Chronic procrastination is often misunderstood. People will misinterpret and simplify procrastination as you just being lazy. This can cause you to feel chronic shame and guilt for not being more productive and on top of things. This leads to low self esteem. Let’s consider chronic procrastination as a trauma response. Trauma from your past, or even on-going stress, can really effect how you cope and behave.
Understanding procrastination as a trauma response is crucial for healing. You can’t change your tendency to procrastinate without healing from the trauma that underlies the problem in the first place.
Chronic procrastination is also a part of other mental health issues such as depression, obsessive compulsive disorder OCD and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD. It’s important to deal with the underlying causes of chronic procrastination. This article focuses on trauma, or PTSD post traumatic stress disorder. Trauma can go hand in hand with depression, OCD and ADHD.
What Is Trauma?
Trauma is defined as a wound, shock or injury from an event that emotionally overwhelms you to the point where you can’t process it. It might be something that happens once or repeatedly. This event is perceived as harmful or life-threatening to yourself or someone else.
Each person is different in how they process life events. What is harmful to one person might not be distressing to someone else.
What matters is that the event overwhelmed your capacity to deal with it, so it was traumatizing to you. It causes you to feel unsafe in the world, like something bad could happen at any time. Trauma can really hijack your brain.
There are many things that can cause trauma. For example, bullying, military combat experiences, neglect, emotional abuse, rape, natural disasters, physical or sexual abuse, witnessing abuse, the death of someone close to you, hospitalization, and even an automobile accident.
Chronic Procrastination As A Trauma Response
Symptoms of PTSD, post traumatic stress, usually manifest in several ways. You will avoid places, activities or people that remind you of the event. You also can have anxiety and depression. These symptoms include lack of interest in things you used to enjoy doing, memory problems and even hopelessness.
Another common symptom of PTSD is hypervigilence. This is a type of anxiety where you over-react physically and emotionally. You will notice that you are overly sensitive to your surroundings and fearful. This can cause you to be angry, irritable, easily startled and have difficulty concentrating and sleeping.
Hypervigilence takes the form of constant scanning for potential threats or triggers. This can consume a lot of energy and focus, making it difficult to concentrate, leading to chronic procrastination. This is how we begin to understand procrastination as a trauma response.
Trauma can have a long-term impact on your ability to regulate your emotions. You then become less able to manage your emotions and react appropriately to life events. You might start to procrastinate in order to avoid dealing with emotions, which make you feel like you can’t deal with life.
EMDR For Flashbacks and Intense Feelings From a Traumatic Event
When you are exposed to a traumatic event, the intense feelings that are associated with it can pop into your head uninvited. Anything that reminds you of the traumatic event, even in the smallest way, can send you into a tail spin of bad memories and/or feelings. This is called being triggered.
These intrusive and uncontrollable memories are called flashbacks. These will come suddenly, without your bidding. It’s no wonder you start avoiding and procrastinating as a way to keep the flashbacks at bay.
This is the brain and body’s way of protecting you from a potential future threat. It doesn’t let you forget what happened so you can do a better job of escaping or fighting back if it happens again. This is called the fight or flight response to trauma.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, EMDR, is an excellent therapy for trauma and post traumatic stress. I use EMDR to help you desensitize and reprocess difficult traumatic memories. That way, they don’t intrude into you life and make it difficult to function. EMDR helps you with self-regulation. You start to feel more resilient. Read more about EMDR here.
Chronic Procrastination and the Freeze Response
If you are unable to escape or fight back, one option your nervous system has to protect you is to freeze up. This is an automatic reaction, and in animals it takes the form of playing dead so to avoid being prey.
For us humans, the freeze response might take the form of procrastination. You can’t get yourself to take action and accomplish anything. You feel stuck, or frozen.
In this way, chronic procrastination can serve as self-protection. Your brain is trying to help you feel more in control in situations where you feel overwhelmed or threatened.
Trauma and Neural Pathways in the Brain
You know you have trauma when you replay the experience in your mind over and over. You continually think about what happened in hopes of getting some control over it.
When you are traumatized, that experience and all the emotions and body sensations related to it, are etched into your mind. This creates a powerful neural pathway in your brain that is impossible to ignore.
Because this neural pathway in the brain is so strong, you repeatedly think about the trauma over and over. Brain function has been hijacked by the threat and trauma you’ve been exposed to.
If you do the same thing, or think the same thing, repeatedly, over and over, it becomes even easier to keep on doing, or thinking, it. Your brain keeps sending you down that same neural pathway.
That is where neurofeedback comes in. I am trained in neurofeedback and I use it to create new neural pathways in the brain that promote a calm, resting state. When you experience trauma, your resting state can feel like it’s just gone.
Neurofeedback restores your sense of calm and self-confidence. This builds self-regulation and resiliency. Read more about neurofeedback here.
Chronic Procrastination as a Trauma Response
If you experienced trauma, you might procrastinate as way to avoid triggering memories or emotions that are associated with the trauma. You procrastinate when faced with tasks or responsibilities that remind you of traumatic experiences. This leads you to delay addressing the things you need to do.
On top of that, trauma can impair your executive functioning. This effects your ability to plan, organize, make decisions, and prioritize tasks.
Your brain gets overwhelmed by trauma and so you just can’t think. This makes it challenging to initiate and complete tasks in a timely manner, leading to procrastination.
Past trauma disrupts your sense of control and safety. You can develop perfectionism and a fear of making mistakes. You try to avoid feeling out of control at all costs! Since you don’t want to fail, or lose control, you procrastinate in order to avoid potential criticism, rejection or disappointment.
Chronic Procrastination As A Trauma Response And Self-Esteem
The effects of trauma can make you feel helpless and powerless, eroding your self-confidence and self-worth. When you feel like you aren’t good enough, you can feel a lot of shame. Procrastination as a trauma response feeds into a cycle that perpetuates shame low self-esteem.
Shame is a powerful feeling which can cause you to avoid and procrastinate. Shame causes you to be hard on yourself, judge and blame yourself harshly and feel inadequate. Then you feel even more out of control.
When it’s hard to believe in yourself, chronic procrastination can take over. Then, you can get stuck in a vicious cycle of low self-esteem. This leads to procrastination, which then leads to more low self-esteem for not completing things, and the cycle repeats.
Procrastination can be one of the many harmful effects that trauma or PTSD can have in your life. When your PTSD symptoms get better, it is very likely that your procrastination will also improve. We can understand procrastination as a trauma response.
The effect of traumatic events on your nervous system cannot be underestimated. The overwhelm trauma brings upon your mind and body has a lasting impact. Therapy is crucial for healing.
If you think you have symptoms of PTSD that are interfering with your day-to-day life, it is important to seek professional help. I can provide EMDR and neurofeedback. Both of these treatments are excellent for Trauma and post traumatic stress.
I can do EMDR online. I also have two office locations, Torrance and Santa Monica. If you think I can help, feel free to contact me by email mindy@mftherapy.com or phone 310-314-6933.
