How to deal with procastination
Procrastination comes from the latin and means “ahead”; leave it for tomorrow. Cast the first stone who never left for tomorrow what must be done today. We’ve all procrastinated. When it comes to work, procrastination is very common. The vast majority procrastinate in some area of life, at least. What differentiates is the intensity and frequency that procrastination is done.
Procrastination is based on being unconscious of oneself; the person is on automatic and is not clear what is thinking, feeling and not connecting with his own body. Therefore, some emotion related to the task comes and because the person is unconscious of her triad (body, mind, emotions) she does some automatism to suppress that; becoming emotionally anesthetized. We have within us a reptilian brain, which is activated every time we perceive something as threatening. When activated, we can have three reactions: fight, flight or freezing.
When we procrastinate we are on the run, as if we are unaware of our internal states, as if we are running from the dinosaur. “Run away from the dinosaur”, the dinosaur- writes the lecture, the dinosaur -fills out the excel sheet, the dinosaur- prepares that presentation.
Each one does this, depending on what was learned in childhood when performing tasks,
Can happen:
- “I did the activities and when I wasn’t perfect, my parents criticized me”. What the person is not aware of, but what actually happens: it hurted so much and was marked in her brain like a trauma, so anything that refers to that trauma the person avoid, because getting in touch with that, hurts too much and she don’t know how to deal with that pain.
- “I did the activities, but always alone, because my parents were always working and I never had anyone to do with me”. What the person doesn’t know, but it happened: she were a child, didn’t have the brain capacity to regulate her own emotions, her brain was not an adult brain. She felt alone and helpless. So, every time she have a task, this trauma is unconsciously activated and she don’t want to feel all that pain of helplessness, so she avoid.
- When you wanted something, your caregivers always gave it to you. She learned that everything must be instantaneous. Grown up and the world has gotten even faster, she have a constant release of dopamine in the brain daily: the quick reply, the post, the pretty picture, the food that arrives in 15 minutes. Everything is instantaneous and fickle. Her brain is addicted to dopamine. The drink, the sugar, the refined carbohydrate, pleasure for pleasure, here, now, whenever you want. She has constant pleasure, but no happiness. Doing the task takes effort and tolerance for frustration. For her, doing the task is tedious, so she avoid.
- When solving the quick task, she will have time to go visit her family, but in fact she don’t want to, because deep down she thinks she will be annoyed, or because she will receive unnecessary criticism or invalidation. So she sabotage the task, to have an excuse and not go. Here it is a matter of lack of self-awareness and difficulty in saying no.
How to improve? With training to stop procrastination, based on psychology and neuroscience. Contact us for more information.