Kill Procrastination: Habits to Improve Productivity

By Phyllis Nichols

Kill Procrastination is a concise guide that will take you from understanding why it so hard to get rid of procrastination to how to ESCAPE its claws for good! It will be a fun but challenging journey. Kill procrastination and take your place as the leader of your life today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phyllis Nichols
• Release date: May 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218958558

Book preview

Chapter 1: Psychology of Procrastination

Let’s start by understanding what procrastination really is. If we are going to slay this monster, we will need to know its strengths and also find weaknesses to explore. This battle is mainly in the psychological field making it slightly difficult because the mind is tough to understand and work around. But not for you; we are going to map out how procrastination works and moves in your psych and strategize how to slay it after that.

In this chapter, we will review the evolutionary roots of procrastination and look at how it works both biologically and psychologically. This is the first step in the battle, studying the enemy. Now let’s get into some prep work and sharpen our swords.

The Neuroscience of Procrastination

Procrastination has a hideout in your brain’s limbic system. When the limbic system wins, which is often, the result is putting off for tomorrow what could be done today—which offers temporary relief from that unpleasant feeling of needing and, for whatever reason, not wanting to do something. (Spencer, 2023, para. 2) The limbic system is very influential to your decision-making process, and while it has some benefits, some of it will throw you off your productivity journey.

The limbic system regulates emotions—among other things—and part of that interacts with your reward system. Not doing anything is a great source of short-term pleasure, but you know its effects in the long term. The feeling of not having to do something you thought you had to do is so rewarding; you can see this almost everywhere in life. When school is canceled, every child is ecstatic; when your boss does not come to work or when they tell you to break off, you are thrilled.

But don’t worry too much. Procrastination might enjoy the support and cover of the limbic system, but you also have an ally, the prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is the master planner, the part of our minds that really makes us different from other animals. Along with helping with the planning, the prefrontal cortex will also help with expressive language, higher function operations, and, most importantly, voluntary movement.

So, your limbic system will try to convince you to rest and not do anything, while your prefrontal cortex will try to show you the benefit of voluntarily acting on the environment around you. This is the primary battle, a reluctant and passive take on the world or unintentional and planned voluntary exploration to create order in your life. This then shows itself in the simple day-to-day tasks that we either take head-on or put off until the last possible moment.

Your neurological system is complex, and it can be hard to see how the battle plays out, but it all comes down to dopamine. Dopamine is a neuromodulator chemical that essentially makes you feel good. Your mind will always default to the option that makes you feel good at the moment rather than in the long run. This gives the limbic system a head start since procrastination will provide you with instant gratification.

However, there is no need to worry. You can rewire your neural pathways to create a circuit that prioritizes happiness in the long run rather than in the short term. Your brain is made up of millions of neural connections, and you can alter these connections to create and develop habits that you can use to overcome procrastination. This will be our wild card in this battle.

Our strategy will be to make sure we maintain a healthy balance with our neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. These are the chemicals that will communicate instructions to your body and also influence decision-making in your mind. By achieving a balance and control of these chemicals, you can transform how your mind works and set a new default that will get you ahead in life.

The Evolutionary Roots of Procrastination

What makes procrastination such a strong and dangerous foe is how elusive it is. It appears to us as some form of laziness, a small lack of motivation that you can overcome when you want to. Unfortunately, procrastination is far more than that; it has its roots in our evolutionary history and is deeply wired in our psyche.

The most likely origins of procrastination probably tie in with our flight or fight circuits. That is seriously archaic. Imagine you are living in trees and caves, constantly hiding from predators and the sheer vileness of the environment. Your mind will wire for survival, and part of that will be rewarding you for staying away from the danger of not going out to explore more than you need to.

This would have allowed you to stay away from danger, but above that, conserve your energy for when you might actually need it. These circuits are not as crucial now, but they are certainly still as strong at times. They are still the circuits that help you to pull your hand from an open flame faster than you can conceptualize the situation and make a decision. They will have you jump when you see a snake before your mind even realizes what it is facing. So we are not trying to switch off the limbic system, but we still need to flash out the dragon hiding within.

The important thing to understand is that these systems were developed in your brain at a time when delaying gratification was not beneficial in any way. If you had food, you had better eat all of it there and then, or else you would lose it all the next day. There was no utility in sacrificing now for the latter, and so your brain learned to reward you for doing the most sensible thing in the present.

But after years of developing ourselves and our environment, these reward systems are not always in our favor. Your desire to conquer the world, grow, and chase what is meaningful does not satiate you in the interim. Instead, it requires you to give up gratification now and loan some of that to the future versions of yourself.

Now you can forgo the expedient for the meaningful, and that is the only way to orient yourself in the modern world