Psychology

(Paywalled, regrettably.)

I feel seen.

People love to blame procrastinators for their behavior. Putting off work sure looks lazy, to an untrained eye. Even the people who are actively doing the procrastinating can mistake their behavior for laziness. You’re supposed to be doing something, and you’re not doing it — that’s a moral failure right? That means you’re weak-willed, unmotivated, and lazy, doesn’t it?

For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.

When you’re paralyzed with fear of failure, or you don’t even know how to begin a massive, complicated undertaking, it’s damn hard to get shit done. It has nothing to do with desire, motivation, or moral upstandingness. Procastinators can will themselves to work for hours; they can sit in front of a blank word document, doing nothing else, and torture themselves; they can pile on the guilt again and again — none of it makes initiating the task any easier. In fact, their desire to get the damn thing done may worsen their stress and make starting the task harder.

The solution, instead, is to look for what is holding the procrastinator back. If anxiety is the major barrier, the procrastinator actually needs to walk away from the computer/book/word document and engage in a relaxing activity. Being branded “lazy” by other people is likely to lead to the exact opposite behavior.

I don't know how I was led to this article, but oh my giddy aunt, having been accused of perfectionism from time to time, and having oodles of executive dysfunction, I have Opinions about it.

Parents are flabbergasted when I suggest that perhaps their child lives within a messy and unscheduled life because they are putting off the responsibility to get the work done perfectly. Most people assume that a perfectionist is someone with a strictly organized environment and routine, the highest grades, and many accolades. Nothing below perfect is accepted by them and they strive daily for that sense of accomplishment. Yet, what many people don’t recognize is the behind-the-scenes agony that transpires inside a child’s (or adult’s) head when they strive for perfection. The amount of planning, rough drafts, materials, and time it takes to reach perfection can weigh heavily on anyone who rigidly believes that this is the only recipe for success. It’s no wonder why so many projects seem like gigantic monsters that should be avoided until a student has no choice but to face the fear and get it done or fail the class.

Oh, my! It is worth the price of admission for this passage alone.

A Hypothetical Example

Once upon a time, a writer proposed that humanity should be divided into large-eared and small-eared people. The writer suggested that small-eared people do not listen, have lower musical ability, are deficient in the ability to empathize with others, and much more. Because they lack interpersonal skills, small-eared people are also responsible for cruelty and some of the greatest evils in world history. The government of the time endorsed the writer’s ideas and enacted laws that divided children, based on the new concept of earedness, into separate kindergartens and schools. As a consequence, the whole of society was divided into large- and small-eared classes, with separate education, health, and legal systems, and with separate housing and recreational spheres for each group.

Later, and at the time when psychology became an independent discipline, researchers began to test hypotheses regarding earedness with empirical means. They found that several of the assumptions regarding earedness, although not all, had empirical support. More recently, evolutionary psychologists discussed the adaptive advantage of ear size; clinical psychologists used the concept as a broad diagnostic tool; psychologists of religion found that religious founders had disproportionately larger ears than their contemporaries; historians of psychology estimated the large-earedness of psychological pioneers using paintings, photographs, and ear descriptions; and debates as to whether Kant had larger ears than Descartes, or whether Kant’s large-earedness had been overestimated, took place among personality psychologists.

Yet, some criticism of the concept also emerged: Methodologists argued that earedness must be adjusted for by height and gender and that the variable is continuous rather than discontinuous. Other critics argued that earedness is a social construct. However, defenders of the concept pointed out that empirical studies confirm the significance of earedness, that the variable is an excellent predictor of professional success, and that earedness demonstrates high correlations with many other psychological variables. They also pointed out that the average person knows that earedness has always existed and that to deny it would contradict common sense.