On finding a cure to procrastination II
Maybe it's not procrastination, have I been living a lie?
Foreword: this is a therapy session on paper. I should really not share this on the internet, but I am committed to being honest what can I say?
As mentioned in part I, to find a cure for procrastination you need to find its roots. This led me to the infamous Google search “What causes procrastination?” and the world wide web delivered, as it usually does. Reader, in the spirit of honesty, I need to divulge that the events I am describing happened three years ago. I was in Cambridge, living in a cramped bedroom, surrounded by my books and trying to find out “what the hell is wrong with me”. Good times.
I dug into my journal from that era to find out what my past self figured out about procrastination and found a list of procrastination triggers:
Perfectionism and fear of failure
Low energy
Feeling overwhelmed
Difficult and/or boring work
Feeling distracted, not being able to focus
To put it in a nutshell: procrastination could be a self-sabotage mechanism. Personally, I like to ruin the potential I have (allegedly) by not giving it a try. This allows me to protect my ego by never failing at the things I really really want. It’s quite a brilliant system really. Until I need it to stop. I am re-writing this whole paper for the 5th time, my mind keeps wandering and the struggle to focus is real.
I’m procrastinating as if I was getting paid (which I am not as long as this newsletter is free). But what if it isn’t procrastination at all? When it comes to postponing things, I see three possibilities: laziness, procrastination or executive dysfunction.
Laziness implies being unwilling to do work (or anything else) and not caring about it, while procrastination is purposefully putting off doing things and it may cause anxiety (depending on how important said thing is), lastly, executive dysfunction is a behavioural symptom that affects one’s ability to regulate their actions or emotions. Put simply: whether you’re willing or not to do something, you cannot do it and it causes anxiety because it needs to be done.
Well well well. If it isn’t me being wrong about everything again. Is there a cure for procrastination when it is not procrastination? Because believe me, I WANT to write, even to work or do all the things I keep not doing. I wish I could say the cause of it all is a late ADHD diagnostic but the 6 to 9 months waiting list forces me to pick other options, this article needs to be written now. A new piece of information came my way while writing this article (yes I did do some research and not half-assed it).
After three years of wondering if I did in fact have ADHD (and two therapists “strongly” recommending me to get assessed), it came to my attention that executive dysfunction can be caused by an injury to the frontal lobe. Hmmm. Much like Obelix falling in the magic potion as a child, I did indeed fall on my head when I was a baby (pointing fingers). I will not be going into details because of my obvious lack of a medical degree, but this opens many thoughts with the additional benefit of removing all the blame from myself.
God I am, in fact, full of potential. What a day.
Afterword: I did not study medicine nor psychology. I am strictly describing a personal experience. Without a “proper” diagnostic it is complicated to characterised myself as neurodivergent or neurotypical.