I posted this to answer a question on another group. A guy there was making the statement that you have to be MOTIVATED in order to PROCRASTINATE. Here was his example:
My girlfriend says she can’t get motivated to do her Uni work and I agree with her because it’s the only time I tend to get a cooked dinner…
She thinks she’s procrastinating and on the one hand she is… However, on the other hand she’s not because she’s motivating herself to do something different – anything to avoid the uni work…
In my mind it’s the old Aristotlelian ‘either/or’ thinking rather than a ‘both/and’ POV…
To me they’re one and the same!
Here is my answer:
Yes and no. Think about how the brain works. You can get a reward from doing nothing.
Let me give you an example. You want to talk to a girl, pay a bill or even confront someone who owes you money. At first you have the desire to do all of these things. Then as you get closer to doing them emotions begin to emerge. Could be stress. Could be fear. Could be uncertainty. These begin to construct an emotional wall that gets stronger the closer you get to the thing you need to do. At this point some people use willpower. Some go fire walking to build confidence. Some drink a shot of tequila. Some chant , meditated, take SSRIs, chant affirmations or do whatever they can to force themselves through the emotional barrier. The might even succeed but when they get there their brain are so scrambled that they screw up.
The reason is simple. The higher the emotional charge such as using willpower, the less access you have to the neocortex or creative adaptive part of your brain.
So let’s say you don’t use willpower. You decide instead to bale out and not do the thing you need to do. The brain does a really screwed up thing. It gives you a boost of serotonin. Ironically this charges up the neocortex allow you to become very creative. So you create a great excuse for why you did not do what you needed to do and it feels GREAT!
OK here is where the brain sabotages you. It was designed for survival not paying bills and collecting money. It is this system that generates what we call a denial circuit. Way back when we lived in jungles and danger was everywhere this was a good thing. Those who learned what to avoid lived. Those who did not were dinner.
The brain does even more to sabotage you. Learning it is not good enough. This circuit becomes more and more sensitive over time. Like an alarm system that goes off with when a window is broken. First the window breaks and the alarm goes off. Then the window gets tapped and the alarm goes off. Then just when it is touched. Then just when someone walks by. Soon it needs nothing but the thought of maybe someone walking by. Now you want to approach a girl, pay bills or confront someone but you don’t move at all. YOU PROCRASTINATE. Then y make up a story that is fueled by serotonin and you FEEL GREAT about putting it off.
In your girlfriends case. She knows that she needs to do work. There is a level of emotion attached to doing that work. She decides to avoid the work and her reward is a story she makes up that justifies her decision. The procrastination FEELS GOOD.
As you can see she is not motivated at all. She is avoiding and then rewarded. Then the storyteller kicks in and she does something different. As you can see, what she decides to do is way AFTER she has decided not to study.
So no… she is not motivated not to study. She rationalizes why she isn’t studying.
It is biological not strategic. It is a left over survival mechanism that screws us up when we allow over stimulated emotions to run the decision process.
What happens is this process becomes instantaneous. The alarm is so sensitive that you no longer even realize that it is going off. It just keeps going off sooner and sooner. After a while you never even feel the emotions. You just avoid doing things without even noticing you are doing it. You plan on doing something but just never get around to it.
The real trick to this is how to use this biology to correct the problem. In order to do this you have to change how the brain accesses. Procrastination ties into the primal brain reactions. You have no access to the thinking and planning parts of the brain. The answer is to regain access and reopen that doorway. To do that we have to access a resource experience that lights up that part of the brain. When you access the resources from that experience at the same time you access the emotions that create the problem you tie them together and your brain can now draw upon all of those resources.
The outer thinking part of the brain functions differently that the reactive part of the brain which just… reacts. In the outer part of the brain, frequently called the ‘new’ brain, everything it more interconnected. When that part of the brain is being used it lights up like a Christmas Tree. Every part is connected to every other part. The result is that when you think about figuring out a problem you draw from things you saw, things you figured out in the past, spacial awareness, and more. It is more information based instead of emotion based. It can also be a problem though. Sometimes procrastination also gets stuck on this side of the doorway. We see this when we run into perfectionists that do nothing without making sure they know everything. They like to think about things but rarely do them.
It is only when these 2 parts of the brain work together that people are able to really accomplish things. The reason is simple. The outer thinking brain can plan and theorize. It can solve problems. It can invent amazing things. The inner reactive brain is where movement is generated. When you have movement without little thought your life is a mess. When you have thought without movement you life is also a mess. When you have balance you have though AND movement. That makes you life a whole lot better than one or the other.
This is where the personal development field makes some very common mistakes. The prevailing thought is that all you have to do is suggest, program or even just practice, a new reaction. A new reaction is better than the old one. It does not solve the problem. Other think that if they just manipulate the emotions that they can drive someone to do a new behavior. Make them feel really good about a new outcome and they will want to do it. make them feel terrible about what they are doing and they will move to the good feeling behavior. Again maybe better but still it does not address the way the problem behavior was generated. Some want you to go into your past and find where it all started… that could take years and even then does not help with the way you brain is working.
Once you change how you think you will be amazed at how you react and interact in the world. You get things done without force and willpower. You just do things and they never turn into major events because they are done. Instead of kicking down walks every day you get to live life without resistance. It is a wonderful way to live.