Your Procrastination Isn't What You Think
Procrastination isn’t about willpower or laziness. It’s about emotions. Specifically, it’s about how you are managing your emotions.
See, the task you are procrastination is making you feel a certain way…or rather you are allowing it to make you feel a certain way. And you are dealing with that emotion by dodging it through procrastination, rather than acknowledging it and facing it.
Even if you eventually get done whatever you need to get done, your procrastination is still a problem.
You probably beat yourself up for procrastinating, which decreases your confidence and self-esteem, and that has mental and physical health consequences.
You increase your stress because you are on tighter deadlines, which has mental and physical health consequences.
People who routinely procrastinate, according to research by Fuschia Sirois, PhD, are more likely to suffer from chronic stress, depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic illnesses. They also experience lower life satisfaction compared to people who don’t routine procrastinate and engage in fewer healthy behaviors (like exercise, healthy eating, and quality/quantity sleep).
Oh, and there are productivity costs, which also affect stress because they relate to financial well-being and probably tie into how capable and successful you feel if you identify yourself as a leader and provider.
If It’s Such a Negative, Why Do We Do It?
Procrastination is kind of like that pack of cookies or chips that tasted so good when you were stress eating but now you’re regretting it.
Procrastination is an emotional response to the task that you need to do but for some reason don’t want to. Maybe you feel like it will be hard or take a long time or you feel incapable of doing it well. Instead of facing these emotions head-on, you grab a snack or organize a desk drawer or pick out new stickers for your fancy journal, or “finally” take the Magic Eraser to every wall in the house…had to be done, right then and right now….right?
In the moment, those tasks felt good because they helped you avoid the negative emotions associated with the task you were procrastinating. Except, of course, the task is still there and so are the emotions around it. They might even seem worse because time has strengthened them.
Great, Now What?
There are a few tactics. They all come down to developing the skill of emotion regulation. The better you are at processing negative emotions, the less likely you are to procrastinate.
Here are two tactics to start with:
Recognizing that emotions only last 90-seconds: https://www.rachboehm.com/tiptoradiate/how-to-change-your-life-90-seconds-at-a-time
Developing self-compassion: https://www.rachboehm.com/tiptoradiate/tag/self-compassion
“Procrastination is like a credit card: it's a lot of fun until you get the bill.”
― Christopher Parker