Procrastination is the thief of time.
~Nathan Nguyen
Everybody has issues with procrastination but, some more than others. For many, procrastination is a habit and as for others who do it quite often, they are at a risk of developing this habit.
The habitual responses (to specific cues) that your brain has learned over time are called zombies. These focus on making the “here and now” better. Procrastination is one such zombie. When you think of something you would rather not do, the areas of your brain related to pain get activated. Naturally, the brain finds a way to stop that negative stimulation and escape that pain. This is done by switching your attention to something that is more pleasing – temporarily. But, the loophole here, is that once people actually start working on whatever they had been procrastinating, the stimulation of the pain areas begins to vanish.
Like all habits, procrastination has four parts or steps to it
- The Cue It is the trigger that launches you into zombie mode. It may be a location, a text from a friend, the wish to watch”just one more episode” or even an item in your to-do list. A cue, by itself, is neither helpful or harmful. It’s what we do in reaction to that cue is what matters.
- The Routine It is the zombie mode that the brain is used to falling into when it receives the cue. Zombie responses can be useful, harmless or sometimes harmful. As you’ll see the procrastination zombie response may appear to be useful, it is actually pretty harmful in the long run.
- The Reward Habits are formed because they reward us, or at least, we think they do. They gives us immediate little feelings of pleasure. Procrastination is easily developed because the reward, diverting the mind’s focus to something more pleasant happens quickly and easily.
- The Belief Our belief about being able to change our habits is what keeps them as they are or forces us to change them. To change a habit, you’ll need to change your underlying belief.
So it seems what happen when you procrastinate, is something like this:
First, you observe and get a cue about something that causes a tiny bit of unease. You don’t like it. So to make the sensation go away, you turn your attention from whatever caused that unease towards something more pleasant. The result, you feel happy – temporarily.
Procrastination also shares features with addiction by offering temporary excitement and relief from the seemingly boring reality. You start making yourself believe lies. For example, telling yourself that math is synonymous to arithmetic – your Achilles’s heel – and so, you are obviously doing very poorly at it. You create irrational and superficial excuses like, “If I study in advance for the test, I’ll forget the material.’ If you develop the addiction, you may even start telling yourself that procrastination is an unchangeable characteristic. After all if procrastination was easily fixable, wouldn’t you have fixed it by now.
Start making the decisions and taking control of habits yourself instead of leaving it up to the well-meaning-but-not-thinking zombies. Just like people ingesting poison start by taking small doses of it and gradually build and immunity towards it, procrastinators start by putting off small things and move on to greater ones, finally getting habitual to it. Although the poison eater look fairly healthy, the body is actually dying on the inside and just like that, although procrastination seems blissful at first, it really is gnawing away at a lot. Although you may be doing “something” while you are procrastinating, you’re actually not doing a lot of other important things.
Skepseis 