what is procrastination

If you are a procrastinator—or if you think you might have a more or less severe issue with procrastination—here’s a great video that will provide you with an elegant and creative solution to your self-defeating habit of putting things off. Enjoy the presentation!

If anxiety and anger can easily lead us to procrastinate, the same thing can also be said about guilt—an unenjoyable emotion that shares many features with anxiety. Let’s explore together how guilt can lead us to put off till tomorrow what we would better do today.

When we claim that a person should not have behaved as he/she did—a thought that necessarily causes us to be angry—it is worth reminding ourselves that this person behaved as he/she did as a consequence of the thoughts that arose in his/her mind and over which he/she didn’t have much control—at least, not at the precise moment when these thoughts popped up in his/her mind.

Among the emotions that can lead us to procrastinate, you will most probably be surprised to see me include hostility or anger. There are basically two reasons why I do this.

When we believe that we absolutely need the love and approval of some people to be happy, we tend to postpone indefinitely actions that seem likely—at least, in our opinion—to bring about the disapproval and rejection of these people.

When we give way to procrastination, it may be that we are afraid of the pain that the mere fact of taking action would entail for us. As a matter of fact, while an effort is always at least a little painful, inertia is not. So, not only may the task at hand seem laborious, tedious, and painful to us, but when we procrastinate about it, we avoid at least temporarily the pain of spending our energy to accomplish it.

If we want to get rid of our self-defeating habit of putting things off, we will necessarily have to change the emotions that lead us to procrastinate. And the way for us to achieve that is by changing the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that cause us to feel these same emotions.

The events of our lives—whether past, present, or future—will never cause us the shadow of an emotion. This blog post aims to explore a second argument in favor of such an affirmation.

Where do our emotions come from—particularly the ones that make us act or, on the contrary, lead us to put off till tomorrow what we’d better do today?

Procrastination is all about emotions. In fact, it is because we feel this or that emotion that not only do we put off till tomorrow what we can do today, but also that we can no longer decide ourselves.