Procrastination…What stops us getting s**t done?
Procrastination is such a common experience. It affects students, professionals (including psychologists!), and …well, everyone alike! As World renowned expert on procrastination, Dr. Joseph Ferrari, famously writes: “Everyone procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator”. Dr. Ferrari’s research finds that roughly 20% of people are chronic procrastinators, meaning for these 20%, it’s not simply a time management issue, but a maladaptive lifestyle.
Procrastination often arises from unhelpful learned rules or assumptions, such as prioritising pleasure-seeking behaviours, fear of failure, fear of disapproval from others, or lack of confidence, to name just a few. These core Schemas (we’ll speak more about Schemas in future) lead us to feel degrees of discomfort when they’re triggered, and if we can’t tolerate this discomfort, then we often procrastinate to avoid the negative feelings associated with the task. This behaviour, known as avoidance, helps to immediately alleviate the unpleasant emotions, and if occasional avoidance for a little self-care was the end of it, then there would be no major issues! Unfortunately the problem with avoidant-focused behaviour is that it prevents us from developing the skills needed to effectively work through similar problems in the future, thus the cycle of procrastination is established.
Sometimes for people who are occasional procrastinators, the solution can be found in structure and routine; putting in place scaffolding to help support these helpful or adaptive patterns of behaviour. However, if these strategies do not help, then looking deeper by exploring the underlying schemas and why avoidance is being perpetuated can be valuable steps towards overcoming a chronic problem.
Often the work in therapy is to understand and address an individual’s core beliefs and be able to work towards experiencing small amounts of distress or anxiety without relieving it through immediate avoidance. This is known as increasing discomfort tolerance, and similar to working a muscle, the more it is exercised the stronger it becomes. This means that intentionally doing boring or mundane tasks can, and in fact, often does help to increase our ability to tolerate discomfort, reducing our desire to avoid such feelings in future through distraction or procrastination.
Procrastination is a universal problem, but there are ways to manage it, great resources for assisting can be found through:
The Centre for Clinical Interventions - https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/ which has some fantastic information on procrastination, worksheets and exercises, as well as a wealth of info on other challenges.
If you feel as though procrastination is getting in the way of what you’d like to be doing and you’re considering therapy to tackle issues of avoidance, get in touch today, or tomorrow… Or the next day! if you’d like to learn more.
Paul Vanderputt,
Adaptive Counselling & Psychology
