Does Procrastination Increase As Society Becomes More Regulated?

Dodging discomfort is a primitive survival mechanism. If a situation or activity "felt" uncomfortable, your ancient ancestors would probably have avoided it. By avoiding the tension of uncertainty about an unfamiliar territory you might aid your survival by sidestepping a cannibal tribe or saber tooth tiger.

Leading a hand-to-mouth existence, could you afford to be a long-term planner? For a member of a small migrating tribal community, grabbing a handful of berries had more survival value than waiting for a field of wheat to grow.

In The Axemaker's Gift, James Burke and Robert Ornstein described our double-edged history. New discoveries and advancements lead to freedom from the dangers of nature. This happened at the cost of restricting and regulating individual actions and freedoms.

Let's extend this axemaker gift to include procrastination. Regulated societies are organized by the calendar and the clock. Officials will extract a price for greater freedom from natural dangers. You may want this tradeoff without any obligation on your part. If you do, you live in a dream world.

Here is the deal. By following through on job responsibilities and governmental obligations, you gain greater safety and security. This is the social contract. Some requirements may be excessive. But that is as it is until you find a way to change them. It is typically easier for you to change how you operate than to change a bureaucracy .

You may feel resistant to performing certain socially required and regulated duties and obligations. This is understandable. Many regulated tasks are time consuming and unpleasant. Few enjoy completing tax forms or spending extra work hours to meet a deadline. The same is normally the case for self-help actions, such as facing an amplified fear of a harmless situation.

You can flourish in a world of commerce by accepting responsibilities for executing timely and relevant acts. In this process, you act to avoid penalties for social procrastination, which is putting off societal responsibilities. Your reward is getting regulated social responsibilities off your back and avoiding penalties. You also gain a positive benefit. By regulating your thoughts and actions to promote follow through results, you boost your frustration tolerance.

As a negative alternative, you can let yourself sink into a quagmire of distracting conflicts and tensions about the fairness of societal responsibilities. However, you can gain a positive benefit proactively following through. Consider the "relief" benefits of taking charge when you come to cross roads and act to follow a productive path.

Exit the Discomfort-Dodging World

Building tension tolerance is an important step in the direction of overcoming procrastination. A negative feeling can be mild and yet start an avalanche of procrastination diversions resulting in a pileup of things left undone. When viewing the outcome of multiple delays, you may feel hopeless about catching up. However, if you believe you can tolerate tension, you are less likely to delay and have fewer negative prices to pay.

You cut into the emotional roots of procrastination by using discomfort-dodging emotional signals to explore your thoughts and to debunk any accompanying false hopes, such as tomorrow is always a better day to start. Can you emotionally regulate these procrastination triggering emotions? How do you regulate emotions? Do you use a rheostat implanted in your limbic system?

Self-regulation is a cognitive function. By showing yourself that tension is time-limited and that you can live through it, you'll experience less stress and you'll have less reason to dodge discomfort.

Here is an example of a self-regulation technique. Think about your thinking when you experience negative sensations. Do you amplify tension through fearsome thoughts about feeling stressed? Is it possible to build acceptance and tolerance for your tensions? Can you accept--not necessarily like--that it will take time and effort to get socially-required tasks out of the way?

Here is a second self-regulation approach: (1) Place reason between procrastination impulses and diversionary activities by looking beyond the moment of discomfort to the steps you will take to fulfill the social obligation. (2) In the process of reasoning it out, set realistic goals. (3) Devise a plan to reach the goal: when will you start and what is your first step? (4) When procrastination thinking gets in the way, connect the dots between this thinking and its results. (5) Identify the cognitive, emotive, and behavioral consequences of inaction. Then try a different way that yields better results. For example, if you think later is better, ask yourself why? (6) Stick with this approach until it becomes a practiced habit that substitutes for procrastination.

Four Main Steps to Build Frustration Tolerance

You can achieve more accomplishments and psychological wellbeing by acting to increase your frustration tolerance by:

1. Build your body to buffer the stress effects of multiple frustrations. You do this through maintaining a consistent, moderate, physical exercise program, healthy diet, and by getting adequate sleep. The physical exercise phase of this stress buffering process helps decrease depression and boosts your immune system for better health. This is the physical way.

2. Liberate the mind from consistent errors, such as conning yourself into thinking that you can normally escape consequences for delays. This is the cognitive way.

3. Work to boost your emotional resilience by exercising restraint against malfunctioning discomfort-dodging impulses. This is the emotive way.

4. Change negative patterns that you associated with needless frustrations, such as letting work pile up. You can meet this on-going challenge when you dedicate yourself to a lifetime of producing positive results in a reasonable way within a reasonable time. This is the Do it Now behavioral way.

My colleague Tim Pychyl has a blog on frustration tolerance development I recommend reading: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/200910/discomfort-intolerance-why-we-might-give-in-feel-good

If developing frustration tolerance proves challenging, End Procrastination Now (Knaus, 2010. McGraw-Hill) can help. As an alternative, download How to Conquer Your Frustrations for free. I describe how to boost frustration tolerance. I wrote it without using the verb "to be" to help you reduce overly generalized distress thinking. You can get your copy at: http://www.rebtnetwork.org/library/How_to_Conquer_Your_Frustratio...

Dr. Bill Knaus