End Procrastination
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Written by: stevengriggs11
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Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 |
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End Procrastination
While it is not a debilitating syndrome; that is, a diagnosis found in mental health journals as a separate problem, procrastination is still a pain, psychologically. It can create mild symptoms or some that are chronic, even debilitating. Regardless, procrastination is something that can be cured.
Procrastination is really a form of ambivalence. This is not widely documented. Ambivalence is when part of you wants something and part of your doesn't want that something. It doesn't have to be two things that directly disagree. One of the "somethings" can be related to the other, just not the same, requiring a choice that is, at least partially, mutually exclusive. Ambivalence can be in conscious, partially in awareness or totally out of awareness. This isn't really so central to this discussion, because the subjective experience of it is discomfort. The experience of procrastination actually creates anxiety, but it is of the kind that is not usually allied with disorder of anxiety, proper.
Procrastination occurs when these problems occur in our lives and we don't want to deal with them. For example, I'm interested in fooling around with my wife but my son needs help with a project. I'll think about the former but want to do the later. The choices are about two things that are relatively bad bedfellows and sooner or later, I have to consider the choices. I have to single out one. Either one I pick will have a penalty, and I know one of them will have nasty consequences.
I usually pick the more amiable, self-serving behavior, which certainly means I'm putting off choosing the "other." This looks to be procrastinating, because I'm not doing something, but in reality I'm working around a conflict. I am ambivalent, experiencing some level of nervousness and trying tippy toe past the whole thing.
As was discussed above, the things we procrastinate about can be immense or insignificant, in or out of awareness, and be abrupt or longer in time frame. Those are just the specifics, but the intrapersonal experience of fighting ambivalence is the same in each situation. We usually opt for the more immediate behavior in the service of either avoiding the conflict; that is, making it withdraw from our awareness, or to just avoid the less pleasant of the two choices.
This latter dynamic is often a function of our impetuosity. As can be seen, this quality has many ways of making itself known, some of which are helpful, like when we procrastinate in order to dig for more information before performing some action on something. Some dynamics are harmful, like when we stop paying attention to that knock in the enging.
In order to solve procrastination, we have to grasp the ambivalence. We have to "pull up" into awareness, the fullramificationsof our choices. But for the vast majority of us, to do that means we also have to do a little digging. You see, ambivalence doesn't just occupy one and only one space in our heads. There are reasons we avoid certain things, other than they may or may not be more tiring to do than something else. Sometimes it's about not wanting to express a opinion or feeling, such as sadness. If someone asks you to do something and you feel disgruntled, it is doubtful you will go along with their request. So, you don't, ostensibly, which is about not dealing with your internal state, expressing yourself and later fixing ambivalence. The superficial behavior then looks like procrastinating, when in fact, its just about avoiding conflict (which is probably at the heart of ambivalence in most cases).
For more information about Procrastination, visit the author's website.
-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page192.html
The author is a clinical psychologist in private practice for twenty-six years. For more information about this and other articles and ebooks by this author, start with: http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com. For more information about the author, go to:
http://www.drgriggs.org
Source: End Procrastination
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