Procrastination and MD - similarities, and how to train against it

[Kalliope]

I found the term MD and this forum by stumbling upon it on a social site forum about discipline, looking for a way out of ongoing procrastination, on a third tier comment. Quite a few posts on this forum are about procrastination. On both sites, and on many more press articles, the main thing I read about procrastination is good advice. Surprisingly however, many state: Stop with the excuses! Just Do It!, cultivate your discipline! Do what you LOVE! - But what if we actually love what we procrastinate on? Important projects, that are our desire and passion? Do we not love what we think we love, need to reconsider?

MD shares a lot of traits with procrastination: The fear involved, drawing back from the objects of fear (the surrounding reality, or the next project); the soothing mechanism involved (being cherished by MD characters, scrolling through cat videos); the trigger for the fear coming again and again, not being able to circumvent it no matter what (reality/social.., school/work..); and, procrastination more specifically than MD, a flash of adrenaline peaked by a frenzy of working with a brilliant satisfaction of having finished the project just within deadline. Only here the two diverge, as MD incorporates more emotions such as belonging, enjoyment, retribution and so on. (Work after) procrastination in the meantime is an incredible singular adrenaline kick.

Therefore, I do not think, like in MD (and obesity, amongst others), it helps to say: just quit it! That might be more detrimental, as it pushes the belief of failure, of weakness. However, that is not so. MD has specific reasons to exist, performs a valuable service, and needs to be tackled at its emotional roots to disappear. Likewise, procrastination performs the service of lessening fear and pressure, and its current roots need to be tackled.

Overall, procrastination is a habit and an addiction.

It is a habit that self-replicates because first you have chill-time; it is an addiction, because after, you have action-adrenaline-time with an instant reward when you send off your finished project. It's like an action movie about your work, not a boring arthouse movie about how you're working a bit every day. I think breaking out of this adrenaline-dopamine cycle of procrastination involves several parts.

First, it is addictive like any kind of adrenaline-action-movie involving real life is addictive. You crave the boost that the late-schedule-work is giving you, like you drank too much coffee and are hyper-focused. It's fun. You're in flow, and you feel awesome for working so much.

Second, it is a habit. Your subconscious knows exactly how much time you need for this crap and calculates it with the deadline. And it knows which deadlines it can ignore... The trigger for this habit is the moment you consider "I should do this project now" and, then, the effect of the  habit is "... Nah, I'll do this other thing for now".

Third, a lot of it is anxiety, perfectionism. Fear of judgement. This might be the most difficult to tackle of all, as it shares its roots with MD.

Fourth, it is influenced by the chill-period before the work, because we accumulate too much dopamine through social media, browsing, games, writing forum posts (ha)... this is what makes us jump from one entertainment to the next. How much this contributes in comparison to the above, I'm unsure.

The first step is getting rid of the habit. Find the moment right after the trigger ("I should do this now") and do work for two minutes, and then put the work back down, having done enough, because you're working on breaking the habit here, and that is the hardest work. Doing this consistently for a few weeks, then slowly ramping up the time, but consistency is key. Read up on Atomic Habits by J Clear, and https://youtu.be/4x7MkLDGnu8 .

The next step will be probably how to eject the adrenaline rush from the late-schedule work, how to stop craving "being good under pressure" and similar nice things to tell yourself. This is also a big hurdle in procrastination, because it is so rewarding and approved by society.

[Valeria Franco]

Procrastination!

Procrastination is pretty stupid, as things just get worse while you wait, but it's so hard to quit it.

I had many issues in my life because of my procrastination.
I just didn't feel like facing problems and turned away, dreaming.

When I got back to reality, things were just worst.

Maybe we need to let others control us. Maybe we could write on this forum whenever we want to commit ourselves to do something, and stick to it.

What do you think?