you thought? If you take the time to reflect now, it means that you’re less likely to repeat your behaviour in the future!