Do people procrastinate?

If procrastination isn't about laziness, then what is it about? ... chronic illness and even hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

There are many ways in which procrastination sustains itself as a habit.

There are two trains of thought – One leads to procrastination and one leads to motivation. And somewhere in between, there is a junction called anxiety.

People often think procrastination is about time management, laziness, or a weak will but that is not the best way to understand procrastination.

It’s a failure of self –regulation cause people to procrastinate. We procrastinate because some tasks put us in a lousy mood and we want to repair that mood to feel better. Procrastination is the gap between intention to work and the action to work.

What does science really say about procrastination?

For all practical purposes, we will define procrastination as the intentional and voluntary delay of an intended activity even if the delay creates negative consequences. And, we will label the ‘stuff’ done while procrastinating as aversion activities.

Students (analyzing thoughts, emotions, behaviors, etc., with qualitative data) revealed that students procrastinate stressful and unpleasant tasks. When procrastinating, they engage in more pleasant behaviors. One important thing to note here is that any task can be considered stressful and unpleasant based on a few personal factors.

Basic tasks can be stressful and unpleasant when a person is depressed or suffers from anxiety disorders. Low self-worth, low self-esteem, low confidence in skills/abilities can mediate this and make virtually work and sabotage it to prove that feeling correct.

?Depression, anxiety, and finer aspects like poor confidence in abilities, worrying, negative thinking, perfectionism, ADHD, etc., predict procrastination-like behaviors. At the heart of those, there is emotional deregulation – a known source of procrastinator behaviors and habits.

Even your ability to concentrate and focus on work is related to procrastination.

Motivation and forcing yourself to work/study is a source of negative emotions. Mildly demanding tasks can become stressful if a person over thinks. One could over think as a result of cognitive biases, obsessive and intrusive thoughts, anxiety, etc., and overcoming thinking errors ? might help in having a clearer mental picture.

A common occurrence is how many believe they don’t have the skill or ability to perform well, and that belief creates anxiety about bad performance. So self-handicapping feel they actually failed because of their skill. Dealing with inadequate skills itself could be a reason to procrastinate.

In a day-to-day student-life context, negative mood today predicts ?procrastination tomorrow but procrastination doesn’t necessarily predict changes in mood the next day. This shows a direction – a negative mood motivates procrastination. For students ??an aversion to the task and a fear of failure are the main reasons for procrastination.

People, when upset, tend to act on existing impulses to make themselves feel better. However, when people believe that their bad mood is unchangeable; they do not engage in frivolous procrastination or act on other impulses to engage in other activities (which lead to procrastination, at times).

This may happen because believing that one’s mood is unchangeable has a hidden assumption: Nothing can be done to make it better. So why do it?

Negative repetitive thoughts which are related to procrastination are often present in this complex cluster of perceived anxiety. They even have a special name – procrastinator cognitions. These are direct destructive thoughts about procrastination and met cognitions such as worrying about procrastination

?Disclaimer:?The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensure discussion or debate.

Thank you?...We often procrastinate because of perceived anxiety, stress, and poor emotional regulation about the completion of a task. If you are procrastinating reading study material, it’s probably related to some perceived anxiety based on the outcome of studying.

Perhaps, if you start studying, you’ll realize you don’t know anything. Or maybe you’ll feel that you are not smart enough to even begin addressing the study material.

Perceived anxieties make us feel ‘not so good.’

The feeling that you get about the outcome of doing a task is the core cause of procrastination. It could be a belief about you, it could be based on previous experiences, or it could be an amplified version of something small. You’d know best.

After the perceived anxiety/negative thought kills our buzz, we end up doing an aversion activity like going out with friends or watching YouTube or Netflix.

The aversion activity is a mechanism to avoid or delay the anxiety and repair the short-term negative mood. Think about it. Most of us end up doing something more pleasurable because the procrastinated task spoiled our mood in the first place.

Btw, even boredom can be a powerful negative emotion. A common response to task-aversion is phone use. People tend to procrastinate and repair their mental state with their mobile phones.

This, of course, is a very simplistic picture. Motivation complicates things.

Do you want to add a word or two?....

Look at the motivation train of thought. The fact that there are consequences for procrastinating is a source of anxiety and stress in itself. This could motivate you to not procrastinate in the first place. But that doesn’t always happen.

?The motivation could stay in the background or it could even push you toward your goal. However, the anxiety remains until it is dealt with.

Once the anxiety builds up, it hits you in many forms: suddenly-one-night-I-got-the-mental-strength-to-get-up-and-do-it is one form in which it hits you.

Remember I said that there is a junction called anxiety? If you are at that junction, you’ll receive a double whammy attack from anxiety – one from your motivation, and one from your procrastination.

At this junction, you can experience anxiety from both trains of thought and it bleeds into your mental space. This could get a lot worse because anxiety is notorious as a bed-time feeder .

?To make matters even worse, if you have a habit of ruminating stressful thoughts about work, productivity, ambitions, etc., before bedtime, it could ?worsen your sleep. Nighttime negative repetitive thinking is a huge problem in itself.

An idle mind before sleeping makes this anxiety junction overwhelming. It kills your sleep, makes you tired, and gives you zero clarity on how to continue the journey toward successful procrastination or successful avoidance of procrastination.

Wait… did I say ‘toward successful procrastination’?

Yes, because, we don’t often just procrastinate. The story would be simple if we just delayed tasks; the anxiety would be relatively less intense.

We procrastinate and are conflicted by the polar opposite drive to complete the procrastinated task – via intrinsic motivation, rewards, validation, acknowledgment, happiness, satisfaction, pride, honor, and glory.

?Chronic procrastinators know this all too well. When procrastination becomes a default habit, these opposing drives create additional problems such as lacking a sense of accomplishment and autonomy – procrastination enslaves you.

Your comments........?

So what do these insights tell us about overcoming or, at least, reducing procrastination?

Can we really do anything about it?

Fortunately, there is good news. The research is vast and consistent enough to give us actionable tips to overcome procrastination. Here are some solutions based on the recommendations proposed by researchers. I’ve repackaged some insights for practical use.

Remember – You can overcome procrastination by regulating your emotions about your work.

You could get conditioned to this reward and feel nothing was lost to procrastination. Or, the satisfaction of completion is overwhelming and you like it.

These feelings can have a strong biological component via classical and operant conditioning. The brain may associate the increasing tension of procrastination with success, if you are successful. That association underlies a habit or a rigid tendency.

You Procrastinate Because Of Emotions, Not Laziness. Regulate Them To Stop Procrastinating!

Something that is overlooked….What you resists persists. So if you have emotional resistance to;

Not doing the task,

Never doing the task,

Procrastinating on the task,

All the negative consequences of not doing the task, then this resistance will cause you to not do the task.

If your emotional regulation is only focused on the emotions around doing the task and not on your emotions about never doing the task, you will have trouble doing the task.

Emotional regulation efforts must also be focused on your feelings about never doing the task to be completely effective.

That’s an important point you have mentioned – emotional regulation on feelings about never doing a task.

In the context of procrastination self-forgiveness would most likely include those feelings.

?Not doing a task shouldn’t come with the price of damaged self-esteem and self-worth or self-judgment.

That would create a positive feedback loop between negative thoughts about oneself and procrastination.

Procrastination indicates lack of self confidence and/or confusion.

For this one must –

-Understand the meaning and significance of supreme values of life like freedom, peace, love, truth, compassion.

-Understand the significance in meaning of polarities like truth and untruth, justice and injustice, moral and amoral, ethical and unethical, right and wrong and so on.

Having the above awareness, one will develop self confidence while making right choices in the process of decision making in life.