Procrastinating is not a question of laziness but of emotion management

If you have already postponed an important task to, for example, alphabetize the spices of your pantry, you know that it would not be fair to call you "lazy".

After all, literacy requires concentration and effort. And maybe you even tried to clean each pot before putting it in its place. And it's not like you're going to party with your friends or have seen Netflix. You clean, it's something your parents would be proud of! This is not laziness or bad time management. It's procrastination.

Etymologically, "procrastination" derives from the verb in Latin procrastinare -Display until tomorrow-. However, this goes beyond voluntary postponement. Procrastination also comes from the ancient Greek word Akrasia, Do something against our best judgment.

"He is hurting himselfsaid Piers Steel, a professor of motivational psychology at the University of Calgary and author of The equation of procrastination: How to stop putting things off and start doing everything.

This self-awareness is a key element in understanding why procrastination makes us feel bad. When we procrastinate, we are not only aware that we are avoiding the task at hand, but also that this is probably a bad idea.. And again, we do it anyway.

"That's why we say that procrastination is essentially irrational," said Fuschia Sirois, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield. "It does not make sense to do something that, to your knowledge, will have negative consequences."

He added: "People are caught in this irrational circle of chronic procrastination because of their inability to handle negative moods around a task."

Procrastination is not a character defect or a mysterious curse that hinders your ability to manage time, but a way to deal with the difficult emotions and negative moods generated by certain tasks: boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration , resentment and more.

"Procrastination is a problem of emotion regulation, not a time management problem," said Tim Pychyl, a professor of psychology and a member of Carleton University's procrastination research group in Ottawa, Canada. .

In a 2013 study, Pychyl and Sirois found that procrastination could be understood as "the primacy of short-term mood recovery … over the goal of longer-term planned actions." ". In simple terms, procrastination focuses more on "the immediate urgency of managing negative moods" than on participating in the task, Sirois said.

The particular nature of our aversion depends on the task or situation badigned. This may be due to the fact that the task itself is inherently unpleasant, like having to clean a dirty bathroom or organizing a long and boring spreadsheet for your boss. However, this can also be the result of deeper feelings about the task, such as suspicion of self, low self-esteem, feeling anxious or insecure. When you look at a blank document, you may say, "I'm not smart enough to write that, even if I am, what will they think of him?" The writing is so difficult. ? "

All this can lead us to think that storing the document and cleaning the jars of the cabinet is a very good idea.

However, of course, this only includes the negative badociations we have with the task, and these feelings will always be present when we come back to it, with increased stress and anxiety, feelings of low self-esteem and guilt.

In fact, there is a body of research entirely devoted to the thoughts of ruminants and the feelings of guilt that many of us feel as a result of procrastination, known as procrastinating cognitions. The thoughts we have about procrastination often exacerbate our anxiety and stress, which further contributes to procrastination, said Sirois.

However, The temporary relief we feel when we are procrastinating is what makes the circle so vicious. In the immediate future, suspending a task brings relief: "You have been rewarded for dithering," said Sirois. And basic behaviorism has taught us that when we are rewarded for something, we tend to do it again. This is precisely why procrastination does not tend to be a behavior once, but a circle, one that easily becomes a chronic habit.

Over time, chronic procrastination has costs not only for productivity, but also measurable destructive effects on our mental and physical health, including chronic stress, general psychological distress, and low satisfaction with our health. life, symptoms of depression and anxiety, failing health habits, chronic diseases and even hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

If it sounds ironic to procrastinate to avoid negative feelings, but we end up feeling even worse, it's because it's like that. And again, we should thank the evolution.

Procrastination is the perfect example of the bias of the present, of our mind's tendency to prioritize short-term rather than long-term needs.

"We really were not designed to think about the future in the distant future because we needed to focus on our own needs here and now.said psychologist Hal Hershfield, a marketing professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hershfield's research has shown that at the neural level we perceive ourselves more of the future as strangers than as part of ourselves. When we procrastinate, there are parts of our brain that really think that the tasks we suspend – and the negative feelings that accompany them and wait for us on the other side – are somebody's problem. d & # 39; other.

To make matters worse, we are even less able to make well-considered, forward-looking decisions in the midst of a stressful situation. Faced with a task that makes us anxious or insecure, the amygdala – the part of the brain that functions as a "threat detector" – perceives this task as a real threat, in this case to our esteem of self or our well-being. Even though we recognize intellectually that suspending the task will create more stress in the future, our brains are still connected to worry more about the elimination of the threat in the present. Researchers call this "removal of the amygdala".

Unfortunately, we can not just tell us to stop procrastinating. And despite the abundance of "productivity tips" that focus on how to do more work, they do not address the root cause of procrastination.

We must understand that procrastination is essentially a matter of emotions, not productivity. The solution is not to download a time management app or learn new self-management strategies. It is about managing our emotions in a different way.

"Our brains are always looking for relative rewards, and if we have a circle around procrastination but we have not found a better reward, our brains will continue to do so over and over again. That we were giving them something better to do, "said Judson Brewer, director. research and innovation at Brown's Center for Mental Completeness.

To reconfigure any habit, we must give our brain what Brewer called The best and the greatest offer.

In the case of procrastination, we must find a better reward to avoid, a reward that can lessen our feelings of defiance of the present without harming our future. The difficulty in ending the reliance on procrastination in particular is that there are an infinite number of potential substitutes that could still be forms of procrastination, Brewer said. That is why the solution must be internal and depends on nothing except ourselves.

Now, complete the literacy of these spice jars before it becomes the next thing you start procrastinating.

* Copyright: c.2019 New York Times Press Service