PROCRASTINATION

Why are we actually postponing to do something?

I have to finish that task today! Or maybe I should wait until tomorrow when I have more time or more information. Should I have finished the unpacking I started? Let me do it later! I should read those materials/book for exam preparation! I’ll start tomorrow, get up early and sit down and finish it! And we do this every day. We postpone both small and big things for some reason. We postpone until we see that we are really late to do it. Then we feel under pressure and we become stressed … we are tensed and we think we have too much on our plate. There is no way we can finish everything.

Why do we postpone to do something now or when we really planned? Why don’t we want to sit down and finish that one thing that was going through our heads before bed? Why did he think that if we left it for later, it would be easier then? And will it?

Occurrence of delays in the completion of things is called procrastination. A very difficult word to pronounce. It means a form of human behavior that is characterized by the postponement of actions, obligations and tasks for later, and without good reason. The term procrastination comes from the Latin word “procrastinatio” where “pro” means before, in front and forward, and “crastinatio” means something that belongs to tomorrow.

To better understand why we procrastinate we need to first recognize that we are doing it. And we can recognize it by noticing a pattern: we move around one activity several times, as if it is difficult for us to do it by inventing some «weak» reasons for it. Once we recognize that we are delaying our work or studying we need to understand why we are doing it. Out of fear of failure, it is the most often the reason why. We are afraid that we will not do something well, so that someone might tell us that it is not right. The question of self-confidence is also raised here. And indeed it is (at least scientists say) that a lack of self-confidence is a major feature of procrastinators. The next step is to overcome that condition. Procrastination is a habit and a form of behavior, and like any habit, it has been built over a long period of time. That is why we need a longer time to get rid of the same. To overcome this habit, many different strategies, methods, etc. are recommended. It is recommended to create a reward system if we immediately do what we planned (or at least within the deadline) or create a scheme of what negative results can happen if we delay.

The delay in doing the planned activity may be related to our physical condition in addition to the listed mental difficulties. It is associated with decreased immunity, insomnia or problems in the digestive system. That should be our biggest incentive. Health care. Mental and physical.

Meny people have started procrastinating because of basic insecurities. We may be frustrated by the fact that nothing has been done well enough. We may not be able to plan our time. Whatever the underlying cause, rest assured that they will accumulate over time. So we get a perfectionist who procrastinates until he/she thinks of a perfect way to do something, but as deadlines start to press him/her, he/she becomes anxious, the pressure finally blocks him/her and he/she realizes that he/she will never finish the job, which is why he/she starts thinking he/she may not be good enough. While his/her self-confidence is progressively declining, he/she is also progressively accumulating obligations and tasks that he/she no longer knows how to organize, let alone perform them perfectly. This is just one illustration of the answer to the question: “How did this happen to me?”. Everyone could find their own personal course of development of the problem and that is often what people discover in psychotherapy. There will always be an irrational belief behind a problem that we have adopted through education and experience as valid, such as the belief that everything must be perfect or not even exist!

So let’s not procrastinate but get to work. The more things we finish now, the less stress we will have later due to accumulated tasks (obligations) and increased stress.

At the end we are sharing with you 7 ways to stop procrastinating recommended by blog https://www.iloveugly.com/

Author: Minka