You can’t avoid stress—it occurs in every facet of your life. Any major change, such as the birth of a child, taking on new responsibilities, or retirement, can disrupt your equilibrium. Stress is a general term that can be more specifically defined as being frazzled, pressured, nervous, anxious, worried, strained, or tense. Stress is a by-product of your perception of situations and of believing you are short on resources to emotionally cope with a situation. The three-pronged cognitive, emotive, and behavioral approach directly applies to addressing stress and to reducing your use of it as a catalyst for procrastination.
What happens to your body when you feel stressed? Your brain engages your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which involuntarily releases the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. When the challenge passes, the body returns to balance (allostasis). However, with excessive stress, your hormones no longer protect the body, but instead rip away at it. Persistent stress is costly to your health. Stress elevates your blood sugar, eventually putting you at risk for type 2 diabetes. When persistent stress routinely disrupts your sleep, this limits your body’s ability to restore itself, compromising your immune system; poor sleep patterns can occur and lead to depression.
If you become helpless when coping with stressors, you begin to feel as if you are living in an emotional war zone. Poor coping skills add to an elevated allostatic load. By using cognitive behavioral stress management methods, you can reduce cortisol from chronic fatigue, generalized anxiety, and other stress conditions.
One of the most common forms of stress is workplace stress, which may have as much to do with adversity as with change. Job satisfaction is declining, with 49 percent of people surveyed indicating that they are less satisfied with their jobs. However, while job satisfaction is desirable, work is for pay and rarely for play. But job stress may have more significant implications than job satisfaction.
You won’t find much scientific literature on the connection between procrastination, job stress, job burnout, and low job satisfaction. Does that mean that stress and procrastination are unrelated in the workplace?
If you fear confrontation, you are likely to put off addressing a discussion where you expect disagreement. If you feel uncomfortable about a work function, you are likely to experience an urge to diverge. Does blame avoidance procrastination disappear when you have a choice between taking a risk and playing it safe? Are you likely to put off decisions?
Your positive work reflections can promote feelings of well-being that can spread to your leisure time. Your off-hours reflections on the positive aspects of your work can lead to proactive work effort. However, when work is stressful, dealing with stress effectively can give you something positive to think about regarding your coping competencies. I’ll walk you through some paces on dealing with job stress procrastination. However, since stress crisscrosses practically every avenue of life, what you learn here has broader implications for leading a life where you feel more in command of yourself and of the controllable events that take place around you,
Working in an environment where layoffs are taking place can feel stressful. However, not everyone is affected in the same way, and you may roll with the punches of life in some situations better than in others. That doesn’t mean that stress conditions won’t affect how you think, how you feel, and what you do. However, comparatively, you are less affected.
You may be challenged to develop inner freedom under persistently stressful conditions, such as working with difficult coworkers and supervisors, where you are difficult with yourself, and where you find work balance inequities. However, these conditions can be like a fan blowing cold air in your direction. You can turn the fan away from you, and it continues to blow. The wind may blow, and you need not amplify your stress or procrastinate because that happens.
You are surrounded by a cast of difficult characters, both at work and in other areas of your life—often, you’ll find that your relationships with these people slow your ability to meet your goals or do your job. You have names for each. You call one Joe the Deflector. Whatever goes wrong gets deflected back to you. The fabulous faker looks busy, busy, busy, but you are the one who has to pick up the slack following this faffing procrastination. Old tried and true has a familiar mantra: it was good enough for grandfather and it’s good enough for him. One-upmanship waits for opportunities to make you look bad. The complainer draws you in with horror stories about not getting a corner office and having an assigned parking space at a distance from the entryway.
You may get drawn into other people’s procrastination intrigues, but you don’t have to slip on this slope. Can you cause others to stop diversionary activities so that you don’t get diverted from your functions? You might be persuasive and make some gains in that way. However, the person that you have the best chance of controlling is yourself, and imperfectly so. But accepting and letting go of a need to control uncontrollable situations can lead to stress reduction, even under the most adverse work conditions.
Can you accomplish this emotional muscle building under the most extreme stress conditions? Imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl learned from the ancient Stoic philosophers that he had the freedom to choose his inner thoughts. From the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he learned that by having a why for living, you can bear almost any how. His why was surviving for his family. If you are engaged with difficult coworkers, family members, or friends, is it possible for you to find purpose and meaning that can help you strip away any added stress you may experience?
In most ongoing adverse situations, I find that people give themselves double trouble. The first is stress from the adversity, and the second is often worse: a fear of the feeling of stress that can amplify the tension. The concept of acceptance that we discussed earlier can have a calming effect: the situation is what it is, stress is what it is, now let me see what I can do to create a more favorable external and internal environment to lessen the stresses.
In many work environments, time is lost due to internal politics, intrigues, and acts of antagonistic cooperation. Lamenting these events and distracting yourself by focusing on them is analogous to getting hit by a bus driver and blaming the driver and cursing the situation. Here is an alternative view about this form of stress: Is it better to curse the driver or rehabilitate yourself so you are no longer afflicted? In the next chapter, I’ll describe approaches for taking charge of yourself under adverse conditions where procrastination is especially risky.
Seven Steps to Freeing Yourself from Stress-Related Procrastination
The following seven-step process maps a way to control what you do and advance while others engage in procrastination activities:
1. Identify a clear purpose, a goal, and an organized approach to achieve that goal. You’ve set a leadership direction for yourself that can translate into conscientious, productive actions.
2. An effective person who can pull together a voluntary group for a common cause sets the tone by getting up front, taking responsibility, and displaying intelligence and capability.
3. Keep focused on your prime objective, act with a strategic mind, make an effort to look for and act on opportunities that will pass unobserved by most, and ask what’s missing from the picture.
4. In fluidly changing circumstances, give structure and definition to emerging processes. Keep on top of new developments. Act to take advantage of changing information. Coordinate your resources.
5. The collective intelligence of a group is a rich information resource. Encourage communication. Listen. Judge which people you can count on. However, reserve the final decision for yourself when you have this discretion.
6. In activities where you are in charge, reserve the final decision as your prerogative. Rendering reasoned judgments to gain ground is important.
7. Push distractions aside as quickly as possible. There isn’t time for them. Timing, pacing, and maintaining momentum are normally of greater importance.
Most people amplify their own stress problems. You can have a great employer, supportive coworkers, and challenging responsibilities that are comfortably within your capabilities. Still, you carry your work home and fret over what went wrong and what could go wrong tomorrow.
Negative thinking about your goals can affect the quality of your efforts. Connie, a procrastination workshop participant, complained that everyone at her office hated her. That was why she dragged her feet. I asked her how many people worked in her department. She said, 29. I asked for their first names. I then went down the list and asked her to tell me how she knew that each person hated her. This is what it boiled down to: she had sound evidence that a clique of three disliked her. She regularly socialized with six coworkers. The others showed some cordiality. The question is: if everyone hates you, how do you explain the exceptions? Once Connie got past her misperception, she began to act cooperatively, and she reported feeling better about her work. When she started thinking less about imaginary problems, Connie reported that she procrastinated less. There are numerous potential stressors around you. If establishing control decreases stress, can you establish inner control and direction to survive falling into procrastination traps?
Procrastination increases with worry, anxiety, and depression. These complex procrastination catalysts are common.
As you may recall from Chapter 1, complex procrastination is a combination of procrastination plus a coexisting condition, such as anxiety, self-doubt, or low tension tolerance. Complex procrastination delays include delaying the task and putting off dealing with the complex co-occurring condition that contributes to procrastination. Let’s suppose that you want to convey unpleasant information to a coworker about how the person’s delays are impeding a project. You delay because you have a confrontation anxiety. You believe that if you assert your interests, this will lead to an unpleasant verbal encounter that you tell yourself you’ll lose. By ending procrastination caused by your confrontation anxiety, you may persuade the coworker to follow through in a timely way. Thus, you have a double gain.
A procrastination habit that co-occurs with self-doubts is a common situation. Here, procrastination can be both a symptom and a cause. You put off a timely and relevant activity. You experience an ongoing nagging anxiety about the incomplete task. You continue to think that you can’t cope with the complexity of the activity. This adds to your uncertainty about performing effectively. This self-doubt is a double jeopardy. It can both trigger procrastination and result from procrastination.
A self-doubt state of mind rarely occurs without other co-occurring conditions that also lead to procrastination. Self-doubts, perfectionism, fear of disapproval, fear of failure, and fear of tension are part of the procrastination evaluative style cluster where you have multiple coexisting problem conditions, but one evaluation theme and some branch issues to address.
Let’s take a look at an evaluation procrastination cluster, shown in Table 4.1. I’ll briefly describe what distinguishes each aspect and give a conceptual direction to overcome procrastination.
When you boil down related cluster conditions into a core theme, you may find complex clusters less imposing. As you engage in productive activities to progress on those activities and cut back on evaluative anxieties, you can shorten your learning curve for addressing and overcoming this form of complex procrastination.
When you modulate, you adjust a tone or volume to change a signal. Let’s look at the language of commitment and challenge as procrastination modulators. Then, we’ll look at proactive coping to boost your do-it-now signals to promote productive outcomes.
TABLE 4.1
Evaluation Procrastination Cluster
American diplomat and scientist Ben Franklin advised committing only to what you are willing to do, then doing it. A commitment is a pledge or a promise to yourself or to someone else that you’ll follow through on a responsibility now or at a future time. You may have competing commitments, such as saving for a new home, having the money to enjoy life, and investing for retirement. Such competing commitments suggest that one thing or another is going to get put off.
You may commit to losing weight, improving the quality of your work products, and ending procrastination practices. However, without a plan and an intention, this is like a promissory note with no due date. If you delay, you’re on the slippery procrastination slope.
If you choose to stay off the slippery slope, before you voluntarily make a commitment, ask yourself: What am I doing this for? (It’s easy to skip this step.) A few more preliminary questions are in order: What do you want to accomplish? What is required? What resources do you need? How long do you expect the process to take? What are the constraints? Now you may be ready to commit to an action of your choice.
A phrase as simple as “I will do this” is a commitment. The stronger your sense of intent, the more likely it is that you’ll follow through. However, you’re not off the procrastination slope until you start acting with purpose and intent.
Organizations that live up to their commitments to produce high-quality products and deliver better-than-average customer service are likely to keep their customers and add to their customer base. View yourself as your own best customer. What service do you believe you deserve from yourself?
Psychologist James Blascovich found that if you believe you have the resources to meet or exceed the demands of a situation, you will feel challenged. In a challenge state, you are likely to feel excited about meeting the challenge and overcoming the obstacles. This positive challenge stress promotes cardiac efficiency and mental agility.
Perceptions of threat have the opposite effect. If you believe that you don’t have what it takes to meet a challenge, you are likely to feel threatened. Threat decreases your efficiency and mental agility. This state of mind also increases your chances of procrastinating.
Threat perceptions are part of a process of coming to a conclusion about whether it’s worth taking the initiative to follow through. However, perceptions are often filtered through beliefs. Threat stresses commonly arise from irrational worries, resentments, and negative thoughts, such as, “I don’t have what it takes.” “I’ll be embarrassed.” “I’ll look like a fool.” This language of threat portends a psychic danger, and this danger is a red-carpet invitation to procrastination.
A shift from threat to challenge language can pull the red carpet out from under procrastination. The language of challenge involves using action terms to structure a positive process of moving from procrastination threat thinking to challenge thinking and follow-up actions. When you use challenge language, you give yourself directions for taking specific concrete steps toward constructive goals. This is a conscious assertion and direction, as you see in the following example:
This is my goal or opportunity: _____________________________.
This is what I’m prepared to do: ____________________________.
This is when I’ll start: _____________________________________.
This is how I’ll benefit: ____________________________________.
This is how I’ll persist: ____________________________________.
Challenge language thinking has nothing to do with inspirational statements, such as, “You can do it. You’ll succeed.” If platitudes and slogans were effective, we’d all use them, and there would be no procrastination.
When you proactively cope, you prepare yourself to meet challenges before they occur. This proactive approach helps prevent last-minute procrastination rushes and can promote a low-stress and high-productivity approach to meeting work challenges.
Is proactive coping a new idea? Hardly. It’s been part of the organizational lexicon for generations. However, the label and the process invite research initiatives. The preliminary results are encouraging. This forward-looking approach to managing goals (challenge outlook) appears to be effective in promoting positive results and less stress. Positive striving through taking proactive steps appears to be associated with a sense of well-being.
When you proactively cope, you appraise the situation using the information you have available. To fill gaps, you research key points. You figure out what you can accomplish. This self-regulatory format is used for addressing challenges before they become stressful.
You are scheduled for a problem-solving meeting on how to maintain ongoing performance review records and increase their accuracy and value. You’re nervous about the meeting. Your usual procrastination decision is to think that you’ll get to this planning stage later. Then you let time run until immediately before the meeting and rush to finish.
Keeping on top of performance review information is appealing. You don’t relish the thought of a flurry of last-minute effort to get performance reviews done, using the last two weeks or so for a reference. Facing subordinates with incomplete information is an added strain. So, how do you proactively cope under such circumstances?
Your proactive coping goal for the meeting is to act proactively. You’ll take a look at the issue and prepare a position. You’ll research the area and distill your findings into a position. You may not precisely know your position before you start. That is the purpose of proactively doing the research.
END PROCRASTINATION NOW! TIP
Four Steps to Proactive Coping
Step 1: Accept ambiguity and uncertainty as normal for upcoming situations. You help yourself reduce fears of uncertainty through exercising your proactive coping resources. You won’t see the complete picture until you engage the challenge; the more knowledge you develop, the more gaps you can discover. That is typically better than relying on an illusion that the future will be better without your making any effort today.
Step 2: Think about potential stumbling blocks that can predictably get in the way, such as stress thinking. Plan to proactively cope with this and other expected impediments in advance of their occurrence.
Step 3: Prepare and gather information to create a plan that you can modify with new information. As you actively engage in this constructive process, you can build momentum for other preparatory steps further down the line.
Step 4: Actively work to develop a time perspective for proactive coping, or the process may get caught up in the same time vortex as other delayed activities. A commitment about when you’ll start and what you’ll do first can start the process in motion and make the difference. Apply challenge language about how, when, and where you’ll proactively cope.
When you arrive at the meeting, you are unlikely to have all the answers. The purpose of the meeting is to flesh out the issues and come to reasoned conclusions. However, when you are prepared, you are likely to see the meeting as a challenge. You don’t feel the usual stress and strain where you hope to go unnoticed in the meeting.
Low frustration tolerance is a strong aversion for tension that can lead to discomfort dodging and procrastination. This sensitivity to unpleasant sensations gets worse when it is magnified by self-talk, such as, “The task is too tough, and I can’t stand doing it.” These tension-amplifying thoughts are a slippery slope to procrastination practices. Questions such as what makes the task too tough and why you can’t stand what you don’t like can expose the false evaluative dimension of this thinking.
Building high frustration tolerance is a significant life challenge. If you don’t fear or avoid tension, you are likely to feel that you are in command of yourself and of the controllable events that take place around you. Paradoxically, you are also less likely to experience amplified tensions when you don’t fear them. With high frustration tolerance, you are likely to take on more challenges and experience more accomplishment and satisfaction from the actions that you undertake. Building and using counter-procrastination skills helps decrease tension fears as you boost your self-efficacy skills.
Tension avoidance through procrastination practically always involves an evaluation. Exaggerated evaluations about discomfort tend to lead to discomfort dodging. The evaluations that lead to discomfort dodging tend to interact with self-doubts and increase vulnerability to procrastination. If you reduce either your self-doubts or your intolerance for tension, you’ve acted to reduce both conditions along with weakening a co-occurring procrastination habit.
Frustration-tolerance training can be counted among the most powerful ways to reduce both stress and procrastination that is associated with stress and that sets conditions for added stress. Here are three broad directions:
1. Build your body to buffer pressures from multiple ongoing frustrations. Ongoing stress increases the risk of disease, fatigue, and mood disorders, and so building your body has an added value in reducing these risks. Build this buffer through regular exercise; a healthy diet; maintaining a reasonable weight for your gender, height, and age; and getting adequate sleep.
2. Liberate your mind from ongoing stress thinking. This includes dealing with pessimistic and perfectionist thinking as well as low-frustration-tolerance self-talk, such as telling yourself something like, “I can’t take this; I have to have relief right now.”
3. Change patterns that you associate with needless frustration, such as holding back on going after what you want, avoiding contention at all costs, and inhibiting yourself from engaging in the normal pursuits of happiness and from actions to curb procrastination.
(For more information on frustration-tolerance development, I’ve provided a free e-book. To access the book, visit http://www.rebtnetwork.org/library/How_to_Conquer_Your_Frustrations.pdf.)
Since stress is inevitable, why not accept this reality and figure out how to make stress work for you? The Yerkes-Dodson curve shows the proven relationship between arousal and performance that you can use to put threat and challenge into a visual perspective while adding an undermotivated dimension (see Figure 4.1).
The slope at the extreme left of the curve shows low arousal and motivation. The slope at the extreme right shows the effects of negative thinking. The region between the two dots in the middle shows an optimal range of arousal. However, some productive activities involve different levels of arousal. Answering a phone and finishing a Masters in Business Administration degree take different levels of arousal. However, the curve is quite okay as an awareness tool for putting arousal into perspective.
If you have a low arousal level for a high-priority activity, your challenge is to either push yourself to start and finish or find an incentive. Pushing yourself is a form of arousal. A possible motivating incentive is to get an unwanted task off your back.
If your mind is filled with threat stress thoughts, you’ll probably have trouble solving a complex problem. When tension is at the extreme, it can be so distracting and disorganizing that you seem to have little time and energy to do anything else. The challenge is to “take a breather,” such as a walk around the block. Plan to shift to a self-observant perspective, perhaps by recording and organizing what is going on using the ABCDE problem-solving format. This organization initiative actively sets the stage for engaging the problem with a clearer, calmer, mind and a directed sense of purpose.
FIGURE 4.1
The Yerkes-Dodson Curve
The POWER Plan
Proactively cope with upcoming challenges by setting a design for achievement.
Outline a commitment and challenge thinking approach to support proactive coping.
Work to execute a coping program to operate productively and reduce stress.
Evaluate your progress and not yourself.
Repeat this proactive challenge and commitment thinking approach until it feels natural.
The curve serves as a reminder of the benefits of challenge arousal and that this arousal is healthy. Indeed, much learning and remembering is motivated by adaptive forms of tension.
Breaking the procrastination habit takes work, and this is best done by working at what you put off. There is another dimension to this: when procrastination is a symptom of distressing thinking, the most direct line to freedom is to follow through without diversion; evaluate this thinking using Socrates’, Frankl’s, and Ellis’s prescriptions. If these ways aren’t successful, try another.
You can learn to buffer yourself against stress conditions that coexist with procrastination conditions such as anxiety, catastrophizing, and feeling overwhelmed. What will work best for you?
What three ideas have you had that you can use to help yourself deal with procrastination behaviors effectively? Write them down.
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What is your action plan? What are the three top actions you can take to promote purposeful and productive outcomes? Write them down.
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What implementation actions did you take? Write them down.
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What three things did you learn from applying the ideas and the action plan, and how can you next use this information? Write them down.
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