by David Parker
“I’d rather do it when I really feel like doing it; that way I’ll be motivated, and do a better job.”
“I know I should be doing other things, but right now, I need to take a nap.”
“I can’t deal with balancing that checkbook. I wonder if I’m missing anything on TV?”
“I’m not doing the laundry now—I’ll do it later.”
Although we all need to take an occasional break at one point or another, if your breaks are just taken to avoid your responsibilities, then your procrastination can progress into a bad habit. Luckily, like most bad habits, it can be overcome if you make a solid decision to change. While that change cannot happen overnight, if your decision is firm, you can purposefully implement that change into your life—and you will notice the difference over time.
As you may have already noticed, procrastination is a highly complex system that develops and grows. It then becomes second nature and an enormous source of frustration within the person suffering from it. This sense of frustration often comes from self-directed questions like, “Why don’t I do what I need to do, when I need to do it?” or, “What on earth is wrong with me?” Questions like these can seem so relatively simple and natural to ask that we may assume their answers will also come to us with that same relative simplicity. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
We can ask ourselves about why we procrastinate until we’re blue in the face, yet accomplish next to nothing. This is because habitual procrastination involves the thinking patterns and self-beliefs that we’ve developed over a long time. That’s part of the reason why I decided to write this book, after numerous years of therapy yielded precious little in the way of positive results.
Procrastination as Self-Protection Against Threats
Some people become habitual procrastinators as a means of developing a protective mechanism against emotional overload. One root of their procrastination grows out of the concern that their tasks will be mentally trying or physically exhausting. They fear their tasks will drain whatever precious reserves of emotional energy they may have left, the ones that their overactive minds haven’t already depleted from worrying. Procrastination then becomes habitual, and can escalate to the point where practically all tasks seem too difficult.
Here are some typical causes of emotional overload that we may procrastinate over:
You put up with poor health, and delay visiting the doctor over concerns of being diagnosed with a serious illness.
You put off balancing your checkbook out of worry that it might not contain as much money as you would like it to have, or because you become easily flustered at the thought of the totals not balancing up.
After receiving your annual statement of earnings from the Social Security Administration you find errors in it, but postpone writing to them because you dislike dealing with large governmental agencies.
You apartment is a mess. The windows need cleaning, the carpet hasn’t been vacuumed in months, and the bookshelves need dusting but you’re concerned that you won’t have enough energy to do it.
You’ve put off doing the laundry for so long that you’ve run out of clean clothes to wear. Still, you can’t bear the thought of lugging several bags of dirty laundry over to the cleaners and spending hours watching the washing machines and dryers rotate.
Your supervisor appears with two boxes of files and says, “It’s your turn to deal with these.” You really dislike filing, and your boss has personally handed these files over to you. Still, you wonder if there’s a way you can flee from this unpleasant task without alerting him.
When procrastinators feel overwhelmed, they tend to go into self-protection mode, shutting down like overloaded circuit breakers do. However, while circuit breakers re-set at only the push of a switch, people are a bit more complex.
So, Why Do I Continue Procrastinating?
“I know I’m driving myself nuts by procrastinating about this, that, and everything. So, why do I continue doing it?” I’ve been asked this question by many procrastinators, and it’s a natural question. Just why do we keep on procrastinating when it causes us so much stress? Well, for some pretty good reasons. Here are just a few of them:
We’ve been this way for quite a while, and although procrastination is not the best coping method ever invented, it has helped us to avoid some stressful situations for better or worse—unfortunately, it’s usually for the worse.
Procrastinating makes us feel independent because no one can pin us down and force us to do things we don’t want to.
Our approach is to hesitate-and-evaluate, instead of facing-and-embracing those tasks that we perceive of being difficult or unpleasant.
We’re uncomfortable at the thought of facing disappointment.
We feel more “in control” when not doing something that could otherwise challenge us, embarrass us, or cause us to feel frightened.
We abhor those tasks that we perceive as being “boring” or “complicated.”
We are used to burying our heads in the sand as a response to stress.
It’s worth mentioning that some people procrastinate for the buzz that their nervous system receives from stress caused by their own delays. For example, while leading a discussion on the topic of habitual procrastination at the Stress Relief Club of Stuyvesant High School in New York City, I posed this question, “Why do we continue procrastinating when we already know it’s not good for us?” One student responded with, “I like the drama.” He then added that by putting off his studying, he believed that he was giving his nerves “extra tension” in order to perform better on tests.
I asked if he thought this line of thinking was entirely true. “Entirely? No,” he replied. He went on to say he worried that his belief in procrastination’s merits might be his own rationalization. I suggested that although he might hope that he might feel that this buzz was sharpening his senses, he knew perfectly well what he should be doing, which was studying. Procrastination can seem to offer pressure-relief, but this is only an illusion because whatever buzz anyone gets from it, comes at the expense of stress, anxiety, and worry later on.
A habitual procrastinator can be somewhat of a miserable creature. Weighed down by a long string of unaccomplished tasks built up over the years, along with an inability to deal with his present tasks, he sometimes worries about how, or if, he will ever deal with the as of yet unknown tasks that will present themselves to him in the future. In addition, he may also worry about how his loved ones, friends, or colleagues perceive him. Is it any wonder if he occasionally feels depressed?
Avoiding one’s tasks is akin to sweeping dirt under a rug, and you can almost picture such a sad soul, stubbornly kicking himself forward through life. In fact, one procrastinator said he felt as if he were wearing a large “kick me” sign on his back.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you were a visitor from another planet who came down to Earth with orders to observe the behavior of Earthlings who habitually refuse to deal with their tasks. Needing data, you interview a few of them and notice that many of them not only complain about their own behavior, they also bear resentment for those times when they were forced to act due to circumstances beyond their control. This, despite the fact that they would have had control, if only they had taken charge earlier.
Wrapping up your study for presentation to the scientific community back home, you look for a name to describe this group of Earthlings. What name would you bestow upon this species?
Chapter Three
A New Species Is Discovered—The Human Ostrich
OVER TIME, AS I CONTINUED my self-exploration by jotting down my moods in my feelings journal, I began noticing a relationship between my difficulties in accomplishing tasks and my low feelings. Even when I had ample time to take care of seemingly smaller tasks, such as doing the laundry or going out for groceries, when I felt severely depressed there was often only time for hiding under the bedcovers and sleeping the day away. Suffering with low ener
gy levels, the only other activity that both distracted me and ate up loads of time was endless television viewing. I felt utterly helpless, while hopelessly confounded by my own psychological condition, victimized by a foe that had control over nearly every aspect of my life—or so I believed.
Depression Isn’t My Fault—Is It?
At that time, I believed that, whatever the cause, my depressive states were entirely beyond my control. However, in order for that to be true, those causes really had to be beyond my control—in other words, they had to be the sort of maladies usually deemed larger-than-life, such as:
Bad genes: I had inherited a family history of depression, said the professionals. “You were born with a predisposition to depression,” they said. As my fellow Brooklynite—Curly Howard of “The Three Stooges”—had insisted in a courtroom, “I’m a victim of soicumstance.”
A rough upbringing: I was a small, skinny kid in public school. Always the runt of the classroom, I suffered the taunts of schoolyard bullies and their troubled peers.
Disruption of my career plans: From an early age, I had wanted to become a radio broadcasting engineer. I even went to a vocational high school in order to learn electronics, and then studied broadcasting at community college. It wasn’t until I was attending college that I learned that the traditional position of broadcast engineer was being phased out due to automation. What teenager wouldn’t become depressed after discovering that his dreams had been squashed?
Alcohol and recreational drug use: In time, I discovered that if I didn’t feel good about myself, I could at least feel better by getting thoroughly plastered or stoned. The only downfall to this was that while attempting to discover my inner-self, I allowed everything else to fall by the wayside.
Bad luck: Well, if the combination of bad genes, a rough upbringing, disruption of my career plans, and alcohol and recreational drug use weren’t bad luck, I ask you, what is? Obviously, I was doomed to a life consisting of struggle and strife.
There’s an old tale about a snowy night, when an outreach team committed to helping homeless people found a man shivering in a bus shelter. After repeated attempts, they coaxed him into their van and took him to a local hospital for evaluation. Later in their shift, one of the outreach workers stopped by the man’s hospital room to check up on him. It wasn’t very hard to find him because he was repeatedly yelling at the top of his lungs, “Nurse! Let me out of here!” The outreach worker peeked in through the doorway and saw the man strapped to his bed, begging to be set free.
Seeing this, the outreach worker thought to himself, “How odd. A few hours ago this man was fighting frigid temperatures and now, he’s laying on a bed with clean sheets and a blanket, demanding to be let back out into the cold.” Then it came to him: “This man must have a great liability. No, what he actually has is a great lie-ability—an enormous ability to lie to himself.” This personality trait can also apply to habitual procrastinators.
I Really Could, but Please Don’t Tell Anyone—Most Especially, “Me.”
One day, I began reviewing the pages of my feelings journal again because I wanted to find out why depression immobilized me to the extent that it did. I noticed that some of my writings detailed day-to-day activities, while others concerned tasks that I wanted or needed to accomplish.
On page after page, I observed that while some tasks always got done, the same was true in reverse as well. By this, I mean that no matter how much time I might have had, some tasks were never accomplished. My entries seemed to stare back at me from their pages, making me feel as if I’d inadvertently played cruel pranks upon myself; however, there they were, and in my very own handwriting! Among the notes jotted down about how poorly I felt was something else that, while unwritten, was irrefutable—the longer I had shunned my undone tasks, the worse my depression had grown.
Let’s take a look at some of those tasks in a side-by-side comparison:
Although I Seemed Able To I Seemed Unable To
Shave, shower, and get dressed.
Get to work on time.
Search on-line personals ads for hours on end.
Search on-line job ads for better job opportunities.
File papers away at work.
Deal with the small paper notes and ATM cash receipts that filled my wallet.
Pay vendors at work by writing checks and making bookkeeping entries.
Open bills and write checks at home.
The fact that some of the tasks I avoided bore an eerie resemblance to many of the things that I did for pleasure or self-satisfaction compounded my frustration. For example: In the above table, one entry refers to my apparent inability to search on-line classified job advertisements. Like many people, I disliked job hunting—after all, was anything worse than the humdrum tediousness of searching for a job? Along with the mind-numbing activity of scrolling through lists of jobs, you then have to reply to the suitable ones, trying to persuade potential employers that you are the best possible candidate. And, if reading their ad once wasn’t “enough,” I often needed to re-read it a few times to insure that my response addressed their needs, trying to be sincere without sounding needy, while trying to impress them with my experience while not wanting to come off as arrogant.
Perhaps the only thing that was worse than job hunting was the very real possibility of facing rejection. The way I saw it, I faced two sorts of rejection. First, there was silent rejection, when I simply didn’t get a response. The other sort of rejection occurred after I’d gone through all the trouble to dress up, show up for the interview, and wind up not getting the job. Who needed frustrations like those?
One of the ways I avoided the chore of job-hunting was by going on the Internet and getting lost on dating websites, searching the postings for a possible love interest. This I could do for hours on end. Let’s examine how I conducted that particular activity:
After going on-line, I would find a suitable personals website.
I would then begin my search either by scrolling through the postings one-by-one and saving the ones I liked, or by using a search filter to limit my selections to women who lived nearby or were age-compatible.
Either way, that left plenty of ads to go through—and go through them I did!
Upon closer examination, I usually found something that disqualified an ad from further consideration. In that case, it was simply on to the next one.
One by one and posting after posting—I would go through a large assortment of ads from women who were seeking companionship.
Every now and then, there would be one posting that made me stop and re-read it.
I might even take the time to read her posting a third time, in order to make sure I understood what she was looking for in a companion.
With her “talking points” in mind, I would begin crafting my response: trying to be sincere without sounding schmaltzy, while wishing to impress her while not presenting a falsehood.
“There!” I’d think to myself with a flare of attitude, and even possibly a bit of confidence: “If she doesn’t go for that, then I don’t want her!”
I’d then hit the “Reply” button for what I hoped might be a chance at romance.
Finally, after considering the possibility that she might not take the bait, I’d go back to that website and go through more personal ads.
Do you notice any similarities between how I went about job-hunting and how I went about looking for a love interest? Here are some of the coincidences that I found:
While I Had Great Difficulty I Seemed More Than Able To
Spending time scrolling through Internet job ads.
Scroll through Internet personals ads for hours at a time.
Putting effort into responding to job ads with intelligence, honesty, and confidence.
Put effort in responding to personals ads with intelligence, honesty, and confidence.
Facing rejection because my résumé might be dismissed at first glance.
Face rejection because
my response might be dismissed at first glance.
Facing rejection by an employer after the job interview.
Face being rejected by a woman after the first date.
Enduring the process of finding a job.
Enjoy the process of finding a romantic interest.
What do we make of this? While I abhorred just the idea of getting down to dealing with some tasks, other tasks provided me with a sense of adventure, making me want to take a chance and be proactive, even when the outcome was uncertain. Moreover, while just the thought of job hunting made me feel overwhelmed and not in control of the situation, something else like searching through personals ads made me feel warm and motivated, despite the fact that these activities shared so many eerily similar elements.
So, I avoided some situations like job-hunting, where I felt uncomfortable because I felt like I wasn’t in control, which in turn made me feel as if I were taking an unacceptable gamble with my free time. However, at the same time, I tended to gravitate toward somewhat similar situations, like going through on-line personals ads, where I also wasn’t in control and had pretty much the same chance of a positive or negative outcome as job-hunting. In short, I had just as much control over my job hunting activities as I did when I searched personal ads; it was merely my perception of the two activities that caused me to avoid one while becoming completely lost in the other.
Reacting—By Not Acting
When it came to tasks that contained a strong component of emotional fear, I had learned that it was a whole lot easier to put certain things off than to deal with them. The only thing was, I had become so used to feeling that way that there was no longer anything unusual about that reaction. It seemed as if I was automatically reacting—by not acting. It wasn’t that the task was getting the better of me; it was more the apprehension that I would become fearful which kept me frozen in my tracks. After pondering this for a while, I recalled the words that President Franklin D. Roosevelt said at his inaugural address on March 4, 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That summed things up perfectly.
