Distractions

Procrastination is when you have something you want to do, or something you need to do, but you keep putting it off by doing other things.  Sometimes you do this consciously and at other times this is just the by-product of a lack of focus or the lack of desirability or determination to achieve the goal you set out to achieve in the first place.  Whilst there are many ways to overcome this, what I find most interesting about the whole concept of Procrastination is the fact that it only seems to happen when you don't want it to.

There are times in life when we experience things we really don't like, and in those moments either after the event or even before it in anticipation, we can fixate on it and build it up in our minds to be much more than it is.  In those moments the thing we would like more than anything is a distraction, yet as easy as it can be to get distracted when we do need to do something, it can be equally as hard to find distraction when we don't.

Trying not to think about something, ironically, seems to make us think about it even more.  The harder you try, the more you will inevitably dwell on the thing you were trying desperately not to think about, but why is this the case?  You could posit that it's a case of desirability in that you will find distractions more easily if the thing you are distracted from is something undesirable, yet that doesn't seem to be the case, anxiety overrides desire and we dwell on things we really shouldn't even more so when it is something we know we should not, and have no desire whatsoever to experience - like if you have a fear of the dentist, you know your health is important but the fear overrides the rationality and you avoid it at all costs, and yet the reason you need to go in the first place dwells in your mind.

You could then perhaps argue that the opposite is true, that the more desirable an experience would be, the less likely you are to be distracted from it, but again, that doesn't seem to be true.  There are a great many things in life we want, but we are unwilling to pursue, and many more we know how to get, yet we don't put any effort into getting them, regardless of how big the reward waiting for us on the other side may be.  We fixate on the short term, and the fact we have to change our direction or alter course limits us from even trying in the first place - we'd rather stay the course we are already on because it is less effort, even if we know it's headed for a cliff edge we won't do anything until it is impending and we have no other choice - but even then some of us who are defeatist will reach the cliff edge and think, "well I'm here now, may as well jump" - I know that's rather melancholy but it's somewhat true, sometimes the path backwards can seem even more effort and we just can't muster up the courage to pursue it.