Is Procrastination simply a reaction?

Inspiring — By Ryan on September 5, 2009 6:01 am

I’ve been procrastinating on and off for a good part of my life and I’ve gotten fairly familiar with the whole process by this point, especially the physical and subsequent emotional sensation that proceeds the onset of a procrastination session.  For myself when I’m doing something and have a powerful urge to procrastinate I get kind of warm all over almost like a hot flash and feel very faint butterflies in my stomach.  For whatever reason tonight I paid a little more attention to this than usual.  It got me thinking of the procrastination in a different perspective, not just as the act of putting something off because that only represents a small part of the overall process.  I realized that every time the time I put something off with business the physical sensation is always the same, it’s that slightly uncomfortably heat flash and small butterflies in my stomach followed by 20-30 minutes of procrastination.

This is when something struck me:  My procrastination wasn’t being caused by me not necessarily wanting to do something it was being caused by me not wanting this physical senstation, which my mind of course associated with the activity I was performing at the time, the activity that I would inevitably put off or get distracted from.  Think of it like this: you are moving towards a fire with your eyes closed.  When you get close enough to feel it you’re pace might slow a little bit as your brain tells you ‘That’s not somewhere you want to go buddy’ and then when it gets uncomfortable you instinctively turn away or change direction because we are hard wired to avoid physical discomfort.  I was doing the same thing with procrastination and I think many chronic procrastinators could be in the same boat here.  Why do I think this?  Well lemme explain my situation first.

8 years ago I started a telecommunication brokerage firm and after a lot of hard work and scraping the bone I got a lucky break and ran with it, and boy I ran hard.  My company’s revenues quickly went from 5 digits per year to 6 digits per month.  At 21 I had a network of thousands of partners using my services and I worked 20-24 hours a day on pure adrenaline.  This was short lived unfortunately as the changing world and business model, as well as new government policies in the USA brought the business tumbling down and within a year we were back to the 5 digits per year income.  The rate at which my market sector declined was so rapid that all of our money was already spent on advertising, which would turn out to be useless and we woke up one day with hardly anything left.   At this point I’ll tell you I had intense heat flashes and a raging swarm of butterflies in my stomach as I watched my fortune, my life and my business collapse in a matter of weeks and months.  I worked my tail off for the months and years to follow but the business never recovered and I ended up getting out of it completely and going into real estate just to cover the large tax debt that the company had incurred.  The feeling of failure haunted me for the better part of the decade and every time I would begin work on a new project that feeling discomfort would creep in, this same feeling which my mind had associated with devastating failure and loss and so I would put off new projects.  At first I imagine it was much more of a mental thing, the fear of failure was so strong that I would sabotage all projects as not to have to face that possibility again(which of course doomed me to a cycle of failure).  In my present point in life however I’ve come to recognize this fear of failure and Iam able to  see it more objectively as apposed to be controlled by it.. It’s still there but it’s more like a backseat driver; I can feel it yapping at me from time to time but I kindly ask it to let me drive and listen to the radio in silence. I am confident now that this fear of failure no longer subconscious controls me anymore, however I still find myself putting off important tasks, albeit much less now than before.  With the subconscious fear gone I realized that I was now simply reacting to this physical sensation out of conditioning.  I had detached the mental fear of failure but my body still instinctively moved away from that fire, so when I am working now that feeling would come up and without even thinking I would just go off and find something much less important to do, anything that would get rid of that physical discomfort which millions of years of evolution have trained our bodies to avoid.  It probably didn’t help that my mind also anchored the painful events of my past to these sensations.

Tonight however something different happened, I stepped back and just let my body experience the discomfort.  I lived in that discomfort and just let it be.  I didn’t try to make it go away by twittering, or watching youtube or even doing the dishes.. I just sat here with my eyes closed and became aware of ever nuance of that physical discomfort, how warm I felt in my chest, how shallow my breathing was, how my stomach flittered, looking at it like a child seeing something for the first time.  Of course it wasn’t a permanent sensation, it is always fleeting and as I sat there examining exactly how I felt and just living in that uncomfortable place for a minute or two it slowly drifted away like a light summer shower.  When it was gone an amazing thing happened:  I simply picked back up what I was doing with work and just worked my tail off for the next 3-4 hours.  This is a remarkable difference from what normally happens, you see I see procrastinating much like Air Sprays, they cover up the smell but soon after the smell comes back and you have to spray again, and again, and again.  They never get rid of anything and you find yourself constantly spraying to make things smell nice.  Normally I’ll procrastinate with whatever until the discomfort goes away and then I’ll feel bad enough about doing so that i’ll come back to my work but it won’t be long before that feeling returns and I find myself distracted with some other unimportant task, I’ll feel bad enough for procrastinating again that I’ll come back work for a bit and then start the whole cycle over again.  Some times this can go on indefinitely.  Today however, when I sat there with this discomfort and just let it be, when it went away on its own it didn’t come back.  I didn’t find myself wanting to procrastinate 30 minutes later, I just worked and worked and worked until the work was done and then after that I decided to write a 1200 word blog post about it.  Amazing.

I am sure going to do this again at the earliest opportunity and look forward to the results, I’m excited to say the least.  Just to let that sensation be, don’t cover it, don’t run from it hoping it won’t be there when you get back. don’t even label as something negative, just sit and be with it until it tires of you and leaves on it’s own accord.  Chances are it won’t want to come back for a while, not with you being so eager to enjoy it’s company , and in the mean time you can get some work done

Tags: cycle, failure, fear, passion, procrastination, sabatage, work