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[THREAD] I have talked about this in a past thread but I want to speak about it again given how much it is prevalent right now. That is procastination. About one third of messages I get are related to that topic and the panic that stems from it. So let’s take a deeper dive.
Procrastinating is often seen as an epic sign of laziness and an unwillingness to do the work we are supposed to do. However, it has nothing to do with laziness. It is a direct link to our psychological health. When I spoke about anxiety, I mentioned that one of the first issues
that arise when we start to experience are a lack of concentration, attention span, and memory. This is because anxiety takes so much mental energy that it competes directly with the higher brain functions like those mentioned above. Since the brain prioritizes the anxiety, we
are often left wondering where our ability to study, work or memorize went. It seems that overnight, we go from being smart, well adjusted, hardworking individuals, to not being to memorize or concentrate on anything. It is deeply unsettling and cuts our motivation to tackle
our work. This is where procastination sets in. If we have frustrations with our work over and over, and it takes us longer to be able to finish it, helplessness will start to set in and we are less likely to be motivated to finish it unless we absolutely have to.
The good news is that those faculties come back once we solve the underlying anxiety and other mental health problems. It is not going to stick along forever. However, that’s easier said than done without professional help and/or medications. If you find yourself constantly
procastinating, that’s usually a sign that something might be wrong with your mental health. So how do we tackle this? Well as I mentioned above, it is time to go to therapy if you experience that constantly. Another thing that can be done is to take things slowly. Since we can’t
rely on our usual faculties for a while, we need to revisit the way we do things. We can’t spend hours studying or working efficiently like we did before. It is important to start with small goals that are easily accomplished and move to harder ones. It is important to take very
frequent breaks to avoid frustration from setting in, even if that means taking breaks every 10 minutes. We need to go easy on ourselves. It is not our fault that we are struggling with our psych health. Accepting that we need help and need to take care of ourselves can go
a long way in stopping to beat ourselves up because of a situation that we can’t control. This is why we need to add procastination to our vocab in clinical psychology and move away from the perception that is a sign of laziness.
