The habit of procrastinating: procrastination

There is a room full of books and junk that are not used, but neither are they given away, recycled or sold.

There has been an aspiration to study a professional career for years, but the decision to do so and start developing a vocation is never made.

It is known that an essay has an exact deadline, and you have to sit down to write, but maybe watching a movie is more tempting. Finally, procrastination, this habit of postponing everything for later, ends up being the great winner.

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What do we understand by procrastination?

Etymologically, "procrastination" comes from the Latin: pro, forward, and crastinus, referring to the future, postponement or postponement. Therefore, procrastination can be defined as the tendency to intentionally waste time, procrastinate, and put off tasks or situations instead of facing them.

It is an irrational process, since the priority of feeling good in the present moment prevails over its negative consequences. We speak of irrationality, insofar as the person is aware of its implications, and even so continues to perpetuate said action.

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Its causes

The habit of procrastinating it has a lot to do with short-term mood repair, while our mind is torn between duty and want, momentary and long-term gratification, thus avoiding those emotions that can become difficult.

Thus, people end up trapped in this irrational circle of chronic procrastination, making the procrastination a way of life, causing a feeling of chaos and frustration due to the accumulation of tasks slopes.

Now, procrastination should not be understood as a character flaw or a mysterious spell that has fallen on our ability to organize time, but as an inability to regulate negative moods around a task: anxiety, insecurity, boredom, frustration, resentment and more.

There are people who are specialists in procrastination, behaving in this way continuously because, in some way, they believe that tomorrow will be more suitable to carry out the pending activities. However, the temporary relief we feel when we procrastinate is what ends up leading to an even more vicious circle. Procrastination should not be understood as a sporadic behavior, but rather a circle, which easily ends resulting in a chronic habit and an increase in anguish and stress, increasing procrastination and therefore, the discomfort.

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To do?

Unfortunately, we can't just tell ourselves to stop. And despite the abundance of “optimism and organization tips”, which focus on how to “fix” the work, they do not address the root cause of it.

Self-awareness is a key aspect of understanding why procrastination makes us feel bad. When we procrastinate, we are not only aware that we are avoiding the task at hand, but also that doing so is probably a bad idea. And yet, we do it anyway.

At this point, the essential thing is to understand that procrastination is a matter of emotions, not laziness. The solution does not lie simply in downloading applications that tell us how to make better use of time, but rather involves being able to face our emotions in a different way.

To reconfigure any habit, we have to be able to give our brain a precious reward, find the truly valuable behind those actions, visualizing the long-term goal and the benefit of it to be able to better deal with those emotions that can be challenging and complicated.

Surely we have been in this trap many times, remembering situations in which we have overcome this difficulty may be of great help to us. Many times people wait to be motivated to act, waiting to be struck by a “motivational lightning bolt”. Meanwhile, experience shows us that motivation increases when you start doing what is necessary to achieve something that is truly important for us.

In short, changing habits is within everyone's reach. For this we need two fundamental ingredients: choose a change that is consistent with our scale of values, and sustain it, despite the various inclemencies, until finally ending up turning it into a habit sustained.