I hope you are having a lovely Easter break and looking forward to munching your way through several eggs. Now, don’t go telling me that you don’t have Easter eggs. The latest statistics show that, here in the UK, we are the third-largest consumers of chocolate in the world. Each of us manages to munch our way through 6.9kg of chocolate each year. That’s the equivalent of 153 bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk per person.
All across the land, people will probably be spending time this Easter promising to give up chocolate after all the eggs have been eaten. Or they’ll be saying they will get back to the diet they started after Christmas, but which the Easter bunny has now destroyed. There’s nothing like the taste of chocolate to make us put off our planned improvements in eating.
That’s not the only thing we procrastinate about. I am currently busy marking student assignments. The students were notified nine weeks before the deadline of what they needed to do. Yet, judging by the panic calls I had in the days before the clock was about to chime, many students put off writing their assignments until the last moment. Academic procrastination is commonplace.
So, why do so many of us procrastinate? One recent study showed that 99% of people procrastinate. Worse still, the study discovered that when we procrastinate, eight out of ten of us suffer from anxiety as a result. We clearly know that putting things off is going to cause us problems, but we still do it.
Now, new research has provided a clue as to what is going on. The team of British psychologists has discovered that we get anxious about failing the planned task. Even though we can set a goal, know what needs to be done and are happy to do it, we procrastinate because we worry about not succeeding with the individual steps we need to take. It is not the ‘big goal’ that makes us put things off. Rather, it is the small, individual stages along the way to that target that cause us the anxiety. We anticipate the emotions we might feel if we fail at those tasks, and so we avoid them in order to dodge that negative feeling.
This is where the concept of “reframing” can be helpful. This is a component of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Essentially, when you notice yourself putting something off because you anticipate feeling bad about it, the ‘Three Cs’ can help. First, “Catch it”, by recognising that you have anticipated a negative emotion if you start on a particular task. Secondly, “Check it”, by challenging your assumption and thinking carefully about the evidence you are using. Then, “Change it” by replacing your original thoughts with a more balanced perspective.
We can try this with an example. You are putting off eating that Easter egg because you are worried you will feel guilty when you take that first bite. You have just “caught” the negative emotion that is putting you off. Now, let’s challenge the assumption that you will feel guilty. Is there any evidence that eating chocolate is associated with the production of guilt? Yes, perhaps, but there is also evidence that enjoying chocolate without guilt may be better for us than beating ourselves up about it. So, now we can move on to “check” your thinking and realise that by eating the Easter egg, you will experience a positive emotion of pleasure, not guilt.
There you go, I’ve given you a psychologically sound excuse not to put off eating your Easter eggs. My pleasure. One final wrinkle in all this is that modern life does not help. Recent studies suggest that digital overload can increase stress, which, in turn, makes procrastination more likely. Multitasking does not help either. So, if you are putting things off more than usual, it may not just be the Easter eggs. It may be your phone as well.
