Convenience products can yield advantages but also can come with a price. Affluent nations have populations with growing numbers of people leading sedentary lives. These lifestyles are magnet conditions for leisure stresses and procrastination. For example, depression is dramatically rising.

Your natural tendency to conserve energy and to dodge discomfort may surface when you have a pressing priority but prefer to do something easier. When you play and delay, that's where an ancient calling gets in the way of fulfilling today's responsibilities.

Because it is easier to entertain yourself than to trim your overgrown shrubbery, you recline on the couch and watch TV. You tell yourself, "The plants won't grow significantly between now and tomorrow." Eventually you may have to pay the piper, "But," you think, "There is no price to pay today."

System Procrastination

Figuratively, most of us prefer to gather low hanging fruit and to avoid discomfort. That is often okay. However, it is important to distinguish between when play is okay and when to resist ease and comfort urges when this gets in the way of a bigger cause.

From the start, we learn to conform to cultural ways. You learn to comply with schedules and responsibilities.  You eat on schedule, go to school on schedule, do assignments on schedule, vacation on schedule, get your auto inspected on schedule, and work and get a paycheck on schedule. Some of the teaching you receive is coercive.  Some is based on rewards.

We're also great imitators. We copy what we see others say and do. Through observation, we learn how to be productive and how to procrastinate.

You can build resilience by learning to manage responsibilities. There also are social casualties in any mass indoctrination. You can develop negative thinking habits, such as putting off meeting challenges because of self-doubts and a fear of criticism. These acquired beliefs fuel procrastination when you dodge responsibilities to avoid fictions that evoke anxieties and fears.

Despite early training in compliance, people procrastinate and miss deadlines, rush at the last minute, or find ways to extend a deadline.  You can teach yourself to recognize and change rogue beliefs that help propel procrastination. You can teach yourself to stretch, strain, and struggle for a bigger later gain.

What You Do When You Procrastinate

Throughout your life, you'll face choices between doing and delaying. If you needlessly delay, you can define procrastination as not doing what you should do. However, this definition is too limited for my taste.

You can rid yourself of procrastination by defining it out of existence by making the standard so high that no one qualifies.  A definition, such as "always starts late and never finishes" raises the bar unrealistically high.  Few would buy that dodge.

You can look at procrastination as a needless delay of a timely and relevant activity. When you procrastinate, you put off starting, doing, or finishing, until another day or time. Negative perceptions and feelings about activities can trigger procrastination. When you procrastinate, you'll always substitute something easier or less pressing. You'll practically always engage in some type of procrastination thinking, such as "I'm not ready." 

Procrastination goes beyond deadline issues:

1. You want to kick an Oxycodone prescription drug habit. You find multiple excuses to delay. Start to undercut the excuses and you are on your way to kicking the habit.

2. You experience rogue motivations, such as when self-doubts and discomfort dodging combine to promote procrastination. By taking on one factor, you can favorably influence the course of the other two.

Three-Pronged Change

When you feel a pressure to procrastinate, you can choose to white knuckle yourself into starting. You grimly accept that you have priorities to do even when you don't feel like doing them. When practiced, this disciplined approach can become a productive habit.

You also can inform yourself about what is going on when you procrastinate. This awareness opens a broad range of options and actions for shifting from procrastination to acting effectively. The three-pronged emotive, behavioral, cognitive approach represents such an option.

1. Resist negative emotions that trigger procrastination. Accept that it is all right to feel resistant to the priority you are tempted to put off, but not to put it off. Push yourself over the threshold of resistance by taking it on.

2. Avoid distracting yourself into easier, more convenient, or safer activities that substitute for the priority. By avoiding distractions, and by riveting your attention on starting and finishing, you'll move closer to acting effectively with confident composure, which is the belef that you can command yourself and the controllable events around you.

3. Question the logic behind procrastination thinking. For example, where is the guarantee that putting a priority on the back burner simplifies finishing?  Refuse to accept excuses, such as "I work better under pressure." Engage the challenge you feel tempted to delay, whether you feel like it or not.

We all have natural urges to go for what's easiest, but some of us are more sensitive to tension and to pleasure seeking than others. Restrain those impulses when they lead to negative consequences. At first, this takes extra steps. In the long run, this saves time and conserves energy.

Rules, roles and responsibilities will continue. Emotional resistances and procrastination pressures are not likely to go away. If you want to do better, or if you don't like the cost of procrastination, try a different way. Put the time you'd spend procrastinating into developing that artistic skill, advancing a career, enjoying your family and friends, or doing other things that you'd be proud to include in your autobiography. 

You're wired to follow the easiest path, the low-hanging fruit way. You also are wired to look to the future and to serve your enlightened interests by the positive actions you take today. This never-ending conflict is between choice and pattern.

To learn more about prevailing over primitive urges to procrastinate, see:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-and-sensibility/201003/emotions-decision-making-and-procrastination

Tune into my free Podcast procrastination workshop at: www.smartrecovery.libsyn.org.

Use End Procrastination Now!  for guidance.

Dr. Bill Knaus