Psychology Today
Science and Sensibility
Build Frustration Tolerance and Cut the Emotional Roots of Procrastination
Sensation sensitivity for frustration or discomfort correlates with procrastination. For example, a low tolerance for frustration or tension can trigger discomfort-dodging procrastination activities. These diversionary activities are the sine qua non of procrastination
Short-sightedness also is a procrastination risk factor. In this mindset, you elevate the value of a smaller short-term gain over the benefits of working longer for a proportionally greater reward. Thus, you may party to avoid study.
High frustration tolerance correlates with psychological health and wellbeing. You are more likely to take prudent risks when your willingness to accept frustration is high. You'll get more done. Simultaneously, you may experience higher levels of emotional resilience.
Lest I sound too critical of discomfort sensitivity, tension avoidance, and immediate gratification, let's look at a time when these conditions were especially useful. This study makes dodging uncomfortable situations understandable and suggests why change can be challenging. Your awareness of these challenges, and action steps you can take, supports an enjoyable life journey filled with desired accomplishments.
Does Procrastination Increase As Society Becomes More Regulated?
Dodging discomfort is a primitive survival mechanism. If a situation or activity "felt" uncomfortable, your ancient ancestors would probably have avoided it. By avoiding the tension of uncertainty about an unfamiliar territory you might aid your survival by sidestepping a cannibal tribe or saber tooth tiger.
Leading a hand-to-mouth existence, could you afford to be a long-term planner? For a member of a small migrating tribal community, grabbing a handful of blueberries or walnuts had more survival value than waiting for a field of wheat to grow.
In The Axemaker's Gift, James Burke and Robert Ornstein described our double-edged history. New discoveries and advancements lead to freedom from the dangers of nature. This happened at the cost of restricting and regulating individual actions and freedoms.
Let's extend this axemaker gift to include procrastination. Regulated societies are organized by the calendar and the clock. Officials will extract a price for greater freedom from natural dangers. You may want this tradeoff without any obligation on your part. But this is a dream world.
Here is the deal. By following through on job responsibilities and governmental obligations, you gain greater safety and security. This is the social contract. Some requirements may be excessive. But that is as it is until you find a way to change them. It is typically easier to change how you operate, to function effectively, and open more time to do what is more important for you.
You may feel resistant to performing certain socially required and regulated duties and obligations. This is understandable. Many regulated tasks are time consuming and unpleasant. Few enjoy completing tax forms or spending extra work hours to meet a deadline. The same is normally the case for self-help actions, such as facing a needless but amplified fear of a harmless situation.
You can flourish in a world of commerce by accepting responsibilities for executing timely and relevant acts. In this process, you act to avoid penalties for social procrastination, which is putting off social responsibilities. Your reward lies in getting regulated social responsibilities off your back and avoid penalties. You also gain a positive benefit. By regulating your thoughts and actions to follow through, you boost your frustration tolerance.
You can let yourself sink into an emotional quagmire of distracting conflicts and tensions about the fairness of certain responsibilities. However, at any time you can act to boost your abilities to reason, tolerate tension, and achieve more by proactive follow through efforts. As an added incentive, consider the "relief" benefits of intentionally taking charge when you come to cross roads where you could decide to follow either tension avoidance or productive ways. If you decide to take a productive direction, you can feel more secure in that decision when you start follow through actions.
If you chose to exit this discomfort-dodging world, you have more awareness and action options. A few more follow.
Exit the Discomfort-Dodging World
A negative feeling can be mild and yet start an avalanche of procrastination diversions resulting in a pileup of things left undone. When viewing the outcome of multiple delays, you may feel hopeless about catching up. However, if you believe you can tolerate tension sensations, you are less likely to delay and have fewer of these prices to pay.
You cut into the emotional roots of procrastination by teaching yourself to use discomfort-dodging emotional signals as triggers to explore your thoughts and to debunk any accompanying false hopes, such as tomorrow is always a better day to start. Can you emotionally regulate these procrastination triggering emotions? How do you regulate emotions? Do you use a rheostat implanted in your limbic system?
Self-regulation is mainly a cognitive function. By showing yourself that tension is time-limited and that you can life through it, you'll experience less stress and you'll have less reason to fear the feeling.
Here is an example of a self-regulation technique. Think about what you think when you experience negative sensations. Do you amplify tension through fearsome thoughts about feeling stressed? Is it possible to build acceptance and tolerance for your tensions? Can you accept--not necessarily like--that it will take time and effort to get socially-required tasks out of the way? (How many hours out of the year do these impositions take to discharge? What is the percentage?)
Here is a second self-regulation approach that supports the first: (1) Place reason between procrastination impulses and diversionary activities by looking beyond the moment of discomfort to the steps you will take to fulfill the social obligation. (2) In the process of reasoning it out, set realistic goals. (3) Devise a plan to reach the goal: when will you start and what is your first step? (4) When procrastination thinking gets in the way, connect the dots between this thinking and its results. Identify the cognitive, emotive, and behavioral consequences of inaction. Then try a different way that yields better results. For example, if you think latter is better, ask yourself why? (5) Stick with this metacognitive approach until it becomes a practiced habit.
Four Main Steps to Build Frustration Tolerance
You can achieve higher levels of psychological wellbeing by acting to increase your frustration tolerance and to resist procrastination impulses by:
1. Build your body to buffer the stress effects of multiple frustrations. You do this through maintaining a consistent, moderate, physical exercise program, healthy diet, and by getting adequate sleep. The physical exercise phase of this stress buffering process helps decrease depression and boosts your immune system for better health. This is the physical way.
2. Liberate the mind from consistent errors, such as conning yourself into thinking that you can normally escape consequences for delays. This is the cognitive way.
3. Work to boost your emotional resilience by exercising restraint against malfunctioning discomfort-dodging impulses. This is the emotive way.
4. Change negative patterns that you associated with needless frustrations, such as letting work pile up. You can meet this on-going challenge when you dedicate yourself to a lifetime of producing positive results in a reasonable way within a reasonable time. This is the Do it Now behavioral way.
If developing frustration tolerance proves challenging, End Procrastination Now (Knaus, 2010. McGraw-Hill) can help.
Do you have other options? I wrote a book titled How to Conquer Your Frustrations. You can download it for free. This book is unique. I dedicated it exclusively to boosting frustration tolerance. I wrote it without using the verb "to be." This writing style can help you reduce overly generalized distress thinking. You can get your copy at: http://www.rebtnetwork.org/library/How_to_Conquer_Your_Frustratio
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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.
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