The Mental Birthplace of Procrastination

Using Psychology To Stop Procrastinating is an eBook dedicated to the issue of understanding and resolving procrastination with the help of psychology. Here's an excerpt from it which showcases who the mind of a young human individual discovers this phenomena and what is the mental and emotional context in which it is usually created.

Imagine: you are a child once again. Using the magic of the written word, you have been transported far back in time to a period when you were only starting school. Imagine yourself, aged 7 or 8, lying in the bed, sleeping. The alarm clock rings, and you hit the snooze button. You are awake but drowsy and not too inclined on getting up. On the other hand, the pull of sleep is so strong that it is almost magnetic, like a hidden force of gravity that keeps you down.

Copyright: Monica H.

Even worse, your mind, nearly awake, is also on board with this idea. It tells you that keeping your eyes open is hard and that the room is cold and painfully bright while the bed is soft and warm. On those occasions, it seemed that getting up was almost physically painful, like a strenuous motion which is not suitable for a regular human being.

At the same time, your strength of will apparently vanished, leaving you all alone in that comfortable bed. Simply put, every fiber in your body seemed to petition you to continue sleeping. In that situation, it was so easy to cave into those urges, shut your eyes and immediately return to a sweet dream. But then, an adult would have most likely barge in, pull your blanket away and tell you to get up right now. At that moment, the final plea was probably made as the last desperate act.

“Just five more minutes!”

Sometimes, you got your five minutes, possibly even 10. But you still needed to get up and go to school, now with the added benefit of having to rush because you were running late. While you did this, you probably thought to yourself how you gained nothing from those extra five minutes and how you should have just gotten up and went about your day. You may be telling yourself that you will never again do this to you. But then, just a few days later, the alarm rang, and the bed felt so nice and comfy.

“Come on! Just two more minutes, please!”

Here, at this very moment, your young mind was exposed to the idea of procrastination. Here, you realized that not doing things now allows you to attain a bit of instant satisfaction, which was a concept ideally suited for your mental posture. There will be consequences, possibly, to the same satisfaction, but these will come later on if they ever come at all. You most likely did not analyze sleeping in a bit longer using these notions, but when the calculation was made inside of your mind, you realized that getting those five more minutes sounds like a great idea.

Now, you are grown up, but a very similar mechanism is still active in your consciousness. In fact, we all have an inclination towards this behavior, but it is not prominent in all of us in equal measure. Some keep it in check; others live lifestyles where postponing things does not generate issues for them. But, for everyone, procrastination is based on a very similar mechanism...

To find additional information about this psychological phenomenon, get this eBook on procrastination.