1-Day Habit

Procrastination – The Emotional Battle

Written by David on June 4, 2010 - 4 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized

This article is all about the emotional side of procrastination and the common causes that create resistance even when you are keen to get up and get on with things. This article is 1500 words long and should take about 5 to 6 minutes to read.

A few weeks ago I carried out a little survey to see what most interested readers of this blog. The topic of procrastination was clearly the big winner, but what surprised me was that other topics were very undervalued, in particular problem solving techniques and high productivity techniques, so I’m going to slap a few wrists!

You can never solve a problem by focusing solely on the problem itself. It is not enough to be against something, you also have to be for the flip side. This is essential. Without a replacement behavior to focus on you will continue with your old behavior. The flip side of procrastination is high productivity and a vital component of that is your collection of problem solving techniques. So study the categories of Productivity and Problem Solving. You will find some very useful help there.

However, one respondent mentioned that a primary frustration was an inability to consistently overcome procrastination without slipping back into old ways, so I think that the deeper issue for most people is the emotional battle that keeps occurring of which procrastination is the end result.

On a fundamental level, you procrastinate because you want to do things that you find too difficult (if not downright impossible) to do at the moment that you desire to have the final result.

This inability generates some level of painful negative emotion, which discourages you and your subconscious immediately responds by seeking out alternative behaviors and actions that can be indulged in immediately that are either less painful or, even better, pleasurable.

To feel good about the thing that you want to do, but which is generating negative emotion, then you have two options. One is to give up on that desire, either for good or to accept postponement until another time. Once you remove that desire from your mind then it ceases to generate negative emotion. The second option is to make the objective both possible and easy to do.

For every desire that you wish to turn from intention into reality there are two main parts: a mental part and a physical part. The mental aspect is required to think through the task so that you break it down into separate parts. Each part should be small enough to do in one session of effort using the physical aspect, which is to use capabilities that you already have.

If you resist immediately take action after you have analyzed, solved and planned things in this way then there may be several causes:

Biting Off More Than You Can Chew: Once you put a desire into your consciousness, an immediate assessments starts as to whether you have fulfilled the desire or not. For a long as the answer is ‘No’ then negative emotions are generated. The pain of negative emotions drives us to take action immediately but if what you want is just not physically possible there and then, then you are sunk. You have created an engine of pain and negativity for yourself. You must plan out the sequence of small tasks that will lead to eventual fulfillment and then focus your consciousness on the first task alone and accept postponement of the full desire until the full process is completed.

Lack of Organization and Preparation: You know what to do and you know how to do it but you resist taking action because you have not organized and prepared the resources that you need to take immediate action. You will often find that you have to make organization and preparation a full and distinct task. Otherwise you will scheme and plan continuously without bridging the practical gap to make the task possible.

Indecision Over What To Do: You don’t take action because you are not sure what to do overall, or else you are not sure how to do something. This indicates that you lack precision in defining the objective. When you specify with great clarity exactly what you want then the way to create that becomes much, much easier to work out. This removes the indecision of not knowing what to do overall. Note: If in doubt then speculate.

Indecision Over How To Do: You don’t take action because you are not sure how to do something. Ultimately, you can only do something in physical reality that you have the motor skills to do with your physical body. You must work out a process for getting what you want that you can personally do. Otherwise it is physically impossible for you to get what you want. Sometimes this requires developing new abilities and so you have to postpone fulfillment of the objective until that is done. Sometimes the best thing to do is to outsource the activity to someone who can do it for you. Note: If in doubt then speculate.

The Result Is Not Desired: Sometimes you have a task that is possible to do but you know that it will lead to a final result that is unwanted, e.g. more work, more pressure, more obligation, make or break failure. This type of resistance requires some deep thought. It could be that you are heading down a path that you are truly not comfortable with. You must think the whole thing through from a long-term strategy point of view and decide whether to give up or whether to build the necessary mental and physical abilities that will allow you to cope with the results of your success.

A Conflicting Belief: You have a desire to get a result but you also have a belief that tells you that you cannot have what you desire. For example you might have a desire to earn a lot of money but you might also have a belief that all people with a lot of money are dirty rotten scoundrels. You have a desire that drives you forward to find ways to get more money and a belief that tells you that if you do this then you will get a result that you don’t want. A belief is just a guess at the mechanism at work between a cause and an effect. The only way to overcome the belief is to test it and seek proof of whether the belief is properly true or not. You can find extensive help to overcome beliefs here, here and here.

Too Much Uncertainty: You might be clear about what you want and how you might do it, but you might still lack certainty over whether it will all work for you. This is especially true when success is dependent upon external elements beyond your control. You can remove uncertainty by making as much of the process controllable by you as possible. Where uncertainty still remains then you can carry out research to see if anyone has done this thing before and made getting desired results systematic with a very high probability of success. Your greatest ally in removing uncertainty is understanding. Through knowing the cause and effect of systems as much as you can you have a much better chance of removing uncertainty and random results and instead create the ability to predict results with a high likelihood of success.

Always remember that it is your desires that potential emotional conflict that results in procrastination. The only way to deal with that conflict successfully is to manage your desires very carefully, especially at the point where you put an idea into your head to do something. If that desire cannot immediately be carried out physically then you will experience a negative emotion.

You can use willpower to consciously force yourself to take action and attempt to solve the mental aspects of problem-solving and organization on the fly but that only works for relatively simple tasks. You must make the task possible to do in both the mental and physical aspects in order to succeed and generate satisfaction. The bigger the goal, the more effort you need on the mental aspects of planning, preparation and organization. The more difficult the goal, by which I mean the more it goes into unknown territory for you, the more effort you need on the mental problem solving and skill building aspects (which often, but not always, requires developing new physical aspects of your capabilities as well).

If you are ambitious and desirous of doing better and better things (which describes the readership of this blog, I think), then get used to living with frustration, only recognize that it’s just a warning sign that you need to either expand your current level of abilities or that you need to think things through better. It does not mean that you are no good or incapable on an absolute level.

If you have enjoyed this article then please join the 1 Day Habit newsletter and receive a free report and a series of free videos that will give you a new insight into how your mind works and how to work in harmony with it so that you can get things done easier, better and faster than ever before.

4 Comments

How to Eliminate Anger

Written by David on June 4, 2010 - 1 Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

: “He who conquers his anger, conquers an enemy.” German proverb

Anger is a volatile emotion that actually creates physiological changes in the brain. A part of the brain called the amygdala swells up and puts us into fight, rather than flight, mode. It’s a primitive survival response. Once this occurs it becomes difficult to exert conscious and rational control over our reactions.

A lot of destructive results can come from anger. It can cause people to say awful things about other people, even loved ones and in the extreme it can lead to physical violence.

The best way to deal with anger is to never let it happen in the first place. It is possible to completely eliminate anger and angry responses from your life. It all comes down to understanding the mechanism that causes anger. Once you understand it, you can change the mechanism, or change the input to the mechanism and get a different output. Through understanding and applying this, things that once caused you to go berserk can end up causing no more reaction other than a raised eyebrow.

The Anger Mechanism

Anger occurs because a desire that you have is not fulfilled. In your mind you have a mental rule where a condition, or set of conditions, must occur or else something ‘wrong’ has happened and the response is anger. Implicit in the rule is an underlying reason for making such a rule in the first place. The rule is then followed by the response to take, should the rule be broken.

For example: A person must never steal from me, because it takes resources from me. If someone steals from me then I feel anger and I fight to get back what’s mine.

Often, you will be unconscious of the specific terms of the rule, as many rules form subconsciously. However, once you question your anger and analyze your responses, you will find that this structure of rule, reason and response always exists.

The depth and intensity of the anger that you feel is directly related to the nature of the desire, how much value you attach to it, the extent by which the rule was violated and the immediacy of the event. Sometimes events occur that are so shocking that they can send you berserk, as this little story demonstrates:

I was in a bar some years ago and had drunk too much. As I was leaving I made a foolish comment and the bouncer in the bar literally jumped upon me and pinned me to the ground and started cursing me and seemed all fired up to give me a beating. I was totally shocked and backtracked and managed to wriggle out of the situation and I left.

Although I got out physically unharmed, I was in a furious rage. For me, a sacrosanct rule that no one must carry out physically violent actions upon me had been violated in a manner that was totally and shockingly overboard as a response to what I had done. I tramped up and down the street and ideas of revenge swept over me. I even went as far as to pick up a brick to hurl through the window. Fortunately I considered the downside and the consequences and the futility of such an action, but I really had to exert massive will power to accept the indignity, drop the brick and move on.

The occurrence or threat of actual physical harm is mercifully very rare for most us. However, many people get angry over relatively trivial issues, for example, if you open the door for someone and they give no word or gesture of thanks or appreciation, that can cause anger, but it’s a minor offense in the grand scheme of things.

Many people also get angry over issues that they simply cannot control. For example, if someone cuts in front of you when you are driving then that is alarming, but you can’t control the other person’s action and it’s an event that is already in the past, so getting angry only harms you.

If you find yourself frequently angry then you can take control and eliminate anger by identifying the rule and the reason that sets up the anger mechanism and change either one of them so that no angry reaction is generated. When you get good at this, you can eliminate all useless, trivial and destructive anger from your life.

How You Can Take Control

The next time that you get angry, try and isolate yourself before responding. Once the amygdala is enlarged it takes at least 30-minutes to calm down and during this period rational control is very hard to exert. Counting slowly from 1 to 10 really is excellent advice, but if you feel like responding by lashing out in some way, either with words or actions, then shout the words out where you can’t be heard, or take out your anger on an inanimate object, or write an angry letter (but whatever you do, don’t send it!).

Once you have calmed down, think about the event that caused you to react emotionally with anger. Identify the specific thing that ‘should have happened’ or that was ‘wrong’ and write it down. Work out the rule that was broken.

Once you have the specific rule written down, consider whether it is a good rule to keep hold of. Good rules to keep are ones that protect you and your loved ones from immediate or long-term serious harm. Bad rules are ones where triggering events are always outside of your control, where other people have no idea what your rule is (so they break them without any awareness of them), where it’s always too late to do anything about it, where the angry response is out of proportion to a trivial cause.

Next think beyond the normal knee-jerk reaction to identify what’s really at stake and what the real reasons for action are. For example, if you open a door for someone and they show no appreciation, then question your reason for helping out in the first place. If you do it because you are naturally generous and helpful and because you get pleasure from it, then realize that when you open the door you are totally congruent with yourself, i.e. you would do it even if you knew in advance that the person would not thank you. If you open doors because you want recognition and gratitude, then you are doing it for the wrong reasons. Those benefits should come as an occasional byproduct of your generous action and not as the purposeful desire.

Rewrite your rule and your reason and your chosen reaction, e.g. I prefer it if people show appreciation for me when I open the door, because it’s polite and it demonstrates reciprocity. However, if it doesn’t happen then I don’t mind, because I have acted in accordance with my good standards and I thus fulfill myself.

In the case of someone cutting in front of you: I prefer it when the people around me drive safely and don’t take alarming risks, because this lowers the risk of accidents. However, it occasionally happens that people make mistakes, so I accept that I can’t control that.

It’s a bit of a chore to go through this process, but it does get to the root cause of the problem and allows you to know and understand exactly what is going on. By changing your rule, by changing your reason or by changing your interpretation of the event that sparked off your anger, you can change the mechanism. When you have no rules, or rules that are incredibly hard to break, the result is no anger.

The Benefits of Eliminating Anger

Every desire that you have becomes another opportunity for reality to disappoint you. When you don’t get what you desire, you feel bad. Every time that you abandon or modify a rule to make it easier to manage you simultaneously make it easier for you to be happier and more cheerful. Remember: The people with fewest rules are happiest.

On top of that, anger leads to damaging responses and if that occurs over trivial issues or things that are impossible to change, then it wreaks unnecessary and avoidable damage. That just creates a catalog of human misery and tragedy. That can be eliminated through understanding the mechanism. It’s really very simple. You have no excuse to let anger wreak havoc and damage in your life.

If you are frequently angry, then you have a lot of work to do here, but after a while you stop responding with anger to events. As soon as a bad result occurs and you feel anger starting to rise, you instead shrug your shoulders, or give a little sigh and say to yourself, “Oh well, that’s my reality. I didn’t get the result that I wanted and I accept that. What’s the best way to respond now?”

This is a nice place to get to. Instead of letting your emotions control you (and anger is one of the worst because of the physiological changes that occur), you manage your desires and hence have mastery over yourself. Instead of responding with damaging verbal or physical violence you bypass that reaction immediately and instead tap straight into your personal resourcefulness, where you think ‘What’s next?’ or ‘How can I get that result that I want?’

1 Comment

Detachment – The Key to a Balanced State of Mind

Written by David on June 4, 2010 - 0 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized

This highly useful attitude involves breaking the mental link to both physical real world objects and also mental interpretations of real world results. By breaking this link through detachment we reduce the chances of experiencing destabilising emotions and we maintain better control of our actions and results.

In order to understand the value of detachment we also need to consider the original value of attachment. In ancient times a person who took care to protect the things he or she had created to aid survival would likely survive longer and equally so a person who protected their offspring would see his or her genes continue into the next generation. Hence attachment to other things and to other people would prove of evolutionary benefit and this trait would continue in the species.

Attachment can give an emotional response that favours protecting assets. By seeking to control circumstances and the environment and by eliminating risks and hazards wherever possible we increase our chances of thriving and surviving. However, a limit to control of circumstances always occurs and further preparations either will not reduce the risk of calamity any further or will prove so costly to implement that the possible unknown future benefits get heavily outweighed by the immediate cost to pay right now.

At this point we need to recognise that we have done the preparation that we can and so have acted as mature and responsible people. To continue to respond with fear of loss only serves to cause emotional distress without any further productive result. Only if we feel the distress and yet do nothing at all to prepare and protect our things and our people should we feel ashamed. We must rationalise on the balance between accepting the element of chance in our lives and taking strenuous efforts to reduce that element wherever possible and deemed worthwhile. If protection efforts require vast expense in resources, or require controlling the will of other people against their wishes or mean that too many other desired benefits must go by the wayside then we will usually choose not to do those things and so have to accept that chance will play its part. We have to accept that reality. At this point we benefit from developing detachment to things and sometimes to people too.

Often the best way to protect something or someone lies in making it stronger so that it can easily withstand the misfortunes of chance. For example, when I have a girlfriend I don’t seek to control her or to bind her to me or to check up on her all of the time. Whilst that might protect my position in the short-term, in the end it either destroys the relationship or creates so much tension so both parties end up miserable and at loggerheads for much of the time. Instead I focus on treating my girlfriend so well that she would never think twice about looking for affection elsewhere. I think that people have an inherent loyalty to other people that treat them well. If we continuously make the experience of spending time with another person fun, enjoyable, relaxed, supportive, caring and involved then we fulfil most of their desires and fire off all the pleasurable emotions. Only if the other person seems bent on destruction, because their own mind cannot let them remain at peace even when the external circumstances go great, does this method fail. If someone else chooses to seek satisfaction elsewhere with other people then I see that as a reflection of their own troubled mind and nothing to do with me. In such a situation I break the relationship off because such a person cannot accept my generosity and to continue only wastes my efforts. I feel good to have found out the untrustworthiness of such a person as soon as possible so that I don’t invest more time into a losing situation. I protect my position initially by making it stronger through pleasurable appeal and not through restrictive force. Beyond that I remain fairly detached because I cannot control the responses of a girlfriend. I accept that other misfortune might cause the relationship to fail. I work at making the relationship fun and fulfilling and relax about the consequences and reactions that I cannot control.

I don’t have children yet but I can bet that I would sometimes feel anguish about what might happen to them, especially when out of my sight and direct care. However, I feel that the purpose of parenthood lies in raising children to become fully functional independent adults. That can only come from teaching them, training them and encouraging them to develop the intrinsic skills and ways of thinking that allow them to solve problems by themselves and to accept that reality will often not meet their desires and that they must take responsibility for doing what any individual can to improve the chances of meeting desires. By continuously taking the easy option of doing things for the children rather than taking the more difficult route to let them do things for themselves and learn we instead create very dependent children who will suffer later from incompetence to handle themselves well. We create protection in the short-term but generate incompetence and lasting dependency in the long-term. When I have children I will remove risks where possible and do what I can to prepare my children for the problems they will encounter. Beyond that I will have to accept that chance will sometimes prevent me from exerting control and so to avoid continuous worry I will develop detachment to the possible results of those uncontrollable events.

Detachment as an Aid to Acceptance

Some events happen despite our preparations and efforts at protection; very often because to give full protection simply doesn’t justify the effort or because in giving full protection we end up cutting-off other pleasures. For example, I used to get upset if some possession of mine got damaged or ruined. I had a need for my things to remain in excellent condition and when this didn’t happen I got annoyed, disappointed and sometimes angry – especially if the damage occurred by someone else’s actions. However, since I really don’t like to feel emotional pain and I really don’t like to feel at the whim of things beyond my control I chose to think differently about my possessions. I decided to think of my things as just material possessions, useful for a while but then generally discarded. Although they had a monetary value I decided that once the money got spent that I wouldn’t care about the value. I focused on the utility of the item and knew that at some point it would stop having value to me as an item of utility at which point I would discard it. I have also developed the habit of very quickly accepting reality so that I immediately deal with the aftermath of an event rather than feeling pain over regret and ‘what might have been’ thoughts. Instead I think about what I could do to prevent such an occurrence from happening again, which I consider the real purpose of regret – to prompt the brain into preparing better next time. We feel pain in order to reinforce the message but we can do nothing to change the real event that triggered the feeling so get over that quickly by accepting it and preventing it happening again.

With these different mental interpretations of possessions I feel quite detached from material possessions so that if something gets damaged or broken I don’t feel any pain from that loss. It served its purpose, perhaps a little shorter than I had hoped, but I simply get on with the reality that I need to replace it, repair it, accept the imperfection or do without it.

Detachment as as Aid to Improved Performance

As an example of feeling detached from a result of a more abstract nature we can look at a sports event. If we play a game or match and we have a lot of attachment to the result of winning then any threat to that will cause us to feel emotional pain and disturbance. This will cloud our thinking and will affect our ability. Instead of thinking about performing with excellence we think more and more about ‘not losing’ and if we focus on incorrect things then we tend to get what we focus on.

Conversely, better performance and results often come with detachment because we stay focused on our personal performance and the challenge and enjoyment of that (things that we mostly control) rather than on the result (something also dependent upon the opponent over whom we do not have much control). By focusing on carrying out every small thing (in this case points or advantages) with excellence and mastery we have more chance of building up the small accumulation of things that leads to the excellent final result. If the final result does not end up in a win then we can at least enjoy the process and we know that at that time we performed to the limit of our current abilities and that at that time and with that level of ability to expect any more equates to just useless wishful thinking. Learn how to improve but don’t feel sore as it doesn’t help.

The Key to a Balanced State of Mind

A strong mental attachment to anything that we have little or no control over will create stress because at some point reality may not deliver the result that we want. The difference between our imagined desire and our real result will cause us emotional pain. Whenever we feel that we ‘need’ something this leads to the creation of rules and expectations. Too many rules and too high expectations lead to neurotic behaviour when our reality doesn’t match our imagination. Consequently, developing mental detachment to imagined and real world results removes the opportunities for emotional pain and the consequential debilitating feelings and actions that they bring.

Developing detachment for objects and events can reduce some of the excitement in life that comes from not knowing how things will turn out. As a spectator in a sports match becoming attached to a result can prove exciting as the downside has almost no consequence (unless you’ve bet a whole load of money on the result). However, for the more personally important and influential things in life developing detachment allows us to deal with problems more maturely, with less stress and with better focus on the things that you can control to make a difference.

I don’t have a deep knowledge of Buddhism but I was once married to a Buddhist and she told me that in Buddhism one reaches enlightenment by giving up all attachment to worldly desires and that if anything in life causes you pain then the best solution lies in giving it up. I do not subscribe to this point of view. In my opinion emotional pain comes from experiencing the difference between desired results and real results. If you feel pain then the best way to negate it comes not from giving things up but from accepting the reality of the situation. By changing desires so that they match reality we remove emotional pain. We can then seek improvement in our lives by seeking to make small gains based on real possibilities and probabilities given our current situation and ability. With time we create enormous resourcefulness that means that things once impossible and improbable can now happen for us because we have constructed every foundation and building block necessary to support reaching such heights.

By accepting reality we achieve inner peace and unlock our powers of productivity. Even unconditional love comes from accepting reality and enacting detachment from our desires to control those that we love. You will know when you have made detachment a part of your thinking when you begin to assess things like this: “I prepared as far as I could to control as much as I can within the limits of my current abilities and my current resources. Now I accept that unexpected or uncontrollable misfortune might interfere with my desires and so I also accept the consequences of any such events.” When you think this way and remove your attachment to results you can remain balanced and harmonious in your mind.

Share your thoughts and leave a comment..

Why Distractions Feel So Temptingly Good

Written by David on June 1, 2010 - 0 Comments
Categories: Mindset

Procrastination is an ever present specter when we seek to get important and difficult things done. Seemingly, at any moment a thought can pop into our heads to go off and do something more pleasurable instead. The problem is that they cost a lot of time and, if we indulge first in our pleasures instead of acting upon our good intentions, then we end up feeling guilty, irresponsible and drained by our fecklessness. This post explains just what is going on when the impulse to avoid the issue occurs.