End Procrastination Now! (10 page)

What three ideas have you had that you can use to help yourself deal with procrastination thinking effectively? Write them down.

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What is your action plan?

What are the three top actions you can take to contend with adversity and propel yourself into positive territory? Write them down.

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What did you do to implement each of these actions? Write it down.

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What did you learn from applying the ideas and the action plan, and how can you next use this information? Write this down.

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Now that we've talked about the cognitive component of procrastination, let's take a look at the second important component of the procrastination process—your emotions. Have you ever had a feeling of anxiety when you were faced with a task, so that you ended up avoiding it? For example, a person may avoid following through on creating performance reviews because he feels anxious about the conflicts that may arise when evaluating employees.

Ending procrastination partially involves building stamina and resiliency, or what I like to call “emotional muscle.” With practice and exercise, you can toughen up so that you can withstand your emotional drives to retreat from productive pursuits. However, building emotional muscle is a constructive striving to build on the positive emotional capacities involved in the activation of purposeful and productive efforts to produce and prosper.

Building your emotional muscle when reacting to the anxieties, fears, and unpleasant emotions that cause procrastination will allow to you tolerate the tensions, pressures, and frustrations that take place along the path of life. While you are building emotional muscle, you learn to let go of short-term rewards in favor of larger
longer-term gains. You accept life as being neither great nor terrible; rather, it is what it is. Paradoxically, your willingness to accept tension means that you'll have less tension to tolerate. Without the limitations set by tension-driven procrastination, you'll see and have more opportunities. Productive choices are at the gate of those opportunities. As you will see when we move ahead, there are various ways to build your emotional muscle, to strengthen your resolve to get things done.

There are three primary steps on the path of developing emotional muscle:

1. Developing tolerance through acceptance is a step on the path.

2. Reframing ego and discomfort threats as positive opportunities and challenges is a cognitive step on the path.

3. Stretching for excellence, or actualizing your finest abilities, is the third step on the path.

Willpower alone is often not enough to determine the outcome of a conflict within the mind. Instead, our ability to accept a negative affective state is an important start in guiding our behavior away from procrastination tendencies and toward productive activities. Acceptant states of mind are calmer states that are associated with fluidity, flexibility, and productivity. It is simpler and easier to regulate follow-through activities to address issues that trigger the procrastination process. In this chapter, you'll learn about the seductive emotional side of procrastination and how to resist false emotional signals to retreat when it is wiser for you to advance. On this trek you'll:

• See how emotions fuel a procrastination process, and how to redirect those emotions to a productive direction.

• Find a Y condition in productive or procrastination directions, then learn to emphasize the productive direction.

• Discover a simple-easy conflict that can interfere with your productive choices, and learn to see through that conflict.

• Find the key to a double-agenda dilemma that, if left undetected, can leave you baffled why you procrastinate when you tell yourself you want to go a different way. You'll learn to redirect your efforts by putting the emphasis on the right syllable.

• Use a cognitive action exercise for putting the dilemma into perspective and giving weight to a realistic view.

• Learn how to free yourself from procrastination impulses and put yourself on a purposeful and productive cognitive, emotive, and behavioral path by slowing down, creating a productive perspective, and acting on that perspective.

Procrastination has a strong emotional component. I've seen hundreds of people who complained about their procrastination who either don't tune into their procrastination emotions, recoil from them, or ignore them. Emotional conditions associated with forms of procrastination are varied and complicated, and in the following I point to some of these complications:

• You may get emotional signals following perceptions of up-coming productive activities that you view as ego-threatening (a threat to your sense of worth or image) or uncomfortable. These threat sensations can range from whispers of unpleasant emotions to a distinctive emotion of anxiety or fear. Either the whisper of unpleasant emotion or the emotion may be sufficient to divert you from the activity you connect to it.

• Procrastination may be affected by mood. Moods are a gray area of consciousness; they can reflect your disposition, your temperament, your circadian rhythms, your sleep patterns, barometric changes, and other such factors. You can create a
mood by what you think and how you view what is upcoming for you to do. A pervasive gray mood may predispose you to avoid some productive activities that you might otherwise engage in.

• We can create emotions through the images we conjure up in our minds. Method actors have known this for more than a century: if you want to feel angry, reconstruct an angry event in your mind. You can also act out pleasant emotions and constructive habits and use these experiments to build confidence in yourself as a change maker.

• Threat and pleasure cognitions stir emotions. These emotive cognitions are caused by what you think. Preexisting moods may influence these interpretations, evaluations, and beliefs. These emotive cognitions interact with behaviors.

Emotions are distinguishable. You know when you're sad, happy, or angered, but emotions can also feel confusing. You can have more than one view of a situation and experience mixed emotions. Some emotions seem so general, persistent, and unpleasant that you may do anything you can to dull them. Emotional procrastination involves avoiding productive situations that you associate with unpleasant emotions. This omission can slow progress. You see complexity, unpleasantness, or threat in various tasks, so you back off from them. For example, do you find yourself putting off things like fixing a leaky faucet, giving bad news, or avoiding someone who will ask you about your progress on a project that you are also putting off? When you retreat, you act like you were telling yourself that the task is too unpleasant or tough to do right now, but you'll get to it later. When the event, emotion, explanation, and behavioral diversions merge, dealing with these procrastination complications can seem like pulling out the ingredients from a spaghetti sauce. However, that's not so much the case here. Pulling out one area for corrective action may influence the others. The question is where to place the emphasis. When negative emotions
spur repeated procrastination performances, emotional procrastination is a prime area to address.

You may go to a horror movie to experience fear. You gravitate toward people you find attractive. Your favorite comedian is in town, and you go to the show to have a good laugh. You enjoy a good massage, a swim in a lake, a walk through a garden, and a sea breeze against your cheeks. You experience pleasure in finishing a race. You enjoy listening to music before a warm fire. You feel glued to the screen of your TV as the history of planet earth unfolds. Indeed, there are countless emotional and sensory pleasures in life that add to the enjoyment of living.

Emotional states motivate action. If you are curious, you are likely to approach what piques your interest. Love can trigger extraordinary actions—if you have love and passion for a specific task or subject, you are more likely to complete such a task. For example, you look forward to doing things that you find pleasurable, and you may get some things you'd ordinarily delay out of the way if they block the path that you want to travel. On the other hand, if you connect an activity to past distresses, you'll probably approach it more tentatively than you would if you favored the activity. If you view a timely priority as highly unpleasant, uncertain, or threatening, you may avoid it even when this costs you dearly.

END PROCRASTINATION NOW! TIP

Think about Your Emotional Response

When you catch yourself procrastinating, look at how you're feeling and what you're doing in response to the feeling. Results are ordinarily more important than feelings, which tend to be fleeting. Procrastination is a choice for delaying rather than producing.

By weighing the benefits of acting versus delaying, you've introduced a change into the process and have sharpened your choices. As a by-product of exercising a productivity choice, you strengthen your skills that support future productivity choices. Accept that simple solutions to defeat procrastination are not necessarily easy, but can be made so through practice.

Dealing with necessary inconveniences, uncertainty, and discomfort normally gets easier with practice.

A Twofer Process
. The
twofer process
is a term that I like to use to describe how, by addressing procrastination at the same time you manage its underlying causes, you get a double gain. This effort supports your long-term efforts to build emotional muscle and to prosper more by procrastinating less.

As you saw in an earlier chapter, deadline procrastination, while important to address, is only the tip of the iceberg. How you manage
you
is the more profitable area to probe. By living through avoidance urges and making productive actions to promote accomplishment, you gain in both meeting your deadlines and developing your emotional muscle.

The horse and rider is a metaphor that I like to use when explaining the procrastination process in the context of the emotive approach. It describes why you may feel tempted to take the path of least resistance on matters that are important to start and finish, but that you also view as unpleasant, threatening, boring, uncertain, or risky.

Taking the road of least resistance usually depends on responding more to impulse than to reason. From a producing and thriving vantage, retreat is normally negative. Your higher mental process may have a better way. How is the conflict between a procrastination retreat and a constructive advance resolved?

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud uses the metaphor of a horse and rider to show the endless conflict between impulse and reason. The horse is the impulse. The rider controls reason.

The horse represents our passions and our impulses to avoid tension. The horse knows two things: if something doesn't feel good, move away; if something feels pleasurable, go for it. The horse learns new dangers fast. It is a slow learner when it comes to giving up false fears.

The rider is your higher mental processes. The rider reasons, makes connections, plans, and regulates actions. The rider can be a fast learner about maintaining perspective, solving problems, and anticipating change. When the horse's instincts depart from the rider's awareness of reality, the rider has the ability to restrain the horse, but the horse has a mind of its own.

The horse can be spontaneous. The rider may also act spontaneously, but in different ways. The rider sees humor in incongruity, which is something that the horse can never do. Neither the rider nor the horse wants to experience tension, but the rider will recognize when it's necessary to tolerate tension. The horse may prefer grazing to creating an insightful competitive analysis. The rider's job is to create that analysis and avoid horselike distractions.

The rider has the power of reason. Yet, the rider is not always realistic. You may unintentionally distort reality because of false beliefs, such as thinking that inconvenience is terrible. You can worry about failing. Worry is a form of helplessness in the face of uncertainties that can scare the horse and spur procrastination.

Emotional and mental processes that trigger procrastination are not as deeply embedded and invisible as Freud thought. Rather, they are often at the cusp of consciousness and can be made visible if you know where to look. Information from this book and other cognitive behavioral sources can give you a solid template for knowing what you are looking for when you think about your thinking.