Procrastination – Postponing actions
I have seen many clients with procrastination problems. Of course, we all have had times when we have procrastinated about doing something. Still, when clients seek help for this, it’s usually because it is occurring far too frequently and having a really detrimental effect on a person’s quality of life. With procrastination problems, a person finds themselves in an endless cycle of analysis, resulting in a lack of useful action. In many ways, procrastination is the polar opposite of impulsiveness, where there is a lack of thought that makes a clear way forward unclear.
Like many behavioural problems, once a person engages in this kind of activity, it can become self-perpetuating, where procrastination leads to even more procrastination. Often, this can delay important decisions, creating all kinds of problems for the procrastinator. One memorable example was a client who couldn’t bring herself to deal with her mail on a daily and weekly basis. She had carrier bags of unopened mail literally in her house. This meant that bills were not being paid, services were sometimes cut off, and other problems arose. The key question in dealing with such procrastination issues is not to ask the question “why” but rather “how” she is creating this problem behaviour. I noticed from her client’s notes that she had only experienced this problem in recent years, and that it had got much worse.
Resolving Procrastination Issues
Every behavioural problem results from how a person thinks and feels. In this instance, she would look at the daily mail and think to herself, “What if that’s bad news?” She thought this to herself in an anxious tone of voice, then experienced the feeling of anxiety and then decided to delay opening the mail. Now she saw the mounting piles of mail and thought, “That could be a lot of bad news just waiting to reveal itself” I asked her if she was the regular recipient of bad news, and she confirmed that this was not the case. The procrastination was created by her feeling of anxiety when she thought about the situation in this particular way. This is important because clients who analyse behaviour often do little to change the feeling process.
Yes, it’s important to find out what has been going on in these situations, but only to gather relevant information to then change the thinking and feeling process. By changing the way she thought about this issue, we quickly changed how she felt and what she did. By the second session, she had organised all her mail and discovered that not only was there no bad news, but one letter contained some news about a friend she had not heard from for many years.