Procrastination is an Emotional Problem

Manage emotions, not time

Doing vs. Feeling

I don’t feel like doing it

Lets de-construct the sentence.

There is something happening within the “I”, that doesn’t feel like doing something.

Rephrased, I am being affected, or blocked by a feeling that is not allowing me to get started on doing something important to me.

Procrastination is the “action of delaying or postponing something”.

Since its an action, we can often look at the surface-level behaviour of procrastination and think of clever ways in which we might want to re-engage with the thing we’re putting off.

This might involve scheduling, making to-do lists, removing distractions, and setting up cute reward systems for when we make some progress, and more. This is all done to help keep ourselves motivated to keep going.

It all makes sense on paper. Ultimately, we want to work past whatever it is that’s holding us back, and get to the action part where you actually make the thing happen, and get things done.

But feelings are instinctive, and they happen before we get a chance to act or behave a certain way. Meaning, our emotions are really what are preventing us from doing. We don’t have to do better (although behavioural strategies can help), but we need a way to learn to self-regulate our emotions and feel better.

When we procrastinate, there’s a good chance that there are a lot of other emotions involved. Feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, being overwhelmed, and helpless.

These strong feelings can bring perfectionist tendencies, all-or-nothing thinking, or negative self-talk (e.g., I must do this perfectly, or I am a failure).

Urgency & Focus

Any time we come across something important that needs to get done, our minds are wired to need two things to actually execute and do the thing that is asked from us. That is: Urgency and Focus.

Urgency is temporal, meaning it has to do with how immediately you need to get the task done. Is it a birthday present that you need to buy for your friend within the next 2 months, or is it the assignment due in the next 48 hours? How urgent a task is, dictates how much we (de)-prioritize it.

As time moves forward, the task feels more and more urgent, and the pressure to do the tasks becomes greater and greater (as does perhaps the strength of the emotions you might be feeling, if you’ve been procrastinating the whole time).

Focus has to do with our ability to actually sit down and focus on the task at hand. This might be easier to do for some people at night, since there are less distractions around, but it can also be achieved by silencing your phone, closing irrelevant tabs on your browser, removing unnecessary distractions, and getting yourself to actually sit down and get started.

Cognitive disorders like ADHD have to do with the brains’ inability to properly gauge the urgency of a task, or make it difficult for us to sit down to focus on the task at-hand. This might be because the person has an attention deficit (AD), making it hard to identify what is urgent, or the person’s ADHD symptoms are more hyperactive (HD), in which the person fidgets, can’t sit still, has a very divergent mind, and finds it hard to focus.

Of course, not everyone who procrastinates has ADHD, but the disorder is clearly linked to a problem in regulating the self through the two drivers of behaviour — urgency and focus.

If we don’t see something as urgent, there’s no rush to do it, and it doesn’t get done until it’s urgent enough. If you were assigned to write a short 3-page paper on a topic, but were given a 5-year deadline to do it, there’s no urgency, so you wouldn’t really get started until you’re well into the third quarter of year 4.

For functional heavy procrastinators, these folks have dialed it down to a science, where their body is very good at tolerating the urgent feeling for a long time, until the very last minute, when they have just enough time to focus and finally cave to the deadline and rush through the task.

This is very common in university students starting and finishing their term papers in the last few days or hours leading up to the deadline. However, it can mean the students are in an almost chronically stressed state throughout the semester, and they are busy avoiding the task and fighting their feelings, which gets in their way of having a healthy work-life balance and good mental health.

Without any urgency, we don’t focus on things for long, and can easily fall into this emotional cycle of building up tension until the very last minute, and then cramming through the task while getting a feeling of rushed accomplishment. For some, it might be too late, and the person feels overwhelmed and burdened by what is asked of them, and they emotionally shut down. The urgency is too strong and the emotions are so heavy, that it becomes difficult to focus.

The Feelings Wheel is a great visualization of our emotions, and might help procrastinators identify what they are feeling when they are procrastinating. It’s usually a mix of strong emotions, and the person has learned to escape or avoid them… Until the task is so urgently demanding, that the person has no other choice but to focus and get it done to the best of their abilities.

This is of course a first step. Slowing down and recognizing how we feel, beneath all of the thoughts and reasons for not doing the task, can be overwhelmingly difficult.

By focusing on the root of the thoughts (strong emotions), we can better understand and grapple with the complexity of procrastination — as not just a behavioural problem, but an emotional problem that affects our feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. When we look at urgency and focus, these two factors are the cornerstone of any behaviour we engage with. For example, when you:

• Get a notification on your phone

• Turn left at traffic lights while driving your car

• Open an email from your boss

• Make coffee in the morning, before your day starts

• Get to work, prepared and on-time

All of these tasks are micro-situations where we could just as easily drift off or “forget” to do them, but the urgency is so immediate and strong, that our minds can generally pretty easily focus on the task at-hand and follow through with it.

With more longer-term, self-defined deadlines and goals, like running your own business, working on a passion project, or pursuing your dream career, it might be harder to identify what is urgent, or what needs my focus, since there is no authority that is regulating these deadlines (teachers, professors, employers, parents, friends). Instead, deadlines are self-imposed, and so is the need for urgency and focus. This makes it harder to do what you want to do, but learning to self-regulate and understand the emotions behind why you’re acting (or not acting) a certain way, can help in understanding and dealing with your own procrascinatory habits.

By looking at procrastination as an emotional problem, we can recognize that what we feel, dictates our thoughts and actions, and so if we are not acting the way we want, we are most likely stuck feeling a certain way, or avoiding such a feeling altogether. This might cloud our judgement, mood, and ability to identify urgent tasks and get focused on the things that are important to us, or need to get done.

Thus, procrastination is really rooted as an emotional problem, and not a behavioural problem.