Who doesn’t procrastinate? But are you an addict? I’ve been reading and listening, and I have to emphatically acknowledge that I am. Here is a sample of what I have read and heard.
“But the momentary relief we feel when procrastinating is actually what makes the cycle especially vicious. In the immediate present, putting off a task provides relief — “you’ve been rewarded for procrastinating,” Dr. Sirois said. And we know from basic behaviorism that when we’re rewarded for something, we tend to do it again. This is precisely why procrastination tends not to be a one-off behavior, but a cycle, one that easily becomes a chronic habit.”
This is a quote from the New York Times article
My house is in shambles; it is literally falling apart because of this addiction. I don’t even do some things I enjoy doing because of negative feelings that are attached. For example, I bought a cello, trombone and a saxophone. I love learning musical instruments, and I have fine instruments. They aren’t cheap. But I still procrastinate. It takes a lot of practice to get to the point of being able to produce music, something that sounds pleasing. So I just play the instrument I’m already good at.
I am now turning my attention to overcoming my addiction to procrastination. I’ll start with the tools above. All are welcome to add your ideas, stories or advice.
This is a phenomenal share. I’m definitely a chronic procrastinator. I appreciate the material because maybe with some understanding I can start reversing this terribly bad cycle.
Procrastination is not about how objectively difficult the thing is. It is about the negative feelings we attach to that thing. This is unique to the individual. I did 120 bodyweight squats this morning at sunrise. Then I had a cold shower. Both were difficult, but I had no difficulty doing them. But there are things that I put off for years like repairing my house.
I washed my car for the first time. It was probably the worst car wash in history. I didn’t even rinse it off. (It’s supposed to rain soon.) I gave procrastination a kick in the arse. That was all I wanted to do.
No. I don’t care about the car. The inside is just as bad. It’s one of many things I procrastinate. I could reveal much worse. I’ll make a list soon, but the list will change. Next year it will be something else. I’ll always be putting off something. I will focus on the habit, not the items on the list.
Suffice for now to say I recognise this. A lot. Thanks for the links. I need to do something about I. Fucks up so much in my life. My ability to do my job well for one. My home too.
This topic is fascinating. I have had an interest in this since I first started looking closely at my life and my mental health. As I’ve been working my addiction recovery over the last 8 months, I’ve realized my emotion patterns related to addiction are basically the same as the ones related to procrastination: they centre on avoidance. (Inevitably though, life catches up to you & you have to live the way we’re all learning in sobriety: live life on life’s terms.)
Tim Pychyl has been researching procrastination for the last 20 years and I find his ideas fascinating. He observed, “Procrastination is an emotion-regulation problem. It’s not a time management problem. It’s about really dealing with our feelings.”
Procrastination is one of the avoidance strategies we use to escape emotions that scare us. (Avoidance. Sound familiar?)
He ran a podcast on procrastination (I Procrastinate) for several years, with lots of interesting talks and interviews: https://iprocrastinate.libsyn.com/
He has a very interesting interview with recovered heroin addict Eric Zimmer here:
The brain’s rewards center mediates procrastination tendencies just as with other addictions. I’m going to read these asap. But I feel like I already have a good idea about how to deal with this. I think it’s going to be similar to how I learned to take cold showers. I have a plan, and it’s empowering.
Avoidance might be a more appropriate word than procrastination. I was thinking about that yesterday. There are no deadlines on many of the things I put off doing. I’m starting to prefer that word.
“It’s not a matter about feeling like it, no one said you have to wait until you feel like it,” Pychyl says. “You hear people say: ‘I don’t want to do it’, but here is the whole point . . . what does wanting have to do with it?”
This was most interesting to me. Want seems like an ambiguous word. Here it means “to feel like”. My goal is to break the habit of putting off things that ought to be done, regardless of how I feel. In a sense a do want to do these things, but I don’t feel like it. That means I feel negative emotion when I think about going into action.
“and he said, master, I’ve been doing my meditation and I’ve been working hard. How do I achieve enlightenment? And the master looks at him and says, have you finished your rice? And he said, yes. Then wash your bowl.”
My strategy is simple. Choose something I’ve been putting off, and just start it. Starting is all that matters. I don’t have to finish it. It doesn’t have to be my best work. In fact I will start it without any intention of finishing it. Just by starting, I will break the cycle. It will take many starts to train my brain to ignore the negative emotions just like it did to train it to ignore the coldness of the water and then to eventually embrace it.
When I was washing my car, I tried to use a yard hydrant at my house to get water. I hadn’t used it in years. It was jammed up, and no water would come out.
This morning I learned how yard hydrants work and decided this would be a good project that I could complete in a few hours. First I greased it, and it opened but only released a trickle of water. I bought a big wrench
and separated the hydrant to find that the problem was what I suspected. The rubber plunger/stopper was broken and stuck in the pipe, obstructing the water.
But the water still only trickled out. Water pressure in the house was good. So I realized that the supply line was clogged. I could have checked this before buying anything. By then I had spent $120 on the wrench and hydrant. I was sure, so I didn’t check.
At this point I had been working for five hours. I took a break, and spent the next two hours debating with myself whether to continue digging or to call a pro. I chose to call a pro instead of digging further, deciding not to get involved with the water main.
A master plumber arrived in a few minutes. He was a gentleman and professional. He persuaded me that trying to repair that pipe was a bad idea. It is sixty five years old. He capped it off and checked the water pressure. It’s in the yellow, he said. It’s high because corrosion has constricted the main. He gave me an estimate for water main replacement, $3200, and surprisingly did not charge me anything for his time. He also offered to replace all the plumbing in the house. I’m going to procrastinate, of course.
I’ll choose another project tomorrow. There are plenty to choose from. This one didn’t work out as I hoped, but that’s okay. At least I have a cool wrench now.
That’s a good experience - you really engaged with the project, even though you didn’t have a perfect picture of it, and you pushed through until you reached a finish point (at least, a point where you’d tried everything you could). It was a good genuine imperfect experience
