The Procrastination Cycle

‘Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today!’. This is wise advice I've heard many times from my grandmother. It's also a powerful tool for avoiding procrastination.

Do you know what procrastination means? It's exactly that bad habit we often have of putting something off, putting it off for another time, for later. It sounds harmless, but this bad habit can be the cause of many problems in our daily lives, both professionally and personally.

‘I'll leave it until tomorrow, or next week! Then I'll do it!’

The critical point in this story is that ‘later’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘next week’ are vague, open-ended concepts that don't allow us to identify when that moment will be, or what things will be like when it arrives. We have no way of knowing what the future holds. As a result, our plans, objectives and motivations will always depend on various unknown factors and may not even come to pass.

In recent years, psychologists and researchers from all over the world have been questioning what it is in the human mind that leads us to put off things that, in reality, may be very important to us. ‘Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder found that some people are more likely than others to give in to temptation when a new distraction presents itself.’

Procrastination is often due to our ambiguous or negative feelings about a particular task. We may feel intimidated, afraid of failure or lack interest. With this, we can look at tasks as things to be overcome, rather than things to be experienced or realised.

We all know the end result of procrastination: that feeling of panic and anxiety. But the short-term injection of pleasure it provides leads us to procrastinate again and again. This ‘injection of pleasure’ is a small dose of dopamine that travels through the brain.

‘Every time something pleasurable happens, we receive a dose of dopamine that modifies the neurons in your brain, increasing the likelihood of repeating that behaviour,’ it is said in the AsapSCIENCE video on procrastination. In other words, when you decide to put off doing something until another day, when that day arrives, you will most likely decide to put it off again, and so on, in a vicious circle of procrastination.

So it's very important that you try to identify the reasons that lead you to procrastinate and radically change your attitudes and behaviour when faced with a task. Because the time you lose will never be recovered, and the consequences of procrastination may not be reversible and the damage may become permanent.

Procrastination can be the answer to the question we often ask ourselves: ‘Why can't I succeed?’. Think about it!