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The year is approaching,
You guys who are doing the year-end summary,
Please accept the following soul torture triptych:
Is going to bed early and getting up early is achieved?
Was weight loss successful?
Have you finished reading 50 books?
Those flags that were first established fell down in countless days and nights of brushing mobile phones, playing games, and chasing dramas. Tomorrow after tomorrow, tomorrow is so much, since there are so many, it is better to delay it. Procrastination has dragged down the years and dragged down the years. How do we break the cycle of procrastination?
Is procrastination a disease?
Procrastination is not a disease. Its precise name should be procrastination, i.e., people voluntarily postpone the initiation or completion of a planned act despite foreseeing adverse consequences.
Psychologists once reported in a study that 20% of adults reported procrastination. Since the vast majority of people think that procrastination is not a good thing, the actual number will only be higher than 20%.
Your anxiety may come from procrastination
Procrastination is cool for a while, but procrastination often induces anxiety.
Just think, you're going to take the exam tomorrow, but you haven't reviewed it today. Looking at the thick stack of review materials in front of you, how to stay calm? Therefore, in the face of the arrival of deadlines, individuals tend to be restless and overwhelmed.
More seriously, such emotional experiences can also lead to physiological reactions. In a psychological study, researchers found that the stress generated by procrastination caused an individual to increase blood pressure and increase heart rate. It can be seen that procrastination is sad and hurtful.
In addition, procrastination creates the illusion of "efficient" work.
We've all had this experience, and the closer we get to deadlines, the faster we'll get to the pace of completing tasks. This forced increase in efficiency leads us to overconfident cognitive biases that we are capable of handling urgent matters. In turn, it is precisely this misconception that exacerbates our dependence on procrastination – and since I can do it in the allotted time, why rush every minute. However, accidental "rushing" does not reflect the real ability. As the saying goes, often walk by the river, which can not get wet shoes. Once procrastination worsens into "procrastination cancer", sooner or later it will delay the task and drag itself down.
Get rid of procrastination
Just four steps
Some people think that procrastination is laziness. In fact, the causes of procrastination are complex and cannot be summed up in one word, so to solve this problem, it is necessary to take a multi-pronged approach.
1
Things first. In work and life, there are endless things to do every day, and we need to prioritize them. This applies to the "four-quadrant rule" of time management. The "four-quadrant rule" is a theory of time management proposed by american management scientist Steven Covey. According to this law, we can measure the complexity of affairs according to two different degrees of importance and urgency, dividing them into four quadrants: important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, not urgent and unimportant, and then prioritize doing important and urgent things.
2
We have to learn to disassemble tasks. One of the causes of procrastination is the fear of facing difficult tasks. Therefore, when you feel that a task is too complex and heavy, you must learn to break it into zero, reduce the difficulty of sub-tasks, break each one, and finally complete the overall task. For example, if we plan to read 50 books a year, we can refine the task to how many pages to read per day. You can also use the app in your phone to help us divide tasks and record your own growth by punching in. When we take down a relatively simple small task, the inner sense of accomplishment will prompt us to move on and win bigger victories.
3
Faced with a task, in addition to quantitative disassembly, we also have to learn to dismantle in detail. The so-called detail disassembly is to concretize the general abstract task. Research has found that when we think about the details of a task, we are more likely to connect with the task, which in turn prompts us to complete the task. Fitness, for example, is something that many people talk about but often procrastinate. The reason is that the goal of fitness is too general and lacks operability. We need to refine the goal of fitness into specific target events that can be implemented. For example, run 2,000 meters a day or swim 500 meters the next day. Obviously, specific goals are easier to achieve than the abstract concept of fitness.
4
We need to consciously train our concentration. In modern society, concentration has become a scarce resource. Our attention has been drawn to all sorts of "short and fast" things, which has a big impact on our persistent focus on completing tasks. Things that could have been done in 1 hour of serious work have taken several times as much time due to lack of concentration. Therefore, in the process of completing the established tasks, we must try to stay away from the source of interference, such as muting the mobile phone, closing the message pop-up window push, and not chatting with others.
Procrastination is not a disease, but procrastination is really fatal. Overcoming procrastination not only allows us to study and work more efficiently, but also allows us to have more time of our own, thereby enhancing the happiness of life.
In the new year, don't delay, beware of missing out on that excellent self.
The author | Liang Jing Shi Jiaxin
Audit | expert of the National Health Science Popularization Expert Database
Bai Yonghai, director of the Department of Medical Psychology, Long March Hospital Affiliated to the Naval Military Medical University
Planner | Tan Jia Yu Yunxi
Editor| Liang Jing