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Procrastination Is More About Managing Emotions Than Time, Says Study (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: [A new study] identified two areas of the brain that determine whether we are more likely to get on with a task or continually put it off. Researchers used a survey and scans of 264 people's brains to measure how proactive they were. Experts say the study, in Psychological Science, underlines procrastination is more about managing emotions than time. It found that the amygdala -- an almond-shaped structure in the temporal (side) lobe which processes our emotions and controls our motivation -- was larger in procrastinators. In these individuals, there were also poorer connections between the amygdala and a part of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (DACC). The DACC uses information from the amygdala and decides what action the body will take. It helps keep the person on track by blocking out competing emotions and distractions. The researchers suggest that procrastinators are less able to filter out interfering emotions and distractions because the connections between the amygdala and the DACC in their brains are not as good as in proactive individuals.
I'm just operating according to design specifications.
Chris Reimer's amygdala must be the size of a pumpkin!
to get a First Post
french toast, ladies
Been there, done that. The Stoics exactly figured this out 2,000 years ago. Go read Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or Seneca on procrastination. It is all about emotion. This is not news... to me.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
This was an interesting article on how most discussions of procrastination stigmatize the action of putting tasks off, even in cases where doing so causes no harm. Studies seem to indicate that a large fraction of the population "procrastinates" while still successfully completing tasks. These people may have no problems with their lives beyond the stress of people who want them to do things sooner because those people can't stand to see people work at the last minute. Treating all procrastinators as if they "have a problem" probably causes more harm than it prevents.
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
The problem is that the reasons are generally not taken seriously, or ridiculed, because "I'm not that weak!".
But neurally, it's very simple: The stimulus threshold for actually starting to act is not reached, but the threshold for inhibiting it, is.
Because "just" doing it, i more painful that we like to admit. More painful than the perceived pain from waiting a little longer. Which is "far" in the distance anyway.
We say we "just" have to overcome it. But brains do not work that way! You cannot trick yourself! Because you ARE yourself. Nor can you "just" change yourself. It's a stupid meme, and ignorant of neural reality.
In reality, if you want to change yourself, you have to change your environment, to generate experiences (input), which itself then changes you! THAT is how you change yourself.
So the goal, is to take your negative feelings towards doing it seriously, accept that your basic emotions won't care if the long term pain later will be much higher than that little short-term pain right now, and alter your environment so that it becomes more attractive to start doing it, than the pain of overcoming that beginning is.
If the goals of altering your environment that way isn't itself suffering from the same problem. ^^
Then you have to use the same method on it first.
And possibly go even deeper... until you find a lever you can actually flip, to cascade all the way back.
The only problem I had, was when that cascade became so deep, that the act of overviewing it in your mind, became a task too big for me. Even writing it down, etc. ... get a friend to help you.
But that's rare. And if it arises,
I would second that conclusion. I'm a grand-master at doing nothing "productive" and that correlates heavily with my creative drive which in turn correlates strongly with my nerd qualities and the notable need to do something useful when I'm compelled to do something. Nothing has me procrastinate more than having to deal with nonsense cause by others or circumstance.
That's also why my karma here is through the roof. ;-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
These people may have no problems with their lives beyond the stress of people who want them to do things sooner because those people can't stand to see people work at the last minute.
"Haste makes waste." Not to mention the trickle-down effects on other people when done at the last minute.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Careful consideration and a little bit of planning is not procrastination.
Actually, it is my preferred approach to anything difficult that needs insight. The thing that happens is that some limited initial look at the problem subconscious keeps working on the problem and throws me ideas at a low rate. At some time I have everything needed for a good solution and can get to work very efficiently. I can start working on such things immediately, but it takes more work and the results are worse. Would not surprise me one bit if there were quite a few other people out there that use this approach as well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I’ll have to take a look at that article later
L'Idiot
You know, I've thought for a while that procrastination has a little bit of an unfairly negative reputation. People treat procrastination as laziness, but in my experience, it's much more complicated than that.
I do agree that procrastination is often more about managing emotions than time. I don't know about the science from the article, but in my experience of my own procrastination and others', it tends to happen when there's some feeling of being overwhelmed. There's too much to do, there are two many things to think about, and so the procrastinator avoids dealing with it until they're forced to.
I also agree with you that it's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the procrastinator still completes their work on time. It can even be a good thing if, when confronted with a complex, difficult, or overwhelming problem, there's some level of procrastination. Stop, take a break, maybe focus on something else first. Not only can it be a coping mechanism, but it can be a good strategy. If you have a long-term problem without only bad options, and you let it sit for a while, a the situation may change and better solution might present itself. Or, even if nothing changes, it may be that giving yourself some time will allow your unconscious mind to turn the situation over a few times and think of a better solution. It may even just be that you're not in the right frame of mind to consider the issue right now, and considering it at a different time can let you deal with it in a better way.
So I don't think procrastinators are lazy or that they necessarily have a problem, but clearly it can turn into a problem. For one, procrastinators sometimes put things off too long, and the avoidance turns into hopelessness. They think, "I had 2 months to do this, and I've made no progress. Now the deadline is only a week away. If I couldn't make any progress in a month and a half, then what makes me think I could complete it in 1 week?" They give up and don't get things done.
That's an extreme case, but even in less extreme cases it can be a problem. You said, "Studies seem to indicate that a large fraction of the population 'procrastinates' while still successfully completing tasks." However, "completing the task" may not be the only measure worth considering. People are terrible at estimating how long tasks will take. If you get in the habit of putting things off until the last minute, and giving yourself just enough time to meet the deadline, you'll find you sometimes miss the deadline because you underestimated the amount of time that'd be needed. Or if you don't miss the deadline, you might cut corners to make the deadline on time. Or even if you don't explicitly "cut corners", very often having spare time at the end of a task allows you to be more careful, take your time, and refine your performance.
To give a more concrete example, if you have 2 months to write a paper, and you don't start it until the night before, you might not finish it in time because you needed a week to write it. If you start writing a week in advance, you might finish it, and it's fine. However, if you start writing immediately and finish it in a week, then you have an additional 7 weeks to proofread, edit, and revise the paper. So in that case, procrastination isn't exactly a problem, but it is still detrimental.
Still, not everything needs to be done perfectly, and sometimes the paper you wrote at the end of 1 week is good enough. Sometimes giving yourself a break is more important than making the paper as good as it could possibly be. And it's possible that letting the ideas roll around in the back of your mind for 7 weeks actually allowed you to write a better paper than you would have if you started work immediately.
I don't think there's a simple one-size-fits-all answer. Procrastination is often a problem, but often it's not, and I'm sure sometimes it's beneficial.
There has to be SOME upside.
A similar one is the stigma around being a night person not a morning person.
Actually, it is my preferred approach to anything difficult that needs insight. The thing that happens is that some limited initial look at the problem subconscious keeps working on the problem and throws me ideas at a low rate. At some time I have everything needed for a good solution and can get to work very efficiently. I can start working on such things immediately, but it takes more work and the results are worse. Would not surprise me one bit if there were quite a few other people out there that use this approach as well.
I use this approach. I even have a name for it - I call it being “ thoughtful”.
I think it is vital for complex tasks with no single solution.
To me “procrastination” describes cases where the solution is well known, but not applied for no good reason. My sink is full of dirty dishes. I’m washing them one at a time when I need to use one. Using the sink is inconvenient because it is crowded. I know what needs to be done. I’m not waiting for more or better info. I just haven’t done it.
but I'll post it later.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sure, leaving things until late can be a reason the job done is done poorly, and that should be addressed. However the the starting point should to evaluate the outcome and then if the outcome is poor figure out why - there are lots of poor outcomes that are not the result of leaving things until later, and focusing just on procrastination may have little or no bearing on the quality of the outcome.
Anyhow - I hear the author of the Psychology Today article promoting her book in a radio interview a few months ago and it seemed like an interesting observation - namely that procrastination gets a whole lot of negative attention, sort of like being lefthanded once did, and that it is not generally helpful and may in fact be harmful.
You have a point.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
but I'll post it later.
Good point. That was one of the things mentioned by the author in a radio interview - the way we joke about procrastination, and equate it with moral failings.
I'd like to think my distractibility is an inherited trait from caveman days. While everyone else in the hunting party would be focused on deciding which wooly whatzis to go after, I would have been the only one who noticed the bushes off to the side rustling because there was a saber-tooth whatever preparing to attack the hunting party.
Obligatory "Oh look, a squirrel".
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I'm a perfectionist. As an example, in high school during wood shop, we were supposed to make a sanding block - a simple rectangular piece of wood within a certain size range. I cut down my block of wood to size on the band saw. I then measured it and noticed the edges weren't exactly perpendicular. So I cut it again. I noticed that cut wasn't exactly perpendicular either, so I cut it again. I repeated this until I'd fallen below the minimum size specified for the block. And I had to get a new block of wood and start over again.
Same thing happens if I start a project early. I finish it, then go back and tweak it. Then tweak it some more. Over and over until the deadline prevents me from tweaking it further. The subsequent tweaks add very little to the completed work (or as in the case of the sanding block, make it worse). It's just my OCD perfectionism making me waste time trying to make it better. (e.g. I've hit Preview about a dozen times composing and editing this post.)
Procrastination is a self-defense mechanism. I artificially reduce the amount of time I have to complete a project, to a little more time than I estimate it will take, That prevents my perfectionist urges from wasting time by over-tweaking. When it comes to tasks which can't be tweaked (e.g. buying plane tickets, making reservations, etc), I don't procrastinate. And in fact I usually do those tasks long before other people (non-procrastinators) typically get around to doing them. And I get annoyed that they won't hurry up andt tell me if that date works for them so I can go ahead and place the reservation.
No, it isn't. I'll tell you a secret: your emotions are just a reaction to your own thinking. The way to blast through procrastination is just to start something regardless of how you feel. Your emotions are largely irrelevant. This isn't a 'study', it's a glorified doctor's note to justify adult millennial underachievement now that the childhood excuses have dried up. Grow up, kids, it's the only way you'll ever excel, and ultimately the only way you'll ever be happy.
I procrastinate. A lot. And, yeah, part of it is simply the adrenaline rush from knowing something HAS to be done NOW or else. It helps to make a mundane task interesting.
But there's a very real probabilistic side to this for me as well. There is a non-trivial portion of my tasks that will simply go away if I wait long enough. Requirements or situations will change and suddenly that big "thing" that needed to be done by next week that I could have started 4 weeks ago just isn't relevant any more. If we want to take a camping trip, for example, and I'm supposed to make a big menu and buy a bunch of food...I'm going to wait until the last possible minute to start that because 20-30% of the time, that trip ends up getting canceled due to "other stuff" like weather or changes in other scheduled items...whatever.
I'm buying back TIME by procrastinating. Not only the time I would have wasted working early on that "thing" nobody needs any more but also in the time it takes me to do that "thing". If I have a looming deadline that borders on being impossible to meet, then I have to work REALLY hard and fast on it to get it done. If I start 4 weeks early, I'm almost certainly going to be working at a slower pace and, as such, I'll limit just how many of those "things" I can even get done over time.
Most of it is about avoiding emotions. Some people have far worse emotions in this domain and this is what causes their problems. Sometimes those emotions are easily resolved by a decent therapist and sometimes not.
A lot of clever people procrastinate because they were very good at it in school. They could do it all at the last minute and still get a decent mark. But there are several reasons that habit comes unstuck later in life:
1. Challenges are often harder.
2. Teams get irate.
3. There are more distractions in life eg smartphones.
4. Sometimes there are no deadlines.
Some people are afraid of success. Others doubt success means anything a la existentialism.
Sometimes it's about how our minds (de-) motivate us eg obsessing about the discomfort instead of the rewards.
Particularly when someone has all these problems, or when someone tries to start their own business, lack of motivation can be a serious disability.
I'm writing a book on this. If you have any questions or comments, I'll be happy to answer/read them.
That is how I came up with the dishwasher idea.
I one of them. There's a lot of us out here...
That's just good business sense. It's straight out of Lean Manufacturing / Software Development. Put off decisions that are irreversible or difficult to change until the last possible moment in order to ensure that you have the best information.
At the same time, treating everything that way is foolhardy. There are some things you should spend a good deal of time thinking about or mulling over, but there's plenty of rote tasks that benefit in no way from being delayed. You're never going to really want to do the dishes, so you may as well get it done with. Getting those simple tasks out of the way ensures that you'll have plenty of time later to tackle the problems that need to be put off for a time in order to be given their due amount of thought.
It would benefit us all if you submitted your posts sooner though. Laziness and clarity are not enemies!
Absofuckingloutely correct.
Exactly this. Throwing yourself at a problem unprepared usually is a recipe for a bad solution.
-- Cheers!
This just isn't the same thing. Some people rush in. Some people deliberate carefully. Both have the value. But procrastination that they are talking about in this article is something different. Whether approach/approach approach/avoidance, or avoidance/avoidance, the paralyzing anxiety that robs some of us our ability to act comes with terrible consequences. Yes, sometimes we can get things done at the last minute. But sometimes that last minute comes a little too late. I think it is great that there is study behind the biological causes beyond just general psychology. Because giving this a biological background that supports common wisdom gives hope for a solution beyond general anxiety meds.
Don't forget learned helplessness. One of the life lessons many of us learn in school or at home as kids is that no matter what you do everything will be awful and no matter what you do there is nothing you can do to avoid it. Often times the adults around us teach us this directly, "just ignore it". You can't change your situation so "just ignore it". Constant harrassment, "just avoid it". Dad beats you for the dishes, "just try to do better and hide in your room when he gets like this."
I've been a huge procrastinator all my life. It was never because I didn't have time to do something -- it was because I didn't want to do whatever the task in question was.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The Dishwasher is too complicated and hard to implement. That's why I invented the double sink, thus solving the problem forever. Forever!
That is THE method and the way we are designed to operate.
Acting first and asking questions later can be found under the dictionary definition for "Mistake".
Thanks for the perspective. I'll include it in my book somehow. Still in planning stage, won't be out for years.
That's background processing, which has been known since the late 1800s. It wasn't an issue then, since the slower pace of society meant there was plenty of opportunity for a thoughtful pause. Alas, a society which values doing chores limits the opportunity for relaxation. It's why, now that chores require less time, people are still busy.
Most times, procrastination is aversive motivation (See aversion therapy) for people with high hedonism needs (eg. children). In adulthood, the hedonism continues and/or the learned response remains.
It isn't complicated, stupid code monkey.
Finally got around to the first post.
the vile screed "a message to Garcia" Elbert Hubbard, 1899
https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/pdf/hubbard1899.pdf
Yes. Sometimes, inaction turns out to be the BEST course of action. Not everything is as important as it first seems. Sometimes, thinking about it--procrastinating--can make this clear.
Sometimes, procrastination is the best thing to do. Many tasks seem important at the time, but procrastination might make it clear that the task really didn't need to be done in the first place. This is healthy.
Unhealthy procrastination--waiting to do things that REALLY need to be done promptly--this is a problem.
Our tendency to procrastinate sometimes saves us from doing unnecessary work.
The Coursera course 'Learning How To Learn' also makes this same point... with the added tip to tackle the most difficult problems first before the easy ones, before backing off the problem at the point where it gets frustrating and moving on - leaving the subconscious to trundle on with that problem. If you want a good short summary, Reddit comes through: https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMo...
Sometimes the best approach is just to start - not with a solid goal of 'finish x' for example, but a less scary goal, like 'spend 25 straight minutes identifying all the tasks needed to complete x'. Helped me!
However the the starting point should to evaluate the outcome and then if the outcome is poor figure out why...
I suppose part of what I wanted to point out was, it's not just an issue of "poor outcomes". You could be really smart and talented, and still squeak by with a "good outcome" by throwing something together at the last minute. Still, it might be that if you'd given yourself enough time, you could have brought about an outstanding outcome.
And I wouldn't argue that we always need the most outstanding outcome possible, but I think there's an argument to be made that you shouldn't just muddle your way through life, doing the bare minimum to accomplish acceptable outcomes.
On a side note, as someone who used to be a habitual procrastinator, I've also found that it's typically less stressful to just get it done early. If you're only going to spend half your available time on a project, make it the first half. Then you can relax afterward without worry.
procrastination gets a whole lot of negative attention, sort of like being lefthanded once did, and that it is not generally helpful and may in fact be harmful.
I don't really buy the logic there. Just because two things get similarly negative attention doesn't make them the same sort of thing. I agree that we have unfortunate misunderstandings about procrastination, but I'm not sure I'd say it's the same sort of thing as being left-handed.
"And I wouldn't argue that we always need the most outstanding outcome possible, but I think there's an argument to be made that you shouldn't just muddle your way through life, doing the bare minimum to accomplish acceptable outcomes."
Why not? Isn't that a moral argument?
I'm being a bit extreme, but I think it is important to examine the underlying assumptions when making judgements about others.
Fred is a happy person, and feels he has a fulfilling life. Fred does the bare minimum to accomplish acceptable outcomes. Why should we as a society piss on Fred for not achieving more? Sure - incentivize "excellence", but implying that Fred has a "problem" when in fact it is the rest of us who have the "problem" (one of perspective) I think is a bit of a stretch. Give Fred a break.
Why not? Isn't that a moral argument?
Possibly. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "moral argument".
But what... are we forbidden from even entertaining moral arguments? And on what authority are you deciding that? Perhaps you should examine your underlying assumptions when making judgements about other people's arguments.
Please note that I said, "I think there's an argument to be made" and not "I'm about to tell you something absolutely unquestionably true." There's an argument to be made (really a few different arguments) that we should strive toward excellence. There's an argument to be made in favor of putting out the least effort to avoid trouble. There's even an argument that could be made for not doing anything at all, and just starving to death, but not one that I'd like much.
I'm presenting a worthwhile alternate view, not laying down gospel.