It’s 5pm and you remember that report you have to do tomorrow. Time to get down to work — but wait, maybe you should just check your phone first. Or look at that YouTube channel you like. Or make dinner, for that matter — you’ll be less stressed if your belly is full. But even with your favourite chilled sauvignon blanc at hand, it’s hard to get your head in the game. Before you know it, it’s late and you’re wondering whether you’ll actually manage it tomorrow. Everyone procrastinates a bit, don’t they? I used to.
However, if it’s not good for us, why do we do it? Well, delaying tasks is not always procrastination. Sometimes it’s prudent. It’s about appreciation of time, a sense of what is urgent and what can wait. Procrastination, on the other hand, is about intentional avoidance of things you should be doing for no good reason, even though you know it’s going to give you trouble later.
Our reluctance to tackle it is merely the brain’s mechanism to protect us. The prospect of my doing a report triggers a stress response as if it were an actual threat — which causes my system to flood with stress hormones such as adrenaline. In a non-helpful move, the amygdala can hijack the cortex, robbing me of my ability to rationalise. Instead, I either fight or run. I either finish the report or pursue less stressful activities to until such time as I can conquer the report.
This major reaction might seem a bit over the top for a deadline, but many of our tasks that we procrastinate are those that we anticipate will make us feel bad — if we are worried about them, or feel anxious about doing them. And, empirical evidence shows that when we think about a task longer than we should, it actually looks harder than it actually is.
some of us are more genetically predisposed to crossing that line between procrastination and productivity. Those who suffer from impulse control, and who are prone to anxiety or depression and/or low self-esteem are at greater risk. Laziness has never been an issue here. Laziness equates to having no energy. Laziness entails not caring. The procrastinator often cares too much. Constantly fearful of not living up to her exceedingly high standards, she fears, instead, that her work will not be good enough.
This is self-defeating: indecision over what to do is stressful, and procrastination leads to anxiety, depression and the usual residue of stress-related ill-health. Rather than being a good way to cope with the pressure, procrastinating reduces stress in the short term, reinforcing the habit.
But how do we stop this, then? It’s not about withdrawing PSP privileges. We simply have to work through the negative emotion. Break tasks into small steps; write down what you are dreading about them; knock out distractions; be kind to yourself, forgive your failures, plan to do better next time. In the long run, it’s the rest of us who benefit from relief from procrastination stress.