I just read another article about self-sabotage—which is also not a thing. Your brain does not have ill intentions toward you; believing that it does is irrational. This particular article used procrastination as evidence of the brain’s self-sabotaging tendencies.
The word procrastinate is meant to describe delaying or postponing taking a particular action: the emphasis is on not doing something. But when we’re awake we’re always doing something. Procrastinating doesn’t mean you’re sitting vacantly in a chair staring off into space or out a window not doing instead of cleaning the house or finishing a report or making that one phone call. No, it means you’re doing something else instead of the thing you think you should be doing. That seems obvious, right?
So why isn’t there a word for eating a cheeseburger for lunch when you planned to eat a salad? Why isn’t there a word for staying up late at night when you meant to get to bed before midnight? Why isn’t there a word for binge-watching a TV show when you intended to go to the gym? There’s only a word for doing one thing when you strongly believe you should be doing something else if it’s based on a real or self-imposed deadline.
There is no substantive difference between doing something other than the thing you think you should be doing, whether that involves what you eat, when you got to bed, how much exercise you do or don’t get, and say, when you complete a report or project.
All these incidences of doing something other than what you think you should be doing have a couple of things in common. One is the false belief that understanding the benefit of a particular behavior ought to automatically cause us to “do the right thing.” But understanding has no direct impact on behavior. So it’s completely unsurprising that we’re likely to do whatever we’ve been doing rather than do something different based on information or vague desires to shape up or be better.
Rewards ARE a Thing
Another is the fact that the brain moves toward what it believes will provide a reward and away from things it considers a threat. That means we’re inclined to do things that give us pleasure and avoid things that provide less pleasure or may even amp up stress neurochemicals.
If you like cleaning the house or writing reports or eating cheeseburgers or watching You Tube videos, you’re likely to do more of those things and less of other things. This is why we use rewards to motivate us to do things we don’t otherwise get pleasure from when we’re doing them but nevertheless want to have done. This is called using your brain. If you decide your problem is procrastination, however, you have diagnosed yourself with an imaginary condition that you have to explain (why do I sabotage myself?) and treat. Or you may simply use this imaginary condition to explain yourself to yourself and others. Neither approach will generate any change in behavior. There’s no solution to the problem of procrastination because procrastination is not a thing.
There is one difference between the behaviors that fall under the category of procrastination and other behaviors like the ones I used as examples. That difference is time. You can convince yourself you’ll choose the salad tomorrow or the next day; you can get to bed on time…eventually; you can start going to the gym next month. But if something has a deadline, you don’t have more time than that.
Nevertheless, moment-to-moment, the brain still moves toward what it thinks it will like and away from what it thinks it will dislike. A deadline in the future, with potential negative or positive consequences, is not compelling to the brain until the task becomes an emergency. Failure to eat a healthy diet or get enough sleep or enough exercise are not, moment-to-moment, perceived as emergencies by the brain because we believe that we have more time to get them right.
If you look at all these behaviors through the same lens, though, you can see that they all involve doing something in the present that we understand would be a good idea (good for us in one way or another) but that we don’t particularly want to do right now. We may believe that we should want to do them right now, but the fact is that we don’t.
The belief that we should want to do things that we don’t want to do because we know they’re good for us is one of the most counterproductive beliefs we can have. It’s an enormous obstacle on the path of creating any level of behavior change, let alone transformational change.
What would it look like if you gave this belief up? What might then be possible?
Although I haven’t mentioned specific neurotransmitters in this post, it is part of the series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.
