Mindfulness of Procrastination and Motivation

[aly4519]

Hi all!

Couldn't find a thread dedicated to this, so I figured I'd start one.

Curious how others view the application of mindfulness towards procrastination, and helping get motivated.

To me, on the surface, I guess whatever tells us that 'we don't like to do this or want to do this' is just what our mind is telling us. But the thing is.. the mind isn't wrong! I actually do find certain things to be boring!

I guess procrastination is the result of one of a few things, one of them being a person who is a thrill seeker or arousal seeker, where I would categorize myself.

Any thoughts?

[Gareth]

I've often wondered about this.

Is boredom a 'feeling' or is it just more thoughts?

[piedwagtail91]

i've found boredom comes from not being 'present'.
i volunteer as a health walk leader.
i don't like backmarking a walk but we have to share to make things fair
i don't particularly want to walk lead any longer but don't want to drop out til another leader is found.
so there is some aversion there.

i found myself bored when i was backmarking the last walk.
so i looked at my thoughts and found i was anywhere but on the walk, through a pretty nice woodland with a lake at the time.

so i started to walk more mindfuly , to be present and the sense of boredom went.
i still didn't really want to be there but that's something i experience a lot and accept.

so for me 'boredom' is down to not being present.

[JonW]

Strangely the word "boredom" didn't exist in the English language until the 19th century and the first recorded use of the word is in Dickens' Bleak House.
Makes you wonder how people described the feeling of boredom before they had a word for it. Maybe they would just say they felt a bit funny.
Jon

[FeeHutch]

Often being mindful helps me identify what it is I am trying to put off and what the feelings associated with that are. Usually once I've got that far it doesn't take much for me to decide to stop procrastinating and either do the task or accept I am not going to do the task.

I think that's why mindfulness is sometimes difficult for me, procrastination helps me avoid thinking about something and if I'm avoiding it then it is probably painful in someway. That said, I always feel better for tackling it - eventually

[jdandre]

I agree with piedwagtail91's reply on boredom - well put.

If you've ever read Tolle or listened to his lectures, he talks about boredom often. I find the passage below helpful, and it does a good job of summarizing his philosophy:

"The mind exists in a state of 'not enough' and so is always greedy for more. When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless very easily. Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and its hunger is not being satisfied.

When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind's hunger by picking up a magazine, making a phone call, switching on the TV, surfing the web, going shopping, or — and this is not uncommon — transferring the mental sense of lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it briefly by ingesting more food.

Or you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored and restless. As you bring awareness to the feeling, there is suddenly some space and stillness around it, as it were. A little at first, but as the sense of inner space grows, the feeling of boredom will begin to diminish in intensity and significance. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not.

You discover that a 'bored person' is not who you are. Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.

Nothing that comes and goes is you.
'I am bored.' Who knows this?
'I am angry, sad, afraid.' Who knows this?
You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

From "Stillness Speaks," by Eckhart Tolle

[craftyzen]

The more effort you try to stop boredom the more it persists. Boredom is simply boredom as red is red. It is normal to be bored, necessary even. The problem persists when we try to stop the problem because then there is friction. When I am bored I try to count by odd numbers or spell words backwards. Mind is only attention and a receiver of information. Living in Indonesia for over two years, boredom is as often present in the East as in the West. The only difference between the two is that the latter fights it, thinking it can be changed or shoved away, whereas the former accepts that they're bored in the same way they accept their body is hungry or cold.

[SageMindfulness2015]

According to Kelly McGonigal in her boom the Willpower Instinct, procrastinators who are stressed out about how behind they are on a project will put it off even longer to avoid having to think about it. This is because the goal of feeling better trumps the goal of self control (i.e doing something). So there is an emotional component to it for sure.

From my own personal experience piling on self judgement and self criticism at myself because you I am procrastinating (i.e like, er, doing my taxes:) actually prolongs the procrastination. Self-compassion or a more self-accepting approach is paradoxically an effective way to get yourself to lean in into actually doing the task you have been putting off.