Procrastination, Part 2

Part Two: How Does Procrastination Work?

Why, if procrastination has so many negative effects, do we still do it, either from time to time or habitually?

There are three overarching themes that Dr. Sirois explores, which I’ll take one at a time: managing negative emotions, our future self, and perfectionism.

Managing Negative Emotions

Contrary to popular advice about developing more will-power, more discipline, better time management skills, better impulse-control, or more motivation, procrastination is not an issue of laziness, self-indulgence, motivation, or time management. Procrastination is an issue of mood management.

If there is a task we find ourselves putting off, it is because there is some negative emotion tied with that task. This could be a matter of uncertainty, boredom, lack of meaning, or a matter of stress, frustration, anxiety, or self-doubt. Whatever the negative feeling, procrastination is an attempt to get some relief from this feeling by putting off the task.

Procrastinate the task, and get instant relief from these negative feelings. This instant relief acts like a kind of reward, making procrastination more likely to occur again. What gets rewarded gets repeated.

Unfortunately, this strategy isn’t very successful overall. Successful emotional management strategies need to be both effective and have lasting effects, not just short-term impact. Procrastination takes the current unpleasant emotion and passes it off to our future self, where it will actually be more unpleasant than it is right now, thanks to the addition of stress, guilt, and time-pressure that procrastination brings with it.

Our Future Self

A second theme in understanding procrastination is our perception of time, particularly our sense of our future self. 

When we feel distant from our future self, seeing it as more abstract than concrete, it’s almost like seeing our future self as a different person. Dr. Sirois even points to brain studies that have indicated that similar neural activity is seen when describing a distant future self or when describing an entirely different person. 

When our future self is basically another person to us, it’s easier to offload our negative emotions and tasks onto them, like the evening crew in a restaurant kitchen leaving the cleaning for the morning crew to deal with.

In addition, it’s common to assume that our future self will be a much better version of ourselves, that the time between now and then will involve a lot of self-improvement. We tend to overestimate the positive qualities of ourselves in the future.

Basically, when we see our future self as some other superhero person, then we can assume they’ll be able to handle whatever we leave for them, probably better than we can now!

Surprise surprise when we arrive to the future and realize that we’re basically the same person, but now with less time to handle the same tasks, and more negative emotions. To go back to the kitchen metaphor, there is no morning crew - we’re the only ones who work here!

Perfectionism

A third theme playing a role in procrastination is perfectionism, which is often what leads to all the issues with negative emotions in the first place.

When we strive not just for excellence but for perfection, we set an impossible standard for ourselves. We assume we’ll hit an unrealistic goal, in an unrealistically short amount of time, without encountering any issues, and with an unrealistic amount of self-improvement along the way.

Basically we expect things to look like this:

Inevitably, however, any task progresses through a series of stages, with varying progress, and numerous obstacles. It looks more like this:

The result of a perfectionistic outlook is that anywhere the perfectionistic path and the actual path differ, the result is self-criticism and negative emotions. Dips in the path aren’t seen as normal, or as opportunities for self-development and growth, or possibilities for something better happening than we could have imagined ahead of time. They are seen as personal failings, threats to worthiness, and confirmation of negative self-beliefs.

To put it all together, when we approach a task perfectionistically we set ourselves up for self-criticism and negative feelings of self-doubt, frustration, inadequacy, and shame. These negative emotions then need to be managed somehow. One way of managing them is to procrastinate, to get relief from negative emotions associated with the task by putting it off, leaving it for a future superhero version of ourselves to handle. 

The result is the reward of temporary relief, but eventually and inevitably we run back into the task that needs to be done. However, we’re still encountering the negative emotions resulting from self-criticism just like we initially did. And with whatever negative consequences we’ve accrued in the meantime. And with increased time pressure and accompanying stress, and along with guilt, shame, and further self-criticism. 

It doesn’t help when popular advice for this kind of struggle points to things like lack of motivation, lack of discipline, lack of skill, or any other kind of lack. These all just attempt to address symptoms of procrastination, while actually reinforcing the self-criticism that is one of the root causes of procrastination in the first place.

So what strategies are shown to actually work? Let’s tackle those in Part 3.