Procrastination

by Jane B. Burka

  Mindfulness refers to “paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”10 It is a meditative way of observing one’s experience that has been practiced for over 2,500 years. It can be especially helpful to procrastinators because of its emphasis on moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness. Since “the overall tenor of mindfulness practice is gentle, appreciative, and nurturing,” it serves as a counterpoint to self-criticism.11 Practicing mindfulness is one way to develop a capacity to observe yourself with compassion rather than cruelty, to offer yourself gentle support rather than harsh demands, and to experience steady, balanced acceptance rather than anxious worry or guilt. Imagine how different your experience of yourself could be, and how, from a more peaceful frame of mind, you might approach the dreaded tasks you’ve been putting off.

  There are physical benefits to mindfulness, too. Mindful practices have been linked with improved immune function, a reduction in cardiovascular disease, and a lessening of reactivity to stress.12 Since procrastinators live with so much mental and physical stress, mindfulness as an approach to stress reduction is especially valuable.

  Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Jon Kabat-Zinn has developed a system for teaching mindfulness practices that can be incorporated into modern life. His eight-week program, “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction,”13 (MBSR) is taught in medical centers and clinics around the country and has been the subject of many research studies that demonstrate its effectiveness. A recent study at Harvard, for example, showed that regular mindfulness practice stimulates growth in the part of the brain (the anterior insula in the cortex) that is associated with feelings of compassion, kindness, openness, and receptivity.14

  As with most mindfulness practices, MBSR begins with sitting in a comfortable position and focusing on your breathing. Just taking a moment to pay attention to this fundamental and essential activity of your body immediately takes you out of the automatic, pressured mental and physical activities most of us engage in throughout the day. Many people find that as they focus on their breathing, without intending to change anything, they begin to breathe in more slowly and fully, and they exhale more deeply.

  Paying nonjudgmental attention to your breathing and to body sensations extends to noticing your thoughts without judging them.15 In mindful practice, you observe your thoughts, whatever they are, as they come and go, as they change from moment to moment. Paying attention to your thoughts in this gentle, observant manner will allow you to know more about yourself without a harsh attitude, and you might even feel gratitude just for the experience of being alive in mind and body.

  The Sacred Pause. One way to incorporate mindful awareness into tiny moments throughout your day is to make use of the “sacred pause.”16 It is both utterly simple and remarkably difficult to do. The idea is to stop for just a moment, deliberately and consciously, before engaging in an activity or taking the next step. For a few short seconds, pause and just notice your breathing and the sensations in your body. Reconnect as fully as you can to the present moment. For a few short seconds, you don’t have to do anything else or be anywhere else, ruminating about the past or anticipating the future. For a few short seconds, you simply discontinue whatever you are doing, becoming “wholeheartedly present, attentive, and often physically still.”17 You can even do it right now, in this present moment. Stop reading and just be aware of what you are experiencing.

  The sacred pause can be especially helpful for procrastinators. When you start to experience a buildup of anxiety, dread, guilt, self-blame, or terror, use the sacred pause to come back to the present moment, when you are simply connected to your body. When you are ready to take a step toward your behavioral goal, use the sacred pause to quiet yourself for just a moment before making that phone call, opening that file, writing that sentence, or paying that bill. Each time you use the sacred pause, you are de-linking the familiar, well-honed neural circuit of procrastination just a bit, giving yourself a chance to approach the next moment in your life in a slightly different way—more open, more balanced, and perhaps, eventually even more confident that you can handle whatever comes your way.

  Heartmath. By focusing (mindfully) on your heart, you can regulate your own heart rhythm. A smooth, ordered heart rhythm is experienced as a feeling of harmony, energy, or ease and is associated with positive emotions. Negative feelings, however, are linked with jerky, disordered heart rhythms and a sense of inner disturbance,18 which is what you probably feel when you’re angry at yourself for procrastinating or frantic in the anxious push toward a deadline.

  In just one or two minutes, you can regulate your heartbeat. Begin by focusing your attention on your heart, perhaps by touching your hand to the center of your chest, where your heart lies behind your breastbone. As you breathe, imagine the air flowing in and out of your heart, slowly and gently finding your own rhythm until your breathing feels smooth and balanced. Five to six breaths per minute is a calming rate for most people, but it’s important that you find the rhythm that feels best to you. As you continue to breathe and feel your heart rhythm, recall a positive feeling from some time in your life when you felt good, and just enjoy that feeling for a moment.19

  You can choose an attitude or feeling that you wish to cultivate and focus on that feeling with each breath. For example, you might think to yourself, “Breathe calm,” “Breathe courage,” “Breathe forgiveness,” or, “Breathe balance.” This “attitude breathing,”20 like the sacred pause, may be especially helpful when you’re feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or scared, or when you’re in the midst of a highly charged situation. “Breathe steadiness,” perhaps, or, “Breathe purpose.” Or you might help yourself lessen the emotional significance, and thus the tension, that is linked to a task by breathing, “Take the significance out” or, “Breathe neutral.”21

  Benson’s Relaxation Response. The “attitude breathing” we just described is a version of the original work done by Dr. Herbert Benson over thirty years ago. Dr. Benson, a Harvard cardiologist and pioneer in mind-body medicine, developed a deceptively simple stress management technique that also focuses on the breath.22 All you have to do is breathe in and out, slowly and regularly, using deep belly breathing. Each time you exhale, repeat a word you find soothing. In Benson’s original teaching and research studies, he had people say the word “One” with each exhalation, but any word will work, as long as it’s easy and calming to you. Some words people like to use are “Peace,” “Ease,” “Calm,” and “Warm.” Try to do this for ten to twenty minutes, twice a day. The more you do it, the easier it will be, and the more quickly you will be able to relax yourself when you are stressed.

  Beyond exercise and mindful practice, there are many other ways to take care of your biological self that will reduce stress and help you feel more balanced and more able to tackle whatever you’ve been putting off. If you’re trying to take these steps but keep procrastinating, we once again recommend that you consider what underlying anxieties might be stopping you. We also recommend you use these tips in moderation, because any of them can be used to procrastinate on something else!

  • Get enough sleep. Take short naps if necessary.

  • Eat foods that will nourish your brain and body.

  • Limit your use of caffeine, alcohol, and other substances.

  • Have good sex, preferably with someone you love.

  • Get a pet. Dogs will keep you walking, and both dogs and cats have a positive effect on blood pressure and cardiovascular health.23

  • Call a friend, or better yet, get together and laugh a lot; this will lower stress hormone levels in both of you.

  • Play and make time for fun.

  As you experiment with these suggestions, remember that, as with all new learning, repetition is helpful. You are, among other things, forging new neural pathways in your brain, and it is only through repetition that those neurons will begin to fire together and then wire together. So don’t give up; every little bit will help.

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  Tips for Procrastinators with ADD and Executive Dysfunction

  It is very common for people with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and executive dysfunction (ED) to have problems with procrastination. Although our previous suggestions for managing procrastination are effective, in this chapter we offer additional help for those who have ADD or ED. Even if you don’t have these issues, we hope you will read this chapter, because some of these ideas might be useful for you as well.

  We want to remind you that ADD and some ED difficulties are primarily problems with inhibition, meaning that it is difficult to manage impulses and distractions, one of the main factors that lead to procrastination.1 It’s hard to stop yourself from paying attention to all the novel stimulation you experience—ideas, thoughts, sounds, sensations, urges, and other people. Being distracted and unfocused makes it hard to organize, persevere, and follow through, so procrastination is rampant. It takes effort to rein in distractibility and get yourself back on track. It’s important to develop strategies that reduce the number of competing distractions and remind yourself to return to the task you’re trying to complete.

  In this chapter, we highlight some principles that have been shown to be helpful to people with ADD and give specific suggestions that are based on each principle. In addition, we hope you’ll use your experience and creativity to generate your own strategies and solutions. We encourage you to look at the many books and Internet resources available on ADD and executive dysfunction, some of which are included in our chapter notes.

  START WITH THE EXTERNAL, MOVE TO THE INTERNAL

  As we learn new behaviors and skills, the typical progression is to start with a lot of external support, then gradually fade that support as we internalize the behavior, and eventually do it independently without external cuing or structure. For example, parents teach children by talking them through tasks, helping them think about time (by explaining a clock or a calendar), or guiding them through a sequence of steps. Gradually, most children begin to talk out loud to themselves as they do the job. (“First you get your paper and pencil. Now write your name at the top of the page. Now write the title.”). As they gain more proficiency, children subvocalize; that is, they talk to themselves very quietly, almost under their breath. Eventually, this vocal function becomes completely internalized, an inner voice of guidance and support that the child doesn’t even think about consciously. This same process holds true for adults as well: we begin learning new skills with some supervision, then gradually need less and less, as we are able to practice new behavior on our own. And we talk to ourselves, out loud or internally; we self-monitor.

  The capacity to self-monitor is an important executive function.2 We use it to talk ourselves through the steps of a task, help ourselves stay on track, adjust to new situations, regulate our emotional state, and know how we’re doing as we go. However, many people with ADD or ED have trouble with self-monitoring; their brains don’t do this easily. Therefore, providing external supports is especially important and may be needed for long periods of time before internalization is in place. You might ask someone to help you map out a strategy and then check in about your progress, or practice talking yourself through the steps you want to take.

  POINT OF PERFORMANCE HELP

  You can set up, be clear about, and really want to achieve a significant, realistic behavioral goal, but if your working memory doesn’t perform very well, when you get ready to take your first step five minutes later, you’ve completely forgotten what you intended to do! Or, you get ready to start working on your goal, and something unexpected catches your eye. Perhaps you see an interesting magazine cover, or you remember a book title somebody mentioned, and you look that up when you open up your laptop instead of going directly to your work file. There’s not necessarily a deep inner conflict at work, such as we described in Chapters 2 through 5, when we discussed the fears that usually underlie procrastination. You just don’t remember—and it’s not because you have early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. It may be because your brain is simply not good at remembering and staying on track.

  Barkley’s recent summary of research on adults with ADD3 stresses that an essential strategy for approaching tasks is to get point of performance help. Just having a plan in place is probably going to be insufficient to help you follow through. You need something outside yourself to remind you when and where you are going to take action, that is, at the point of performance, or since we are talking about procrastination, at the point of avoidance. There are many choices for point of avoidance help, including the following.

  Visual reminders in your environment can be very effective. Notes, drawings, arrows, lists—anything you can use to remind yourself visually of your task can be helpful. For example, if you plan to work at your computer, stick some Post-it notes on the screen with reminders about the steps of your behavioral goal. Lenora has her clinical practice in Silicon Valley, and she has worked with many tech-savvy people who create reminders that come up periodically on their computer screens, so if they’ve wandered off in some other direction surfing the Net or reading the news, an automatic cue pops up to help them get back on track.

  Visual reminders may also be helpful if posted elsewhere in your environment to remind you to start working on your goal. Notes are especially helpful in places you go to mindlessly and frequently—on the bathroom mirror, on the TV screen, on the front door, on the steering wheel of your car, on your pillow. We know one procrastinator who puts notes inside his refrigerator and finds it helpful!

  Auditory reminders can be used in a similar way. If you have a smart phone or a watch with alarm functions, you can use them to set reminders for the time you plan to take the next step toward your goal. You can also set a kitchen timer to remind you when to start a goal, or to delineate a specific amount of time you plan to work (for example, fifteen minutes), so that you know you only have to focus for a short period of time before you can pursue the next appealing distraction. If auditory cues are helpful for you, you might want to check out the Web site www.watchminder.com for an array of products designed to help people monitor time. You can, for example, get a watch that will signal you at predetermined intervals, reminding you to refocus your attention.

  A real, live person may also be a terrific point of performance helper, as long as that person knows what you need (focus, reminding) and is able to provide that help with compassion and love. Whether the person is your partner, a buddy, a colleague, a coach, a therapist, or an employee, what matters is that you feel comfortable and accepted and that the other person can be an external source of the motivation and focus you have trouble providing for yourself. For some specific ideas about how to get help from another person, check out Chapter 14.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURE AND ROUTINE

  If you have ADD or ED, every decision point represents a potential diversion from whatever path you are on.4 Each time you have to choose what to do, you face the possibility that you’ll get carried off in a whole different direction or mired in the muck of indecision. Either way, you’re derailed, which is a perfect setup for procrastination. However, if you have habitual structures and routines in place, you greatly reduce the likelihood of getting off track, because you simply do what you always do, no questions asked. Rather than looking at structure and routine as a prison that deprives you of your freedom and creative individuality, try to think of it as a way to help you get the mundane parts of life taken care of, so that you can be free to be that unique, creative, spontaneous person you are (without sabotaging yourself by procrastinating).

  Make (and Use!) Lists. Get your ideas and plans out of your head and down in writing in a place that works for you. Carry a notebook, use your Blackberry, keep a whiteboard in your kitchen or office, send yourself e-mails—anything that helps you remember what you had in mind to do. And write it down before you forget! One variation of list-writing is to write a short list, no more than five items in very large print, of things yo
u want to do today. If it works better for you, write out a short list of what you want to do tomorrow before you go to bed at night. Be sure to put the list in a prominent place where you can’t miss it. Then, when you get up in the morning, you’re ready to go without having to think (or decide).5

  Keep a Basket by Your Front Door for Your Keys. This simple suggestion 6 can save you a lot of time and aggravation. If you develop the routine of dropping your keys in the basket every time you come into your home, you won’t be late for the job interview or for the meeting with your manager because you were frantically looking everywhere for the misplaced keys. As Ned Hallowell says so succinctly, “The devil does reside in the details in the land of ADD.”7 Even though dealing with details may seem boring, it is important so that the rest of your life will flow smoothly. Try to think of creative routines that will help you take care of those details, so you don’t have to think about them, and they aren’t subject to choice-point distractions; for example, auto-pay routine bills, and use Quicken or some other software to track and categorize expenditures.