The draw of procrastination.
Procrastination is something that we’re all subject to. At best it makes for a mild case of guilt or shame. At its worst it can lead to relationship tensions, personal confusion, even job loss or financial disaster. According to Lindsey Markus, an estate attorney and author of A Gift for the Future: Conversations About Estate Planning, procrastination is the thing that concerns her most with clients. People know they need a financial plan. They know they need life insurance. They know they need wills. But one delay after another means they never get around to it. Markus sees her role as helping clients maintain orderly estate plans as their life circumstances change. But if they do not come forward with the needed documents and appointments, she can’t do her job.
Mental health conditions such as depression or ADHD can certainly make procrastination worse. But even mentally healthy people can be plagued by it.
Common advice for avoiding procrastination includes setting aside a half hour a day to catch up, or making a variety of to do lists, or using the technique of a five minute attack, or posting jumbo sticky notes where you can’t miss them, or some introspection about why you might be procrastinating. While none of these are bad ideas for basic time management they don’t get at the hidden dynamic that keeps procrastination going strong.
That secret dynamic is that procrastination works. It deserves respect. It efficiently accomplishes a vital psychological function, namely the reduction of anxiety or other painful feelings. It’s like a well-functioning perpetual motion machine that is always available to make you feel better. In the short run. That’s the problem: procrastination reduces anxiety in the short run but leads to increased anxiety in the long run.
A word about anxiety. It is a nonspecific emotional state that is extremely unpleasant. We are highly motivated to find ways to get rid of it as soon as we can. Most “bad habits” arise because they temporarily lead to a reduction in anxiety.
Take a look at this diagram.
The secret to conquering procrastination.
The little running human figure is you, procrastinating—avoiding something you need to do. The red line is what happens if you continue to avoid tackling that dreaded task. Notice that each time you avoid it (procrastinate) your anxiety goes down, but only temporarily. The overall trajectory of your anxiety is up. While you will continue to feel temporary relief from avoidance, your background misery continues to escalate and the only obvious solution is to continue to procrastinate.
The blue line reflects what happens if you tackle the thing you want to avoid. Gather your financial information for an estate plan, make an appointment to have a will written, write that email that is four months overdue. The yellow circle shows what happens when you actually face the thing you don’t want to face. Your anxiety goes up! You don’t feel good. See the mild increase in the curve just to the right of the figure in the yellow circle. But if you can bear that mild temporary increase, your overall anxiety level goes down and stays down. Follow the blue line down.
That’s the secret. The only way to overcome procrastination is to anticipate and tolerate that temporary increase in anxiety when you finally face that task you’ve been avoiding. Expect it. Breathe through it. Reward yourself for enduring it. Know that it will not last. Because it will not last. This really works. It’s guaranteed that if you continue to avoid things your anxiety will go up and stay up, despite those brief temporary respites. And if you learn to tolerate that brief increase in anxiety it will reliably sink down.
It turns out this simple but powerful scheme works for a lot of bad habits in addition to procrastination. Dysfunctional drinking. Emotional eating. Compulsive shopping. We do these things because they temporarily reduce anxiety. Supposedly they are bad for us, but if you’re just looking at it from the point of view of managing anxiety, they persist (despite all our resolutions to change) because they work and work well. Never mind the long-term consequences.
All these allegedly self-destructive behaviors have a protective and soothing value. No wonder they are hard to change. Their operation is part of a complex and crucial neuropsychological system called affect regulation, which operates outside of our consciousness. Avoidance is one of numerous ways we learn to keep our emotions running at levels that we can tolerate.
However, sometimes, as in the case of procrastination or self-destructive habits, the affect regulation system gets miscalibrated. The only way to break free of these behaviors that have a short term gain but long term ill effect is to understand that you need to expect and tolerate a temporary increase in anxiety if you do not do the behavior. There is no avoiding that short-term discomfort. And know that it really will work to breathe through that temporary discomfort and see your overall anxiety level go down and the grip the habit has on you decrease.
Respect for the protective and soothing value of seemingly bad behavior makes it possible to tolerate those uncomfortable feelings they were “treating.”
