Dr Tim Pychyl is a professor of psychology and a member of the Procrastination Research Group at Ottawa Carleton University, and according to the research, procrastination is actually an emotional-regulation problem. When we have an emotional reaction to something we don’t want to do, we use procrastination to repair our mood because when we procrastinate, we feel better, for a short while at least. For example, if you are given a task that is boring or makes you feel frustrated, you are going to pick something uplifting instead. So the more averse you find a task, the more likely you are to procrastinate.
In his research, Dr Tim Pychyl identifies a set of seven triggers that make a task more averse. So what I’d like you to do is to pick a task that you’re putting off right now, and look through the seven triggers below, and you’ll probably find that the task has many of the characteristics that have been discovered to make a task procrastination-worthy:
When one or more of these triggers are present, your emotional brian takes over, your limbic system, and it hijacks the reasonable and rational part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, hence why you choose facebook, cleaning or bingeing on a Netflix series instead of doing the work you need to do.
The problem is we can get STUCK in a procrastination doom loop for days, weeks, months, even years. Putting off a task eventually makes you feel anxious and guilty and these emotions make you less likely to have the emotional and cognitive energy to take action. You start to panic, which impacts your emotional and cognitive energy even further, so you make an excuse – “I’m not in the mood” or “it’s not the right time” – and then the vicious cycle of procrastination continues.
So I’d like you to do something. Every time you feel the resistance of starting a task, I’d like you to review the triggers above and write down which of these triggers are at play.
After you have identified the trigger, the next step is to identify the cost of your procrastination by listing all consequences of not getting started by considering all of these areas – performance; career; physical health; mental health; relationships.
Awareness is the first step to change.
