Why We Procrastinate and How to Beat Procrastination

When the goal is to beat the procrastination habit, it's best to really understand what causes procrastination in the first place...

The art of breaking any negative habit and replacing it with a more positive habit, begins by understanding why we developed the negative habit in the first place.

Procrastination is one of society's nastiest culprits, and raises its ugly head even among children who either wait until the last minute to work on a school project, or never bother to turn one in at all. Before we can help our children beat procrastination, we need to address the issue in our own lives. Perhaps the root of the problem of procrastination is found in childhood.

The first step to identifying the reason why we procrastinate, is by determining when we first started procrastinating.

We may remember procrastinating with school work, because we usually were punished or reprimanded by parents and teachers. But what if the true beginning of procrastination is buried deeper in our psyches? How do we find it and discover why we ever did it in the first place? Perhaps we had older siblings who loved doing things for us when we were toddlers, and then stopped adoring us as we got older. It is not far-fetched to consider that these young children would suddenly stop doing things for themselves as a cry for attention from older siblings or even parents.

Many people believe that everything we do is simply asking for love. Perhaps that's all we need to know to beat procrastination, because if this is true, then we simply need to acknowledge that we began procrastinating out of some child-like thought that it would get us what we wanted. As adults, we now know that this is not the case. Therefore, procrastination no longer serves any purpose other than bringing us chaos. Our parents and siblings are no longer able to respond to the situation. We must take responsibility for our life and our chosen duties. We choose our mates, we choose to be parents, we choose where we live and even where we work. Therefore, we also chose the responsibilities that came with these choices.

Perhaps procrastination was born from a sense that we are not capable of completing the task as well as we think it should be done. This is also a feeling that could have developed during childhood. Recognizing that many opinions we carry with us as adults are simply the misguided thoughts of our childhood experiences, leads us to being able to dismiss them entirely. It's time to replace the attitudes of childhood with more positive thoughts so we can beat procrastination.

Whatever it is that needs to get done, chances are that all of us are quite capable of doing it. Even if we feel we don't know how to do something, we must recognize that this feeling of inadequacy is based on - nothing. If we haven't tried yet, how can we know the outcome? If we try and fail, then we simply learn from our mistakes and try again. If we continue with this train of thought and continue to try, eventually we will beat procrastination.