In addition to allowing you to proceed with your work, there are health benefits to emotional regulation. Recent neurological research has shown that people who respond with cognitive reappraisal to an emotionally negative experience reduce their levels of stress26 and are more successful in freeing themselves from the well-worn grooves of maladaptive thoughts and urges.27
By consciously modulating our emotional responses to feared situations, we can avoid the full-blown anxiety attacks that we might have experienced in the past.28 When we can regulate our feelings, we become free to decide how to respond. In the end, being able to tolerate the entire spectrum of feelings within you will enable you to face those tasks you put off. When you can stand how you feel, you can stand taking action.
BIG IDEA #3: THE INFLUENCE OF IMPLICIT MEMORY
You may realize that your procrastination is driven by some of the fears we have explored, such as fear of success or fear of feeling controlled, and you may find it easy to accept what we’ve just described: feelings, especially fear, are fast, powerful, and not easy to change. Even so, you might find that your fear doesn’t make sense to you. However, fears that don’t make sense at face value are not necessarily “irrational”; they make their own kind of sense. If you procrastinate on a task but can’t pinpoint exactly what makes you fearful or uncomfortable, chances are an “implicit” memory has been activated. What this means is that you may not remember the experience itself, but your brain and body respond to it nonetheless, generating a cascade29 of emotional distress that leads you to avoid the task. A British psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, expressed this idea when he said: “The things we are afraid of are the things that have already happened.”30
Implicit memories are sometimes referred to as “early” memories because they tend to be laid down before the age of three31 when a part of the brain central to memory storage, the hippocampus, becomes more fully developed.32 From birth to eighteen months of age, the right hemisphere of our brain is dominant,33 undergoing rapid growth and absorbing the world in an intuitive way. The right hemisphere responds to the music of language—the nonverbal aspects of speech, such as tone and rhythm, not the content, which is why lullabies are so soothing to infants. From eighteen months to three years, coinciding with the magic of language acquisition, there is a growth spurt in the left hemisphere of the brain, which is more logical, analytical, and linear, and which processes speech as words and thoughts.34 During this time, however, the hippocampus has not yet developed, so all the experiences of these early years remain in your implicit memory and are activated throughout your life without conscious memory or cognitive understanding.
It’s important to note that the hippocampus is very vulnerable to stress: the chronic elevation of the stress hormone cortisol damages the hippocampus.35 As hippocampal cells die, the structure literally shrinks, so it’s no surprise that chronic stress makes it harder to remember and harder to think clearly. (But don’t despair, hippocampal cells can grow back. See Chapter 15.) This is why people who were traumatized as children often don’t remember even the later years of childhood, yet their implicit memories remain stored in body and brain and leave them immobilized without knowing why.
Implicit memory can’t be seen directly, but it can be inferred from our expectations of ourselves and others. These memories shape our perceptions, which are based on the early experiences of how we were cared for—the unique feelings we have about the world and about ourselves in that world, the assumptions about what we can expect (or not), experiences that seem so natural that we assume everyone feels the way we do. When Jamar fell behind on his work, asking for help was unthinkable: “Of course I should do everything myself. If I ask for help, I would be a failure. It would be too shameful. Doesn’t everyone feel that way?” (Well, no . . .)
Implicit memories cannot be accessed consciously no matter how much time we spend or how much effort we make, because they are memories of experiences that occurred before we had words and the capacity to think about what we experienced.36 In contrast, explicit memories, sometimes called “late” memories, are more familiar to us, coming after we have developed language and consciousness. They include “autobiographical” memories that hold the stories and narrative of our lives, as well as memories that hold our knowledge of social norms, our recognition of people’s faces, and the intellectual knowledge we acquire during our years in school and in the work world.37
Even if you don’t remember the parts of your history that lead you to get stuck in avoidance, it’s important to honor and accept the response your brain is generating. Something from your past has been triggered; it can help a great deal to understand what that something is, but even if you can’t ever identify it, you can still take action. You can remind yourself that you are here now, in this present moment, and that your memories, remembered or not, are from the past. Terror, shame, guilt, disgust, and self-hate are often by-products of old memories. With the help of the thinking parts of your brain, you can “override” the activation of your implicit memories, creating alternative neural circuits and changing your brain, allowing you to act instead of procrastinating, paralyzed by fear.
BIG IDEA #4: WIRED TO RELATE
When you are putting off something you feel you can’t handle or that makes you uncomfortable, you are experiencing not only the activation of implicit memories and the powerful feelings evoked by them. You are also involved in a struggle about how to view yourself: Are you capable? Are you permitted to have your own thoughts? Are you worthy of being loved and respected?
Research confirms that low self-esteem contributes to procrastination. 38 Your self-image—whether you have confidence in your ability to succeed and can value who you are—is being shaped from the earliest days of life. We know now that the brain is wired to be “ultra-social”: 39 it literally grows and develops in response to the way we are responded to by the people who care for us. We are born to seek connection with others: when a baby sees the mother’s face, brain chemicals are released that make the baby feel good and stimulate further growth of the brain.40 The discovery of “mirror neurons” suggests that watching how other people behave and feel activates the same neurons in our brains that are active their brains.41 More and more, it is becoming clear that the state of one person’s brain affects what happens in another’s. And that means caretakers do much more than change diapers and provide food: “They activate the growth of the brain through emotional availability and reciprocal interactions.”42
As an infant you looked to others to find yourself, and the emotional experiences (conscious and unconscious) of your caretakers helped shape your brain and began to influence your sense of yourself. What did you see when you gazed into their eyes? Was there a gleam of pleasure because you exist? What image did you see in the mirror they reflected back to you? Someone who is a joy and a delight? A mother who is relatively free of anxiety, able to enjoy and be attuned to the changing needs of her baby, will help her child become a person who can regulate emotions, trust others, think well of himself, and maintain positive expectations.43 These capacities are the foundation for confidence and healthy self-esteem.
Children of parents who are depressed, angry, preoccupied, or disinterested for other reasons can’t find what they’re looking for in the parents’ response. Rather than seeing themselves as lovable and welcomed, they may see a reflection of themselves as an imposition, a disappointment, a source of trouble, or an ornament for display. These damaging emotional connections have profound consequences, shutting down brain centers involved with feelings of security, well-being, and openness to the world and activating parts of the brain that resonate with the parents’ distressed emotional state.44 The child’s developing self-image incorporates this parental state. If a parent cannot respond with appropriate emotion to the child, the child may begin to feel uninteresting or empty, unable to succeed at the most important thing in a baby’s life: connecting with his caretakers. These early misattuned interactio
ns affect the child’s brain, self-concept, and confidence, setting the stage for procrastination in later life. Keep in mind that misattunements are inevitable in all relationships and are not necessarily problematic. Every parent has a bad day. It’s when these misattunements occur regularly and often that the child is left with a legacy of inadequacy.
Maria’s mother suffered from a postpartum depression when Maria was born and continued to struggle with depression for many years. When parents are emotionally unresponsive, children (even babies) will try all kinds of things to evoke an emotional response from them. The infant Maria had the feeling that, hard as she tried, nothing she did could engage her mother, who remained emotionally flat and unresponsive. Later in school, Maria felt tremendous pressure to be first in her class and to excel in sports, yet she put off homework and was often late to practice. Without realizing it, she viewed every grade and every activity as an attempt to prove she was worth her mother’s attention, something she’d sought since birth. With this emotional pressure on each and every endeavor, she felt that only a perfect performance would be enough to delight her mother. It’s no wonder that Maria often found herself procrastinating: there was too much at stake.
BIG IDEA #5: THE LEFT SHIFT
There is growing evidence that certain parts of the left hemisphere (the left frontal cortex) are associated with feelings of caretaking, empathy, and compassion.45 When activated, they allow us to be relaxed and open to world, in contrast to being in a state of withdrawal based on uncomfortable, negatively charged emotions, which appear to be encoded in the right hemisphere.46 Treating yourself with kindness will stimulate this part of your brain (the “left shift”), creating a state that is correlated with feelings of resilience and well-being. This left shift is also correlated with better functioning of your immune system 47 and with the health of the vagus nerve that wanders from your brain stem all throughout your body.48 The vagus nerve makes an essential contribution to your capacity for emotional regulation and comfortable social engagement49 and is associated with an increase in the amount of the hormone oxytocin in your body.50 Oxytocin helps regulate social bonding and emotional attachment to other people. Some studies suggest that oxytocin can be increased by touch (massage is a good thing) and certain foods, such as chocolate (which is a very good thing!).51 In Chapter 15, we will describe the practice of “mindfulness,” which can activate this left shift in your brain.
What do oxytocin, the vagus nerve, compassion, and kindness have to do with procrastination? Being able to calm yourself and treat yourself with compassion and kindness has everything to do with your being able to face tasks or situations that frighten, anger, threaten, or bore you. Unless you break the patterns of negativity that produce procrastination and replace them with something positive, you are likely to stay stuck in that old rut, like a river running through the mountains in the same channel, carving out a canyon that gets deeper and wider, until you can’t see the sun and you can’t climb your way out.
When you do something that is hard for you, your brain will still show the neural signature for fear, and you will feel that instant shot of anxiety. This is when you can respond to yourself in a new way, with encouragement rather than criticism, with compassion rather than attack. A voice of kindness can help you feel secure enough to venture into uncomfortable emotional territory. Over time, with practice (and perhaps a few pieces of good chocolate), you can develop a different relationship to yourself. When your thoughts are compassionate, your body responds well and your whole self can function in a more harmonious and integrated way.52 Well-integrated systems are “flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable,”53 and we believe that the more you can create an integrated state within yourself, the less you’ll be a prisoner of procrastination.
8
Procrastination and Your Brain
In this chapter we examine several biologically based conditions that often go hand in hand with procrastination: executive dysfunction, attention deficit disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, stress, and sleep problems. If you have or think you might have any of these conditions, they could be making a significant contribution to your procrastination. Don’t despair, and don’t ignore them. Consider getting a medical evaluation; medication may be helpful in treating the condition and may help reduce your procrastination.
EXECUTIVE FUNCTION
When we talk about executive function, we’re not talking about the performance of CEOs in large corporations. We are talking about the performance of the CEO of your brain.1 Just as the CEO of a business is responsible for the performance of the overall company, the executive part of your brain coordinates, regulates, and integrates the different structures and systems of your brain to give you a smooth, ongoing sense of yourself with your personality, goals, values, and skills. Your inner executive takes in information from your senses, your history, your thoughts, and uses this information in a goal-directed way to enable you to accomplish what is important to you.
Just as it is possible for a company to have well-functioning departments led by an incompetent CEO, it is possible for a person to have a brain that functions well in many ways, yet lacks overall leadership. 2 A person with poor executive function may struggle with important life skills in spite of possessing many mental strengths. Perhaps you know someone (maybe even yourself?) who is smart and has good ideas, but who is “terminally disorganized”3 and never seems to have the right papers or materials, can’t remember what was planned or decided, and loses track of the steps necessary for the completion of a task. Sound familiar? This kind of disorganization easily leads to procrastination, because you lose track of timelines and deadlines, and because it can become so frustrating to locate what is needed to complete the project that you just give up.
A person who has difficulties with executive function often has problems with procrastination; however, not all procrastinators have executive dysfunction, so this is an issue that you must consider in figuring out what your own procrastination is all about. Almost all people who have attention deficit disorder (which we discuss in the next section) have executive function difficulties, but executive dysfunction does not necessarily imply ADD.4
There are different opinions about which capacities are involved in executive function, but there is general agreement that there are several basic factors: attentional control, cognitive flexibility, goal setting, and information processing.5 These can be further divided into the following specific functions:6
1. Initiate tasks (get started, generate ideas for action)
2. Sustain attention (follow through, stick with an activity)
3. Inhibit impulses (think before acting, not respond immediately)
4. Shift attention (change focus, move from task to task, respond flexibly)
5. Working memory (remember plans, instructions, and past learning for use with new learning and situations)
6. Emotional control (regulate and manage feelings)
7. Organize material (obtain needed materials and create order)
8. Self-monitor (verbal capacity to review one’s performance, to talk oneself through difficult tasks or experiences as needed)
9. Time management (be aware of and realistic about time)
10. Planning (prioritize, identify steps toward a goal, anticipate future needs and events)
As you read through this list, do any of these issues sound familiar? Are you constantly late because you don’t have the things you need? Do you dash around madly trying to locate them? Are you lost in time? Do you forget what you planned to do, even though it was only five minutes ago that you decided to do it? Are you at a loss when someone asks you, “What were you thinking?”
If you have problems with executive function, we’re sorry to tell you that there is no magic cure. Some issues, such as attention focus, and working memory may be helped by medications that are used to treat ADD. However, problems with organization are usually not helped by medications,7 so the suggestions we o
ffer in Part Two are especially important. You don’t have to feel ashamed, but you do have to figure out how to work with what you’ve got. Many of the techniques we suggest for managing procrastination are techniques that also help with executive function problems: identifying a goal and breaking it down into small steps, taking a small first step, learning how to tell time, and optimizing the environmental conditions to support success. Our suggestion to “get a buddy” may be the most important step of all, because it is difficult to teach executive functions to yourself. It can really help to team up with someone who is kind and who has strong executive functioning. Perhaps this is one reason why a huge new service industry has developed over the last ten years: the personal organizer and clutter management expert!
ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER
Attention deficit disorder and its variations, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and ADD of the inattentive type, have received a great deal of scientific and clinical attention over the past twenty-five years.8 Although for centuries, some children across all cultures have been recognized as “fidgety,” “ill-mannered,” “wild,” “erratic,” “motor-mouthed,” or “excessively passionate,” “dreamy,” or “lost in thought,” it is only relatively recently that we have come to understand that there is, in fact, a biological basis for such behavior, and only more recently still that science has begun to identify some of the biological substrates involved.
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