The Pain of Procrastination

If you wait until the wind and the weather are just right, you will never plant anything and never harvest anything.  Anonymous

We all do it!

We sit down to tackle a difficult task or job then . . .

Oh, there is an email I haven’t responded to . . .

Oh, I wanted to check something out on the internet. ..

Oh, I need to do the dishes . . .

We put it off. We avoid!!

We have 10,000 reasons why we couldn’t do the thing. These reasons are perfectly reasonable at the time.

Until we reach the other side of the procrastination to look back at the thing that once had so much value and see that we didn’t value it.

We beat ourselves up for getting distracted and not doing the thing that was once important. ” I am such a procrastinator,”  we say as if it is a life sentence.

The Why of Procrastination

In a world of never-ending and very good advice about how to achieve more, why is procrastination such an ever-present reality? Why do we still get stuck putting off those meaningful and important things?

Nir Eyal, the author of “Indistracble “, suggests that we can look to the teachings of Plato for a part of the answer. Plato, in his famous Republic, likened procrastination to cowardice. This resulted from the question, “If one judges action A to be the best course of action, why would one do anything other than A?”

Implied in his reflection is the experience of fear.  Thus it is the emotion that we are avoiding not the thing itself.

According to Socrates, we never choose to act poorly or against our better judgment; and, therefore, actions that go against what is best are simply a product of being ignorant of facts or knowledge of what is best or good.

Ah were it that simple!

From a Jungian perspective, we know that we often act against our better judgement when we are in the grips of a complex; those pesky autonomous internal energies that can thwart our conscious intentions and that are full of emotions.
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Being Indistractible

In his book, Indistractable, Nir Eyal, tackles the issue of distraction as the principal cause of procrastination. He explains that understanding the root cause of distraction is the first step in being more present and accomplishing daily tasks one has set out to do.

It is what’s going on inside of us, our inability to cope with the uncomfortable state within us and not the external triggers, that leads us to put off things we previously committed to doing. The internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from such as boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, loneliness, betrayal and so on. These are things that we are looking to escape from, with some kind of distraction to take our mind off of the uncomfortable emotional state we are in. Everything we do is about the desire to escape discomfort.

Time Management is Pain Management

Role of Trauma in Procrastination

One of the major sources of internal triggers comes from childhood trauma and stress is a major causative factor. This is according to Dr. Gabor Mate. Addiction and certain other impulsive behaviours are not the primary problems.

They are only responses and attempts to solve an internal problem. The real question is, how did the problem arise?

Addiction is an attempt to deal with the effects of childhood trauma, which it does temporarily, while it creates even more problems in the long term. The most important influence shaping the physiological development of the brain is the quality of parent-child relationships. When parents are stressed or distracted, or workaholics; if there’s instability, economic troubles, relationship troubles, unresolved trauma on the part of the parent, it will interfere with the child’s brain development.

The result is increased incidences of ADHD, autism and so much else. These children go on to become adults plagued with several issues, procrastination being just one of them. An honest assessment of one’s childhood traumas or internal triggers is, therefore, the first step in combatting procrastination.

Mastering our Internal Triggers

The first step in conquering procrastination then is to master these internal triggers in a healthy manner because fundamentally, time management is pain management. If we don’t learn how to manage these uncomfortable internal triggers, we will always succumb to distraction from one thing or another. Nir Eyal explains that distraction is a problem of impulsiveness. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. Man has an amazing evolutionary gift, that we can see the future with greater fidelity than any other animal on earth. If you don’t plan ahead, then failure will most likely be the outcome. But where we have power is when we use forethought and plan ahead.

We also need to note the sensations in our bodies. If we can write down what that feeling is: boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, loneliness, fear or whatever it is that plagues us and simply interrupt that internal trigger, we will find that we won’t impulsively reach for that thing to take our minds off of that discomfort.

Copyright Christina Becker
June 2021

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