psychology of procrastination podcast

In the Hardcore Self-Help Podcast, psychologist Robert Duff discusses what its like to live with and effectively treat mental health conditions. And they showed the data suggesting that their program worked and they showed the mean scores on this measure of chronic procrastination at the beginning of them coming to the clinic and at the end so they could say, Oh look, there's some improvement. And I remember standing there with a colleague of mine and we both were looking at the scores on this measure of procrastination at time one, and the level of procrastination that they found troubling was well below the average national mean for the procrastination in the U.S. and Canada, but this was troubling in Germany. Advancing psychology to benefit society and improve lives. Kim I. CURT NICKISCH: For me personally, the idea of a pre-mortem and testing your assumptions is kind of attractive because I expect that could help a lot with things that always seem to take longer than you thought they were going to. She explains the different causes of procrastination and shares three approaches to beat it: through habits, emotions, and thought patterns. Starting with thinking of different ways to approach it is probably the most important one for me. Mills: So a moment ago you mentioned the couch and the screen, being able to get away from those things, and I'm wondering whether does the ubiquity of social media and electronic devices have an impact on procrastination or have procrastinators always been able to find excuses to put things off? One of the findings I really like is about ambivalent emotions. So thats obviously a huge problem, right? There was actually a really interesting study that I just read in the last few days that said that doing mindfulness meditation reduces peoples feelings of guilt, but it also causes them to be less willing to do reparative behaviors. For many of us, its a hard habit to break. ALICE BOYES: Yeah, so its quite complicated. So even though I dont like providing tech help, I like the idea that I will compensate for her weaknesses and she will compensate for mine, and that well support each other through that. According to some psychologists, the answer is not that people are lazy or have poor time management skills. Impostor Syndrome involves feeling like you're not the person people think you areas if youre deceiving everyone. And there's multiple layers of doing this. Some people find it easier to do things for other people than themselves. So lots of forms of problem solving benefit from an incubation period where you take a pause between when you hear the problem and when you start working on it. But should we take that to mean, if there's any truth to these lists at all, that women procrastinate less than men? Im Curt Nickisch. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. She is a social, health and personality psychologist who is broadly interested in how self-regulationhow we manage our thoughts, emotions and behaviorsaffect our health and wellbeing. Sirois is the author of Procrastination: What It Is, Why Its a Problem, and What You Can Do About It, published by APA Books in July 2022. Produced by the American Psychological Association, these podcasts will help listeners apply the science of psychology to their everyday lives. So you've chosen to delay and there's no really good reason to. They have career issues, health issues, they're not fulfilling their dreams, they're not reaching their goals. Our guest today offers three strategic paths to beat procrastination in a comprehensive way. How does this play out interpersonally? Knowing what the strengths of people are or knowing how to discover them from conversation. Why we procrastinate and what to do about it, with Fuschia Sirois, PhD, Procrastination: What It Is, Why Its a Problem, and What You Can Do About It. People with Imposter Syndrome believe if someone knew the real them, they would never receive the same level of trust or responsibility. In her 30+-year career in communications, Mills has extensive media experience, including being interviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other top-tier print media. You said, I'm going to do that. Sirois: So yeah, I mean there's a lot of myths out there about why people procrastinate and the common wisdom out there is that, oh, teach somebody to manage their time better and they'll stop procrastinating, or give them better self-control or tell them they're lazy and crack the whip and get them going and that'll reduce it. And when were on alert more, thats often what sparks creativity. I'm really thrilled to be here. / 3 Strategies for Dealing with Procrastination. Tackle the high-willpower tasks earlier in the day. On a level, thats useful. Your four chunks might be: (1) write out your feedback, (2) schedule the conversation, (3) deliver the feedback, and (4) schedule a follow-up conversation. But what we actually know about people who are healthy, happy, and productive is that they dont go around spending a lot of time trying to reduce their emotions. What are you working on now? Guilt is a useful emotion because it causes us to want to repair things. Adding your daily task unlocks deep insights about your psychology. How does procrastination affect people's lives and their mental and physical health? It can become tired, temporarily, after extensive use. Fuschia Sirois, PhD, of Durham University, talks about why procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not one of laziness or poor time management skills; how it can harm our mental and physical health; why its so tied up with guilt and shame; and how self-compassion can help us overcome it. Once we accept it, we can often find the courage to change our patterns. Rooted in psychology, our personalized lessons help you develop strategies to overcome procrastination. Where can you place it? So when you learn that actually strong emotions and tense emotions, diverse emotions are incredibly healthy, you can just fear them a lot less and have a more open attitude toward them. Mills: So what are some strategies or techniques to combat procrastination and just get things done, and how does thinking of it as an emotion regulation problem change how we approach the situation? ALICE BOYES: Yeah. That's Germany. So anxiety is both the strength and a weakness for me in that Im good at foreseeing problems. Get a pour-over, trendy coffee, plan a reward for when you complete the task, figure out what makes you want to follow through, and do it. Then maybe a quick walk to clear your head. If you live and breathe video games, Procrastination Podcast has you covered. What's the difference between procrastinating and simply deferring something for another time? But we can easily say it's all to do with mood management," Sirois says. Can you feel a good emotion from that? My podcast guest this week, Dr. Jackson Brammer, says he used to be an expert procrastinator. And this sort of fits in with an area of research that's called affective forecasting, which basically says that as human beings, we're not very good at predicting our future emotional states. Sometimes its just making sure you dont make that cognitive error, or catching the cognitive error when youre making it, as recognizing that its almost like theres an inverse correlation there between how awkward and yucky things feel. Procrastination thrives in secrecy and isolation. Sometimes its a much deeper seated thing than that. So some of my students have looked at getting people to answers and questionnaires at one time point, and then following up with them and getting them to fill in with grids based on 30-minute or 15-minute segments of the day. So my strategy and my system is kind of tailored to that. In the show you'll learn about the physiological origins of procrastination - the inner brake pedal and gas pedal - and what to do to escape the two . They dont think, Oh, I need to reduce all these negative emotions or theyre going to cause me to go off track with my goals. They associate strong emotions with propelling them to their goals, not with them taking them away from their goals. You'll gain practical knowledge you can put into action right away. And I'll mention one final thing too. And I guess here we're talking about chronic procrastination as opposed to procrastinating from time to time. He approaches the platform of Instagram through his strengths and his posts get like 40-50,000 likes each post. And we all know that it helps to identify emotions. Hidden Brain helps curious people understand the world-- and themselves. There really is so much that goes on with it psychologically. "Everyone procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator," quoth Dr. Joe Ferrari, a charming, hilarious expert on the subject. And I think it makes sense though too, because if you are really driven and your whole sense of self-worth is focused on how well you do this task and you're so worried about that task, that's enough, that fear of failing, that fear of it not being good enough or not pleasing others can be enough to put you off ever even starting it. Im not advocating anyone adopt my system. But really just the more you learn about emotions, the more your psychological knowledge is, the easier this it is to work around all this and not be scared of negative emotions. He answers difficult questions about anxiety, depression, relationships, OCD, PTSD, eating disorders and more, breaking things down so they're easier for the average person to understand. Sirois: Myself as well. And again, estimates there range between 15% to 25%, which is still quite a few people who are really engaging in procrastination as a fairly regular way of dealing with tasks that they don't want to deal with. If you want a behavior to require less self control, then make it a consistent habit. Thats episode 295. Recognizing this link led to the revelation that fighting procrastination might help him stop feeling like he didnt deserve to be in his position. Its why people have workout playlists. Willpower is like a muscle. You actually can't because if we look at the definition, it's got to be something they intended to do. And it sounds counterintuitive because collectively we like to think about productivity and just crack the whip and get going. And I think it has to do with deadlines and how flexible those are. I just want to ask if perfectionism and procrastination are linked and are perfectionists more or less likely to procrastinate? Heres the quick breakdown of how you can look at your thinking patterns when you decide to procrastinate: Recognize when you have the emotion about the task you want to delay. Their self-worth is contingent upon whether they live up to some sort of idealized standard that they think society or their friends or their family expect of them. Boyes wrote the book Stress-Free Productivityand the HBR article How to Stop Procrastinating.. And any strategy that you can use, whether it targets behavior or emotions or thoughts is probably going to work no matter what you see the primary root of it as being, because those things are so interlinked. So sort of drilling down into understanding better that emotional side. Sometimes its just theres so much opportunity, we want to be doing all of these things and we sort of bite off more than we can chew in terms of the energy and focus that weve got. In this way, youre setting yourself up for positive reinforcement, instead of the negative thoughts that usually accompany procrastination. And so we label our downtime as procrastination. Then, merely focus on starting the tasks, not completing them. And one of the researchers there, she mentioned that especially in the workplace in Peru, it's like people procrastinate quite regularly because they see their managers and their bosses procrastinating so it sets the standard and everyone thinks it's okay.

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