All too often, however, we do not allow ourselves that time to rest. After meeting one deadline we worry about the next. We stress about tomorrow’s test, the mortgage, a fight with a friend, next week’s performance review, the nagging pain that doesn’t go away. We live in an age of fast-paced competitiveness, of crowded urban landscapes and rush-hour traffic jams. Even in small towns and on isolated islands, we check e-mail and text messages feeling pressed to respond instantly. Unfortunately, when we live in a chronically stressed way, our bodies are constantly producing stress hormones, which over time, damage important brain structures.43 The more these structures are damaged, the less effective our cells are at repairing damage and stimulating new neuronal growth.44
Stress is magnified when we procrastinate. We anticipate being criticized not only for our work but for turning it in late; we tempt fate by pushing limits; we expect the worst to be waiting right around the corner; we feel guilty for disappointing, inconveniencing, or irritating others. It’s a vicious circle: procrastination produces stress, and stress can produce procrastination. When your body is bearing the effects of a stressful life, you have less creative energy available for things that need to be done or things you would enjoy doing.
BIOLOGICAL RHYTHMS
The natural rhythms of your biology can significantly impact your performance. We discussed an example of an annual rhythm when we described seasonal affective disorder. Other examples of biological rhythms are circadian rhythms (some people are most alert and productive in the early morning, while others can’t get going until noon), hormonal rhythms, such as menstrual rhythms in women, and testosterone changes in men as they approach midlife.45 Another example of a biological rhythm is the need for quiet time versus social time. Some people feel overwhelmed by too much activity or social interaction and need to create quiet, alone time to soothe themselves and recharge their batteries. Knowing the ebbs and flows of your own biological states will help you act in harmony with your body rather than constantly fight against what is natural for you. If you push yourself to work in the morning when you’re really best at night, for example, you’re setting yourself up to procrastinate. Wouldn’t it be more effective to work in a way that’s easiest for you?
SLEEP: SLEEP DEBT AND SLEEP APNEA
Dr. William Dement, head of the Sleep Disorders Clinic at Stanford University, almost single-handedly created the field of sleep medicine. Thanks to Dr. Dement, we now know how essential good sleep is for good functioning.46 When you’re not sleeping well, your brain can’t work well, and you’re likely to experience the typical problems of insufficient sleep: low frustration tolerance, inability to concentrate, low energy, irritability—and procrastination. “The impact of sleep deprivation on executive functioning is direct, since the pre-frontal cortex helps regulate sleep, arousal, and attention. Youngsters who are sleep-deprived have been shown to have difficulty initiating and persisting at tasks, especially those viewed as tedious or ‘boring.’ They also have difficulty with complex tasks that require planning or goal-directed persistence, particularly when the goals are abstract and the rewards are delayed.”47
Although you may do all-nighters and seem to pull through unscathed for a night or two or three, especially when you’re young, we now know that when you don’t get enough sleep, you accumulate “sleep debt.”48 When your body is deprived of sleep, you can’t be at the top of your game, and your tendency to procrastinate will be greater. So, if you’re not getting enough sleep, take short naps (less than fifteen minutes; napping for a longer period allows you to move into deeper stages of sleep, and you’re likely to feel groggy when you wake), and try to go to bed earlier (yes, we know, you can’t go to bed early when you’re far behind and have to work through the night; that’s why we recommend starting sooner!). If you are sleeping enough hours but are still waking up tired, check with your doctor. You might be depressed or have another medical condition. You could have a serious life-threatening condition called sleep apnea, a disruption of sleep that deprives you of oxygen and leaves you feeling fatigued.49
OTHER MEDICAL CONDITIONS
There are other medical issues that could play a role in procrastination. For example, some thyroid disorders can cause the low energy and fatigue that make it impossible to get going or take action, and anemia can cause depression.50 It has been suggested that some cases of writer’s block may be connected to problems in the temporal or frontal lobe.51 It’s important to get a thorough physical to make sure there isn’t an underlying biological issue that is contributing to your procrastination. If you’re someone who’s been putting off health checkups for years, we encourage you to make an appointment to see your doctor—or to find a doctor if you don’t have one.
A FINAL THOUGHT
Whatever your struggles with procrastination, there is always a biological component to what you experience. Somewhere in the process of delaying, your brain perceives danger, and procrastination is your response and your protection. Perhaps your brain has particular challenges that lead you to put things off, such as those of executive function or ADD. Perhaps your procrastination reflects ways in which your brain has shut down, as in depression. Whatever your situation, we hope that understanding more about what happens in your brain will help you treat your brain and your body with care and respect. In Part Two we offer some suggestions for doing just that.
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How You Came to Be a Procrastinator
You were born into the world straight from the environment of your mother’s womb with your unique DNA, your particular brain, and your innate temperament. You were born into a particular family at a particular time. The combination of how you came into the world (nature) and how your family responded to you (nurture) set in motion a series of complex interactions that have led you to become the person and the procrastinator you are now. Some parent-child pairings are an easy fit, and some are not. When there is not a good fit, children can end up feeling defective in some way, not entitled to claim and pursue their own interests and goals, paving the way for procrastination.
Adam has ADHD. As a toddler, he was constantly on the go, climbing up the bookshelves, imitating police car sirens, and taking things apart. Although his energy was delightful in many ways, it was exhausting for his family. They often became irritated and scolded him for not playing quietly. In school, Adam had difficulty sitting still and talked out of turn so that teachers complained to his parents about conduct problems. Later, he forgot his homework assignments and lost track of test dates. He and his parents engaged in homework wars, nightly battles over sitting down to study. Adam’s parents became aware that he had ADHD but were not sympathetic. They wanted him to snap out of it—just focus and do it. Procrastination became a bigger and bigger problem. Adam put off anything he considered boring in favor of his passion for skateboarding.
Adam now says, “I wish my parents had understood how hard it was for me to focus. They knew I had ADHD, but they couldn’t handle it. They said I was lazy and unreliable. They blamed me, but they didn’t help me.” Adam contrasts this with his parents’ response to his sister’s food allergies. “They accepted that this was how her body worked. They bent over backward to find the right foods for her, and they helped her learn to manage her condition. I wish they could have done that for me.”
Perhaps like Adam, you had ADHD and felt blamed. Or you might have had a temperament that was different from others in your family—like being an introvert in a family of extroverts—and you felt out of sync with the other members of your family. How parents respond to their children’s biological givens affects the course of those traits in later life. For example, Jerome Kagan, a child development researcher, studied shy children over time.1 Shyness is a temperamental trait that is associated with fear and withdrawal from novelty. Kagan observed that if parents were emotionally attuned to their children, giving them a secure base and loving support for exploration, these children could, over time, outgrow their shy tendencies and e
ngage the world with enthusiasm and resilience. Children who did not have attuned parenting maintained their anxiety into later life. If there isn’t a good fit between what you were born with and how you are responded to, it’s hard to develop solid confidence in yourself,2 and lacking confidence is one of the main factors that contribute to procrastination.3
Not only did you have to mesh with your family environment, but your family also had its own place in a cultural environment, which might or might not have been an easy fit. If your family was not part of the dominant culture—either because of homeland, language, skin color, education, religion, or economic status—you faced special pressures that may have contributed to problems with procrastination.
We offer suggestions to address the special pressures of immigrants and first-generation college students in Chapter 17, but for now, we ask you to think about whether there were cultural issues in your family background that might be involved in your procrastination. Was there a shift that required you and your family to make cultural adjustments? For example, if your family came from a culture in which individual achievements were not as important as looking out for the community, the Western emphasis on individualism and competition may feel wrong and confusing.4 If English is not your first language, or if you grew up in a family that did not speak English at home, perhaps you delay writing papers, reports, or business correspondence because it is so frustrating not to be able to express yourself as articulately in English as in your native tongue. If you were the first person in your family to attend college, you may have felt unprepared for the academic, financial, social, and bureaucratic demands of school,5 and procrastinated rather than asking for help. If you come from a background of financial struggle and you are now in a more privileged setting, you may feel out of place, insecure, or even fraudulent, and procrastination may be a way to avoid testing whether you really belong. New cultural situations are stressful; often they pose a conflict between assimilating into the new culture and holding onto family and friends from the old culture. Procrastination helps you avoid making difficult choices and facing the potential loss of important attachments.
MODELS OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE
Parents, siblings, teachers, coaches, neighbors, and even people you’ve read or heard about become models for how to live. Sometimes they are models of the kind of person you would like to be—for example, the young boy who wants to be just like his dad, or the student who decides she wants to grow up to be like her favorite teacher. There are also people who may be models of what you do not want to be. A parent may be disorganized or inefficient, leading a child to decide that he will never be like that! Or a parent may be so extremely efficient, giving top priority to work over everything else—including the family—that the child vows never to put work ahead of people.
Who were your models for “success”? What about them made you think they were successful? What were they like? How did others view them? How did they treat you? How did they treat themselves? How did you internalize them?
Now, think of the people who may have been models of “failure.” What was it about them that made you think they were failures? How did they behave toward others and treat themselves? How did they impact you?
And of course, who were the procrastinators?
Consider how these models have affected you and your procrastination. For example, you may have tried hard to be just like the most successful of them. Did that create impossible standards? Or you may have assumed that you could never be as successful as they were, so you gave up. Or you may have decided that, at all costs, you must not emulate one of your models, and so you tried to be everything he or she wasn’t, but then lost a sense of who you really wanted to be. If it’s helpful, you may want to list your early models, writing down your ideas about them and how you think they may have influenced your procrastination.
Here are a few examples of models that some procrastinators have described to us as having had an effect on their procrastination. One man remembered being intimidated by his successful father, a hard-driving man who had pulled himself out of poverty and become an award-winning scientist. He worked constantly at his computer, kept a yellow pad on the nightstand next to his bed, and used his time on the toilet to read scientific journals. “If you aren’t doing something important,” the father would say, “you’re wasting the space you’re standing in!” The young boy drove himself relentlessly to emulate his father. Doing anything for the sheer pleasure of it was perceived as a waste of precious time. Not surprisingly, the pressure weighed him down—he was often inhibited and unable to produce.
Another procrastinator, a restaurant manager whose delaying kept her business in constant jeopardy, viewed the women in her extended family as “just housewives who didn’t have to work,” content to spend their years living for their husbands and through their children. To her feminist mind, they were failures. She was determined to have a busy career. Yet she was afraid of losing her family’s support as she developed her profession and her life path diverged from theirs. Her procrastination kept her from going too far in her work and feeling like an outsider in her own family.
We heard about conflicting models from a procrastinating college student who was strongly influenced by two of her elementary school teachers. One teacher was the picture of efficiency, but the student experienced her as humorless and unavailable and remembers her with little warmth or affection. The other teacher was constantly disorganized and running late, yet she really enjoyed life and was playful with her students. For that young child, liveliness went with disorganization and delay, whereas coldness was linked to efficiency.
You may have thought the only way to be successful was to be exactly like your model of success, with no deviations, identifying with the whole and not allowing for your distinct parts. You might admire one trait in a parent or friend and overvalue or idealize it, so that you don’t see the person very clearly, and you diminish yourself in comparison. An idealized model of success is impossible to live up to! We would like to suggest that the person you admire also had traits and qualities you might not admire; your idealization keeps you blind to their limitations and stuck in a one-down position. Perhaps you use procrastination to stay one down.
FAMILY ATTITUDES: THE MAKING OF A PROCRASTINATOR
Like all families, your family transmitted values, attitudes, beliefs, and expectations to you from a very early age, even starting before you were born, as your parents imagined what they wanted their child to be. These family messages let you know how the world worked and what your place in it was supposed to be. You were undoubtedly taught some basic ideas or rules about how people treat each other, about what is right and what is unacceptable, about what is safe and what is dangerous, about how to deal with conflict, negotiation, and decision making. You also learned quickly about how you were valued and how you fit into the family system—or didn’t. You got messages about who you were, what you were capable of, and what the future held for you. You may have accepted these notions without question, assuming they were true and anyone would agree, or you may have rebelled against the rules and values your family espoused.
The influences of our families run deep, and even as adults we are affected by them, often without being aware of it. Some aspects of your early family relationships actually become hardwired in your brain, as these interactions create neural pathways that become established. Neuroscientists have suggested, “The brain uses past learning as the guide for what to expect in the future.”6 You anticipate what you have experienced in the past.
Robin was startled when her boss approached a coworker and said, “Hannah, you’ve made a mistake on the spreadsheet that throws all the numbers off.” Robin braced for a tearful response to this harsh judgment, but Hannah’s reaction was news to Robin: “Oh good, show me,” she said. Robin had expected Hannah to react as she would have, with either defensive self-justification or tearful hysterics, but Hannah did neither. Later, after talking with Hanna
h, Robin understood that her friend didn’t think their boss had been harsh, and she actually views mistakes as learning opportunities! It had never occurred to Robin that a mistake could be anything but an invitation for criticism, because that’s what her mistakes had always generated, first criticism from her parents and now her own internal criticism.
When the assumptions and rules we learned in our families automatically govern our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, without our evaluating or challenging them, we can be headed for trouble, particularly if the rule is a very rigid one that inhibits our development as capable, creative individuals. It’s like eating everything that is put on your plate without ever considering whether you like it, whether it’s good for you, or even whether you’re hungry! You just open your mouth and swallow, causing psychic indigestion.
Sometimes what you have come to expect does actually happen, and the brain’s prediction is accurate. Other times things turn out differently. It takes active thinking and conscious awareness to evaluate whether your hardwired expectations are true. This is why it’s so important to pay attention to the messages you received in the past. Maybe they once held a kernel of truth but now no longer fit. When you think carefully about these messages, you’ll see that some of what you learned is invaluable, but some of it gets in your way.
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