Here's your detailed report.
Your Main Procrastination Type is Distraction
What is it?
The way you tend to procrastinate is by distracting yourself from doing the thing that you most want to do. According to behavioral engineering expert Nir Eyal, a distraction is an action that takes us away from what we really want to do. If we know what we want to do, then why do we distract ourselves? Let’s find out below.
Why does it happen?
The answer lies somewhere in how we're wired to be as human beings. The root cause of human behaviour is pain-avoidance, meaning we act to escape discomfort. Even when we are looking for pleasurable activities, what we're really doing is relieving ourselves of the pain of wanting.
When we have goals that we don't know how to achieve, we feel psychological discomfort in the form of negative emotions. This discomfort can materialize as overwhelm, the feeling of 'not being good enough', the fear of failure, and having thoughts like "I can't do this", etc.
When we experience these negative emotions, our biological 'pain-avoidance' mechanism takes over and makes us seek short-term relief instead. This short-term relief often manifests itself in the form of excessive use of video games, social media, cell phones, binge-watching content, etc.
What does it feel like?
The paradox here is that the short-term relief will never make up for the lack of achievement of our goals. Because the longer we avoid or put off working on the things we really want to do, the heavier and stronger the psychological discomfort. Which further drives us deeper into distractions and seeking more and more short-term pleasure and instant gratification. It becomes a vicious cycle.
This brings us to a paralyzed physical state where we feel trapped, unable to move, knowing that we don't want to waste our lives playing video games or endlessly going down YouTube rabbit holes but we can't get ourselves to stop. We become stuck in an endless loop of:
Your Possible Root Cause is Overwhelm
What is it?
The most likely cause of your procrastination is that you are feeling overwhelmed. This happens when we know what our goals are but have no idea how to accomplish them. Our goals feel like big, tremendous tasks and we can't figure out what the next step should be. When that happens, we are constantly ruminating on our goals and we can't see how we'll ever accomplish them.
Why does it happen?
Knowing our goal but not knowing what the next step should be causes us to feel an overwhelming amount of negative emotions. We start dreading the task that is supposed to make us feel good and excited.
When faced with these negative emotions, we understandably seek out short-term mood repair strategies rather than focus on long-term goal achievement. One common, but self-defeating, way to deal with these emotions is to completely avoid the thing causing them in the first place — the task at hand.
This is when overwhelm turns into procrastination because it is obvious to us that our task is what's causing us to feel these negative emotions, so we subconsciously choose to avoid it.
What does it feel like?
The negative emotions experienced by overwhelm can be a mix of fear, frustration, anger, shame, guilt, or anxiety. We often feel dread towards our goals and main tasks.
The inability to make progress on these tasks may also stir up feelings of low self-esteem, feelings of unworthiness, and feeling like we're stuck and unable to make any progress or move forward.
It is true that these emotions and feelings are being caused by our task but it is important to realize that our task is stimulating our irrational beliefs. Irrational beliefs come as a cluster in our lives, snowball, and quickly build energy. This causes us to constantly think negative thoughts and perpetuate the suffering we feel inside.
We know deep down inside that if we were able to make progress on our goal or task, we would stop feeling this way. But the problem is that we have no idea how to move forward with the task.We end up getting stuck in an endless cycle of:
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