My name is Missy, and I Procrastinate.

Gasp, shock and awe!

I knew this was going to happen, it always does. As of writing this opening paragraph, I have no idea why I do this. I will start a project, and unless it’s simple enough to finish within a few hours, I’ll quit, and I typically won’t “find the time” to pick it back up. Am I really that busy? Why can’t I seem to finish what I start, or keep a routine, or remember to take my medicine every single morning? Is there something wrong with me? I even let this blog sit here over the winter, unused and stagnating. Let’s take to the internet and see if we can treat this illness.

So first, let us make the distinction between a real procrastinator, and a fake one. A fake procrastinator would say something like this: “I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I’m such a procrastinator!”  While a real procrastinator wouldn’t, because for him, there is no option — “it’s something they don’t know how to not do.” (I even got distracted looking at and reading about the distractions of another author. Gorillas, lions, and tigers, oh my!) [1]

Procrastination at its root is a form of resistance which is a form of fear. So we can say that procrastination is really just a symptom of a larger disease. Several fears that cause procrastination are the fear of failure, the fear of unknown, the fear of uncomfortable, and the fear of doing things the wrong way. The most common, and the one that I know I fall prey to, is fearing failure. I have considered myself to be a screw-up for most of my young life. And why not? I never finish things, I always mess things up, I’m always forgetful, and I never ever get anything right. Right? [2]

This fear can be defeated in three small steps, as long as great conscious effort is made. Identify the fear, run small tests to disprove the fear, and beat it with information and proof that it’s wrong. To run a small “test”, to prove that these things are false, choose an unknown skill. For me, I chose to try spinning poi, and I bought colorful tube socks at the-big-blue-box-store and stuffed the ends with yarn balls. Then I found some nice music, (even though I let myself take half an hour to choose something) and I tried some basic poi moves. It was hard at first, but every once in a while I would do something right and it would feel fantastic! (I quit over the winter, but plan to try again this spring when nice weather gets here.) Positive reinforcement here is your friend, so find something you think you may enjoy doing, and try bite-sized versions to prove to your fear that you CAN do it. Using this information, this data, over time can help you ground out groundless, irrational fears.

But what if the fear won’t move aside very easily? In my case, my fears are so formless, irrational, and habitual, that even knowing so doesn’t seem to cause much of a dent in my procrastinating behaviors. This is a phobia. Phobias aren’t always the overly caricatured emotions of ‘fainting at the sight of spiders’ or ‘becoming sick at the thought of being in crowded places’, even though this does happen. Some phobias are quiet and unnoticed little parasites. Your life is changed, altered to avoid the stimulus, diverted away from the thing that causes you anxiety. Avoidance, resistance, procrastination. Now we’re getting somewhere! [4]

And I know that my fear is a phobia because I’ve had mild anxiety attacks when met with certain failure. At least once that I can remember, two of my bosses came up to me at work, in the middle of my shift, and handed me a write-up sheet to sign. I don’t even remember what for now. Once my mind realized what was going on, my lungs began to stop operating normally and my heart pounded in my ears. I couldn’t think straight, and told them to go away and not say anything else about it until after my shift was over. They weren’t very happy about it but by that point I was beginning to cry. Puzzled, they waited until after the shift to ask me why I had freaked out. I’m sure they didn’t believe me.

This phobia has a name. Atychiphobia. This sentence from the Wikipedia page for this phobia sums up how this fear is most often contracted, and also, ironically, how it can inevitably be treated. “When a developing brain is raised in a home where approval or the feeling of being loved is linked to performance it becomes difficult to separate the two. Such a person comes to believe that such feelings must be earned, and that they can be withdrawn if failure occurs.” Therefore, the person develops a habitual tendency to only love themselves when they succeed, and to hate themselves when they fail. This is a cyclical disease that can only be reversed when love is applied to the equation. [5]

Do this for yourself, you, me, whoever you are. Apply some love.

1) http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html

2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/giuliana-cortese/the-root-of-procrastinati_b_5910548.html

3) http://zenhabits.net/procrastination-fears/

4) http://www.calmclinic.com/phobia

5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atychiphobia#cite_ref-Bauers_1-0