procrastination is not a problem of self-time management, nor a moral problem, but a psychological problem. In addition, it is also affected by some physiological factors (such as attention deficit disorder, executive dysfunction, etc.). Therefore, it is not enough to solve the delay and only participate in the training of time management; You don't have to put a heavy moral cross on yourself or others because of procrastination. What you have to do is, under the guidance of this book, find the root cause and then prescribe the right medicine.
The authors of this book, Jane B. Burka and Lenora M.Yuen, have made a detailed and serious exploration of procrastination based on their personal experience. In this book, the author explains procrastination for us from the aspects of behavior, psychology and physiology.
Studies have shown that intelligence has nothing to do with procrastination, so you should not think that procrastination is a sign of low IQ, while people with high IQ will not think about procrastination. In fact, everyone has the experience of putting off something that can't be avoided in the end, which seems to be a universal human weakness.
People often don't know how to recognize the real procrastination. Sometimes we don't procrastinate, but we just postpone something because of lack of energy. Procrastination makes some people miserable, while others live safely and think that procrastination is not a big problem. So one of the ways to find out whether procrastination has become your problem is to see if it bothers you or not. Procrastination has caused great mental torture to some people, ranging from anger and regret to strong self-condemnation and despair. Procrastination can even affect your work, study, family and interpersonal relationships.
When procrastinating patients start a new task, there will be a series of thoughts, emotions and behavior fluctuations that affect them, and their performance shows a lot of * * *, which is called "procrastination cycle". The process is roughly as follows: "I want to start early this time." -"I have to start at once." What if I don't start? -"There is still time." -"There is something wrong with me." The final choice-"I will never delay again!" . For procrastinators, such a process is devastating, so many people will make up their minds not to step into the cycle of procrastination, and even swear to start early, control their emotions, and complete the task as planned, but the procrastinator is likely to step into this cycle when the next task starts.
Psychoanalysis (Freudian) school believes that personal problems stem from internal spiritual conflicts, which are mostly related to early experiences and hidden in the subconscious. Procrastination may begin with your childhood experience, and it is also a defense mechanism for your self-protection.
cognitive behavior theory holds that maladaptive behaviors and emotions originate from maladaptive cognition. Therefore, procrastinators procrastinate because they have their own beliefs.
These beliefs manipulate our behavior through the subconscious. If you think that things must be perfect, that success is dangerous, and that cooperation is a kind of submission, you will always put things off until you feel ready to do it. You want to have absolute control over things. Under the great pressure of social competition, everyone is eager for success, and this is the reason for procrastination. Procrastinators are afraid that their actions will get them into trouble, and even want to delay so that others can't see their fragile side clearly.
Many procrastinators are afraid of being judged by others or being judged by themselves, and they are afraid that they are not doing well enough with their best efforts. This fear of failure has led some people to develop procrastination. There are two types of perfectionists, one is adaptive and the other is maladaptive. Many procrastinators are the latter. They have high demands on themselves, but they don't trust themselves. When their demands on themselves contradict their performance, they are more likely to blame themselves and feel depressed, so they are often in a state of low self-esteem. Perfectionism procrastinators often expect too much of themselves, are unrealistic, and are unwilling to face their own failures.
In fact, when people face failure, they usually have two different mentality, fixed mentality and growth mentality. Fixed mentality thinks that intelligence and talent are innate, success is to prove individual ability, and effort is the embodiment of lack of ability and intelligence, so people with such mentality can't accept failure; The growth mentality holds that the ability is constantly growing and developing, and through hard work, individuals can improve themselves and become better. This mentality can make individuals gain more self-identity. Therefore, when you find yourself caught in the psychological vortex of perfectionism, you might as well stop, remind yourself, change your concept and mentality, and then move on.
Everyone has his own definition of success. Some people define success as "following the goal in time", which means that whenever we are doing what we want to do, we will feel successful. Procrastinators often fail to follow their goals in time, so they often let themselves fall into a state of depression and disappointment.
Fear of success is often hidden deeper. Success means change, but change often brings inexplicable fear, because we often assume some nonexistent risks for the unknown. This is the nature of human beings to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages, but when you realize this, those fears become a paper tiger that can be broken with a poke. Why don't you try?
it is very important for everyone to have a sense of control over their own lives, but we should also understand that in this world, we still need to abide by rules that are not made by us and adapt to the needs of others. Those who have a strong sense of control may resist anyone's demands on them. Procrastination becomes a reflective response to their sense of control, and they use procrastination to gain their sense of control.
This process is involuntary, because it is related to your experiences buried in the subconscious. Once you are aware, you need to alert yourself whether this impulse to resist is aimed at being really controlled, or whether the child who has not grown up just wants to be willful and make up for the lack of self-control in that year. If it is the latter, please tell TA gently: Dear, don't be afraid, there is no one here but yourself.
By recalling your childhood experiences, you may understand why many procrastinators regard others as controlling opponents. Many procrastinators grow up in a living environment that does not encourage independent exploration. In childhood, they were strictly controlled, and their personal habits were severely interfered. Constant criticism made them lose confidence, and too many restrictions suppressed their spontaneity and creativity. Gradually, when they grew up, when they tried to be independent, they showed themselves with an uncontrollable procrastination.
Procrastinators often use actions to declare: "I am an independent person, I will act according to my own choices, and there is no need to do things according to other people's requirements".
sense of self-worth = ability (independence, opposition to being controlled) = performance (I have the final say through procrastination)
Procrastination here is not only for the sense of control, but also for one's own sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Perhaps it is because of such a strong motivation that many procrastinators are so stubbornly unwilling to change.
Procrastination can protect a person from being judged by others, and it can also protect yourself from fighting with others, and even adjust the relationship with others. Maintaining a comfortable social distance with others is very important for a person's psychological security. However, the psychological comfort zone varies from person to person. Being too close or too distant from others will make people feel uncomfortable. People will try to adjust and pull themselves back to the psychological comfort zone, and procrastination has become a strategy for some people to maintain their psychological balance.
The ancient Greeks believed that time had two aspects: clock time and immersion time. Clock time is objective time, which is measured by clocks and calendars. Objective time can be predicted but cannot be changed. In addition, everyone has their own unique feelings about time, that is, subjective time. When we are immersed in our favorite things, we feel that time flies, such as the passing holidays and happy dating time. A variant of subjective time is "event time", which refers to the individual's sense of time around the occurrence and development of an event.
For procrastinators, their subjective time and objective time are often in serious conflict, and they sometimes don't want to realize that there is a huge difference between their time concept and clock time, so it often happens to them to catch up with the task deadline. The subjective feeling of time is also an indispensable part of our sense of self-identity. Everyone has a unique concept of time, and different sense of time will bring crisis to our interpersonal relationship.
In fact, our unique feeling of time is influenced by biological factors, family environment and cultural factors. The "clock gene" of human body controls the biological rhythm of our daily life. Refusing to accept objective time and trying to deal with problems according to your own sense of time and way will inevitably lead to delays in doing what needs to be done, because procrastination gives you a sense of omniscience and omnipotence in mastering time, others and reality. But no matter how hard you struggle, you can't get rid of the objective rules of clock time.
zimbardo, a famous social psychologist, suggested that people perceive time by referring to different coordinates based on the past, present and future. If the sense of time is unbalanced, it will bring trouble to our lives. Some people like to set things in the far future, so it will give people a sense of unreality, but it will make the set goals seem less important; On the contrary, some short-term goals will make people feel that time is very tight. People tend to be eager to do what they are doing now instead of what is important for the future, which behavioral economists and social psychologists call future discounts.
The past, the present and the future are intertwined and affect each other. We need to realize that everything we experience happens in the present moment. Your present state will affect your memories of the past and your prospects for the future, and what happened in the past will also affect the decisions you make now. Some people's procrastination may be due to their past breaking into the current environment. For example, people are hesitant when making decisions, which is probably influenced by past experience. The growth environment and interpersonal relationship in the past will affect your present and even future behavior. Procrastination is like a signal to look back on the past, but no matter what you have experienced in the past, these life events have already happened. What you have to do is to think about the present and the future from the lessons of the past. For individuals, we need to recognize and accept subjective and objective time, learn to live in peace with time, and have the ability to naturally transition and transform between the two.
① The brain is constantly changing
People's brain is a dynamic system, which is constantly changing and correcting. The brain has a reorganization ability, which we call "neuroplasticity". The brain can break old neural connections and establish new ones. External stimuli (such as our life experiences) can stimulate the growth of our neurons, and by stimulating the transmission of neurotransmitters, some neurons will continue to grow and become more compact in connection.
② Unconscious feelings
Some brain regions control our emotions. Sometimes you can clearly realize why some things trigger your emotions at that time, but there are also many emotions that happen outside our consciousness. Primitive stimuli make the brain retain the feelings caused by stimuli. If procrastinators want to overcome procrastination, they must endure some uncomfortable feelings, such as fear and anxiety.
③ The influence of latent memories
What we are afraid of is things that have already happened. These latent memories or early memories were buried in our brains before we were three years old, but the hippocampus responsible for memory storage was not fully developed at that time. So we may not remember these latent memories clearly, but the traces left by the early years are often unconsciously activated. Fear, shame, guilt and self-blame are all products of past memories. Whether you remember what triggered your emotions or not, you can only try to exert your rational thinking ability and take positive actions to change these emotions.
④ The path of connection
When you procrastinate on something that you don't know how to handle or is uncomfortable, your latent memory will stimulate your strong emotional response, and at the same time you are involved in a struggle about how to look at yourself: Are you capable? Can you have your own ideas? Studies have shown that low self-esteem is also a major cause of procrastination, and how you look at yourself and how you handle your relationship with others has set a tone in infancy. The connection with your parents in infancy will affect your later behavior. Children who are neglected or scolded by their parents for no reason in infancy are more likely to show self-confidence and procrastinate when they grow up.
⑤ Left reversal
The left frontal lobe of the brain is related to our sympathy, care and other emotions, while the brain area in charge of some negative emotions is mainly located in the right hemisphere of our brain. Being friendly to yourself will activate the corresponding brain regions of the brain, thus improving the individual's sense of stress resistance and putting himself in a healthy emotional state. In addition, some hormones in the body, such as oxytocin, help people adjust their social relations and emotional dependence on others, so touching (such as massage) or stimulating certain foods (such as chocolate) to increase oxytocin secretion can keep individuals in good condition.
The four main factors that people procrastinate are: ① lack of confidence in the ability needed for success. (2) There is aversion to completing a certain task: I believe that I will encounter many difficulties in the process of doing things, and the outcome will be miserable. The goal and reward are too far away to feel what it means to me. (4) unable to self-discipline, such as impulsive and distracted.
① executive dysfunction
executive function refers to a series of advanced cognitive abilities that individuals can effectively control their thinking and behavior, just as the executive of an enterprise controls the operation of the whole enterprise. Its main components include attention control, cognitive flexibility, goal setting and information processing. These elements can be subdivided into the following functions: starting tasks, maintaining attention, suppressing impulses (thinking before action, not acting immediately), shifting attention (flexibly shifting focus), process memory (remembering plans, instructions and previously learned knowledge), emotional control, material organization, self-monitoring, time management, and planning (thinking about problems in order and making plans).
② Attention deficit disorder
The three core symptoms of attention deficit disorder (ADD) are distraction, impulsiveness and restlessness. We often say that ADHD is a kind of attention deficit disorder, and these behaviors are related to individual genes, biological factors and external environmental stimuli. People with attention deficit disorder have problems with their inhibition function, they often can't concentrate on one thing, and their sense of time is different from that of normal people, which are the reasons for their procrastination. At this time, I