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August 19, 2004
Excerpts From Books - Continued
The following are the types of mind-sets most commonly associated with procrastination and do-nothingness.
1.) Hopelessness: When you are depressed, you get so frozen in the pain of the present moment that you forget entirely that you ever felt better in the past and find it inconceivable that you might feel more positive in the future. Therefore, any activity will seem pointless because you are absolutely certain your lack of motivation and sense of oppression are unending and irreversible. From this perspective the suggestion that you do something to "help yourself" might sound as ludicrous and insentitive as telling a dying man to cheer up.
2.) Helplessness: You can't possibly do anything that will make yourself feel better because you are convinced that your moods are caused by factors beyond your control, such as fate, hormone cycles, luck and other people's evaluations of you.
3.) Overwhelming Yourself: You may magnify a task to the degree that it seems impossible to tackle. You may assume you must do everything at once instead of breaking each job down into small, discrete, manageable units which you can complete - one step at a time. You might also inadvertently distract yourself from the task at hand by obsessing about endless other things you haven't gotten around to doing yet.
4.) Jumping To Conclusions: You sense that it is not within your power to take effective action that will result in satisfaction because you are in the habit of saying "I can't" or I would but -
5.) Self-Labeling: The more you procrastinate, the more you consider yourself as inferior. This saps your self-confidence further.
6.) Undervaluing The Rewards: When you are depressed you may fail to initiate any meaningful activity not only because you conceive of any task as terribly difficult, but also because you feel the reward simply wouldn't be worth the effort. "Anhedonia" is the technical name for a diminished ability to experience satisfaction and pleasure. A common thinking error - your tendency to "disqualify the positive" - may be at the root of the problem.
Posted by Nealus at August 19, 2004 08:48 PM
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