IS THE PAST IN THE PAST?
As you reflect on your unique subjective experience of time, it’s helpful to consider the mutual influences of past, present, and future, because they are constantly affecting each other. Although we are accustomed to thinking of past, present, and future as occurring in succession, in linear time, it’s not as simple as that. Everything we experience occurs in the present moment.
When you remember a time in the past, you are remembering it in the present, so your present state can color your memories of the past. When you look ahead to the future, the anticipation is happening in the present. The past, present, and future cannot be separated from each other; they are always intertwined.21
In the present, you are a product of your past. Margaret Atwood, in her novel The Blind Assassin, wrote, “Old, cold time, old sorrow, setting down in layers like silt in a pond.”22 Whatever floats on the surface of the pond is affected by those layers that reach all the way down to the bottom. Similarly, our past is always with us, registered in our brains, in our bodies, in our psyches. People may try to rein-vent themselves, cut themselves off from their past relationships and past experiences, but history can’t be changed; it can only be reinterpreted and learned from in the present.
Procrastination may be a sign that something from your past is intruding into the present, because hesitation to move forward usually has a lot to do with past experiences. If you grew up with a controlling parent who micromanaged your homework and your social life, you may expect that every teacher, boss, and partner will treat you in the same way. Or, if you grew up with a sibling who won every award and was the star of school and family, you might assume that there’s no point in trying your best as an adult because somebody else will always get the glory. In other words, your past relationships are laid down as the blueprint for what you expect relationships to be in the present and future. Turning in an academic paper, applying for a new position, reporting to a new boss, or dating on the Internet may fill you with apprehension that has more to do with significant past relationships than with the reality of the present situation. When we talk about the extra “meaning” that is attached to the tasks you are avoiding, we are referring to this aliveness of the past in the present.
Sometimes the influence of the past on your present behavior is obvious, and sometimes it is buried near the bottom of the pond. Tess didn’t like her job in Milwaukee and wanted to move back to her hometown, Dallas, where most of her family still lived. Although she’s usually a “get it done” person and was clear about wanting to make this move, she hadn’t done anything to make it happen. Tess was perplexed by her uncharacteristic procrastination.
It took several months of counseling for Tess to realize what was interfering with her plans to move. Although she loved visiting her family in Dallas now, she remembered being afraid of the big city when she was young. She had moved from a small town when she was fourteen, feeling awkward and unprepared for the social and academic pressures of a large middle school. In an effort to fit in, Tess had gone out with any boy who asked her, and one night, she endured a terrifying experience of date rape. Her family had been more shaming than supportive, and she had never told anyone else about the experience. After that, she had “forgotten” about it until she began talking about her adolescence in counseling. Tess gradually realized that she was afraid of moving back home because she might see people who would remember her from school, and she worried that she would re-experience the disgrace and helplessness she’d felt back then. Although Tess was a thirty-five-year-old successful professional woman in the present, the thought of living in Dallas took her back into her past, making her feel like a vulnerable fourteen-year-old who was going to get hurt. Her procrastination was the signal that, beneath the surface of her pond, something old was awry. The past, though buried in the present, was preventing her from claiming her future.
Your past is your past, whether you like it or not, whether you remember it consciously or not, whether you take responsibility for it or not. Many of the things that happened in the past were not your fault—maybe they weren’t anybody’s fault, maybe some were your fault—but the events in your life are yours and always will be. You can’t go back and change them, even if they feel unfinished and unfair. We each have the task of integrating our past into our present and deciding on the paths we want to pursue in the future. Procrastination may be a sign that the past is dragging you back in time instead of the future pulling you forward to new experiences and possibilities.
We hope we have helped you to think about your relationship with time and your experience of yourself in time, both of which are deeply connected to your procrastination. We think this reflection can help move you toward an experience of Mature Time, which in turn will allow you to do, rather than avoid, the things that are important for your life.
What is Mature Time? We see it as the “capacity to assess and accept what is real in both the external and internal worlds,”23 the acknowledgment and acceptance of both clock time and subjective time, and the ability to move flexibly and comfortably between the two. Clock time doesn’t have to be your enemy or your boss. Time is neither good nor bad, neither fast nor slow, neither friend nor foe. It just is. Your job is to figure out how to work with it and to live as fully as you can within its bounds, rather than spend your life battling against it.
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Current Neuroscience
The Big Ideas
When we said in the first edition of our book, “There is no such thing as a procrastination gene,” we were right according to the current knowledge at that time. But since 1983, there has been an explosion of progress in the field of neuroscience, which enables researchers to study specific parts of the brain and how they function separately and together. While we still don’t believe there is a single gene that creates a procrastinator, we now understand enough about the workings of the brain to say with confidence that indeed there are biological factors that contribute to procrastination. Some are general factors, integral to how the brain works, develops, and changes over time, which indirectly relate to putting things off. Other factors involve specific functions (or dysfunctions) that lead quite directly to procrastination. For example, if you have some degree of attention deficit disorder, executive dysfunction, seasonal affective disorder, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic stress, or sleep deprivation, what’s going on in your brain is likely to be closely tied to your procrastinating. We discuss those conditions in the next chapter, but first we want to summarize a few of the “big ideas” from recent developments in neuroscience, so that you better understand how your brain works. All of us can benefit from understanding this complex part of our body, and you can use this knowledge to bolster your efforts at overcoming procrastination.
BIG IDEA #1: YOUR BRAIN IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING
Scientists used to think our brain develops in a predictable, predetermined way: certain attributes are “hardwired” from birth, then the brain grows through childhood, peaks at about the age of eighteen, and it’s all downhill from there. It is now absolutely clear that this is not true. Research has shown that your brain is a dynamic, living system that is constantly changing and being rewired until the day you die.1 The brain’s ability to reorganize, break old neural links, and form new neural connections throughout life is referred to as “neuroplasticity.” 2 We now know that your brain changes every day: what you do today, for good or ill, affects the structure and function of your brain tomorrow.3 How does this happen?
Our lived experience activates our brain cells (neurons), sending electrical impulses from neuron to neuron, releasing biochemical signals and priming them to grow both in number and in connected-ness to each other.4 As hypothesized by Sigmund Freud in 1888 and so aptly expressed by psychologist Donald Hebb in 1949, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”5 The more you do something, the more your brain responds to support that activity; it learns to do what is asked of it faster and bett
er (whether it’s good for you or not).
The brain is always changing. The good news is that it can generate new, flexible behavior. The bad news is that it can also strengthen old, rigid behaviors. This is called the “plastic paradox.”6 The classic metaphor to describe getting stuck in old patterns is the image of sledding down a hill on fresh snow.7 The first time you sled downhill, there are many routes available. The more you go down your chosen path or one close to it, the more tracks you create and the deeper the tracks will be, until you are going down very quickly—but in a rut. In the brain, repetition means that we lay down “mental tracks,” which, once established, “tend to become self-sustaining”8 and increasingly difficult to get out of. It takes a lot of conscious awareness and effort to interfere with old habits, to break recurring neural networks, but it can be done. Our book is intended to help you increase your conscious awareness of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it when you put things off, so that you can help your brain shift out of its ruts. Thinking about your procrastination in new ways and using the techniques we suggest for taking action can help you break old neural patterns of delay and develop new patterns of getting things done on time.
BIG IDEA # 2: FEELINGS MATTER, EVEN IF THEY ARE UNCONSCIOUS
Your feelings are linked to your unique self—only you can experience your feelings, and feelings are an essential part of being conscious.9 There is great value in being able to use your feelings to guide you and to inform your decision making. As researchers are now learning, there is wisdom in gut reactions and intuition. The capacity to use emotions to make wise decisions can be lost if certain parts of your brain (the frontal lobes) are damaged.10 If you don’t have access to your feelings, you can’t use this crucial source of self-knowledge to help you make your way through life. It’s important to be able to say, “This feels right to me,” or, “That just doesn’t feel right.” Without an inner sense of rightness or wrongness that comes from feelings located in your body, you’re limited to thinking intellectually about a decision, or obsessing endlessly about a long list of pros and cons. You can look for the “logical” answer or the “right” answer or the “perfect” answer. But basing your decisions on these external factors won’t bring you closer to knowing how you feel. Instead, you put off making the decision because you can’t (or are afraid to) consult the authority that matters most—your inner self.
We can think about procrastination as an attempt not just to avoid particular tasks but to avoid the feelings that are somehow associated with those tasks. Recent findings from neuroscience can help us understand more about why feelings are so powerful and how the regulation of feelings plays such an important role in being able to face tasks you’d rather avoid. Sometimes you are well aware of what you feel, and sometimes the clue that you are having feelings comes from signals in your body, because emotions arise from bodily, sensory experiences.11
Your feelings may be conscious, such as when you are aware of why a task is aversive: “Balancing my checkbook is boring”; “I hate to spend my time cleaning”; “I don’t understand algebra.” However, “much of what the brain does during an emotion occurs outside of conscious awareness.”12 It is widely accepted in cognitive neuroscience today that “consciousness is a very limited part of the mind,”13 so it’s to be expected that there are a lot of times when you are not consciously aware of the feelings that lead you to avoid a project. Even if you don’t know exactly which emotions are happening outside of your conscious awareness, your body is reacting.
In order to stop procrastinating, you will have to tolerate some uncomfortable feelings in your body, such as fear and anxiety. Going ahead in spite of fear takes deliberate effort, because fear is triggered instantaneously, once registered in the body it lasts forever, and it sends very strong signals in the brain that are hard to override.14 Fear is triggered so rapidly, it’s incredible. If you touch your arm, it takes your brain 400-500 milliseconds to register the sensation. But fear is registered in a mere 14 milliseconds!15 Before it’s even possible to know it, your body has registered fear and started responding. By the time you think about doing a task you’ve been avoiding, like making a dreaded phone call or adding up your income from last year, your body has already reacted with fear. No wonder you put it off.
In addition, your body holds onto fear. Once your brain makes a connection between a stimulus (for example, a snake, a term paper, a presentation to your executive team) and a feeling of danger or fear, that connection cannot be extinguished.16 After just a single exposure to a threatening stimulus, fear can be reactivated whenever that stimulus is encountered again, even if you don’t remember it.17 A famous case in neuroscience illustrates how fear can be experienced unconsciously without being understood by the conscious mind. In 1911, a patient with brain damage couldn’t remember her past. Every day when she met her doctor, she had no memory of ever having seen him before. One day he concealed a pin in his hand, and when they shook hands on greeting, he pricked her outstretched hand. Subsequently, every time he attempted to shake hands, she refused, even though she could not explain her aversion. The traces of the past painful experience remained in her brain and exerted a powerful unconscious influence on her behavior.18 You may recognize yourself in this example—you don’t know why you avoid a particular task, but you avoid it every time. The link between the original stimulus and your fear is now unconscious.
Another reason fear is so difficult to manage is that the brain pathways that carry fear messages are so strong. The messages from the fear center (amygdala) to the thinking center (cortex) are stronger than the messages going back from the thinking center to the fear center. 19 This means that fear invades our consciousness more easily than our thoughts can control our emotions, so we have to do extra work to manage our fears and our impulses.
People develop different solutions to the problem of managing fears and impulses. Freud was one of the first to observe that people develop an array of defense mechanisms that keep unbearably painful ideas, feelings, and memories from conscious awareness.20 Defensive patterns develop in childhood and then are repeated many times into adulthood, laying down deep neuronal tracks, becoming ingrained.21 For example, if you tell yourself that you don’t have to study calculus because you’ll never need to use it in real life, you’re using the defensive system of “intellectualization” (rationalizing, making excuses), perhaps developed over time to protect you from the pain of feeling stupid and hating yourself when you struggle to understand complex concepts.
Another defense against unwanted feelings is suppression, actively trying to push them away. (“I’m just not going to think about that.”) But trying to ignore feelings will keep you tangled up in a knot. Paradoxically, people who suppress their feelings are more likely to remain vulnerable to negative emotion and to experience higher levels of stress.22 For procrastinators, avoidance is the king of defenses, because when you avoid the task, you are also avoiding the many thoughts, feelings, and memories associated with it.
How can we respond to danger without relying on self-defeating psychological defenses? We can work on developing a capacity for emotional regulation, so that we can live comfortably in our own skins. With emotional regulation, the thinking parts of your brain (the frontal cortex) calm down the activity in the emotional part of your brain (the amygdala), enabling you to soothe yourself when necessary or to think through the consequences of your impulse to scream at your boss, throw your computer out the window, or have sex with that attractive stranger you see on the street.
Managing your procrastination is going to require a lot of help from the thinking parts of your brain, as you confront situations that stimulate the emotional parts of your brain and generate so much anxiety that you want to avoid at all cost. Ideally, the capacity for emotional regulation is developed through interactions with responsive caregivers beginning in infancy, when an attuned caregiver recognizes the baby’s anxiety, understands it, is not afraid of it, and responds b
y taking care of the baby’s needs in a reassuring way.23 If a caregiver can hold onto the ability to think in the presence of intense anxiety, the baby develops this ability, too.24 Even if you have not had the benefit of learning how to regulate your emotions through these early interactions, you can learn to do it later in life. You can respond to that feeling of danger by thinking things through (“I’ll practice my talk so I’ll be less anxious”), considering what the realistic dangers are (“Will I really get fired if it’s not perfect?”), considering the context of the danger (“My new boss is scary because he reminds me of my father, but he’s not my father”), reminding yourself about your competency and resilience, or giving yourself encouragement. This process of cognitive reappraisal25 is an essential part of being able to soothe yourself.
Jane has a vivid memory of a time when she stumbled upon cognitive reappraisal to calm herself in the face of disaster. When she was in graduate school, she had a very upsetting meeting with a statistician who questioned whether her dissertation data were reliable. Having struggled for years even to get to the point of having data to analyze, she was extremely distressed and raced to call her husband for reassurance, but he was not home. Standing alone in a phone booth, she talked out loud as if he were there, and then she answered herself as she knew he would, with calming reassurance and reasonable suggestions. Eventually, this kind of dialogue can take place more automatically, internally, silently, as you help yourself stay calm enough to think in the presence of anxiety.
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