Living with chronic procrastination can feel like living in an echo chamber of self-frustration. Everywhere you turn, it can feel like you are surrounded by unrealized aspirations, things left undone, and projects still to be finished. And this is just at home. Add to this other obligations outside your home and responsibilities to others, and it can feel like you are buried under the weight of these unmet expectations without a way to escape.
For people who struggle with chronic procrastination, home starts to feel less like a sanctuary of rest and more like a prison of self-frustration. Every mess, every pile, and every undone chore—however small—adds up quickly to feel like a visual reminder of your failures.
Looking around your home reminds you of the continuing disconnect between what you think you can do and what you actually accomplish. This awareness of unrealized goals, in turn, fuels self-frustration and disappointment, which ultimately consumes more and more of your experience. This, in turn, drains even more of the precious focus you need to stay on task and make progress, leaving you feeling anxious and overwhelmed, with so many worrisome thoughts:
- Will you ever dig out of this hole?
- Will you ever become the person you want or need to be?
- Will you ever be able to manage the seemingly “simple things” in your life?
Chronic procrastination and anxiety are cousins. Rather than driving motivation, frustration with yourself drives up your anxiety and holds you back. For people who have chronic procrastination, anxiety is always part of the picture. The chronic feedback loop of worry about yourself and your failures continually drives and feeds more and more anxiety.
Here are three specific ways anxiety is getting tangled up with your chronic procrastination:
1. Procrastination and anxiety
Procrastination can be one of the most powerful but confusing manifestations of anxiety. Procrastination, a form of avoidance, is both the result of and driver of anxiety. The more you dread or fear a situation, the more you tend to avoid it.
While procrastination can sometimes distract from anxiety in the short term, it tends to escalate anxiety over time. Not only does the avoided experience tend to feel more dreadful as it’s put off, but putting it off itself tends to undermine your confidence and further drive up your self-doubt. Put simply, when you tell yourself something is too scary to face, it becomes too scary to face.
In its relationship with anxiety, procrastination creates far more anxiety than it solves as any chronic procrastinator knows. When you avoid something scary, you make it even scarier and further diminish your resources to face it.
2. Clutter and anxiety
Research also confirms that visual clutter can have a cumulative impact on your brain. Not only is clutter distracting, but living with it also can lead to cognitive overload and reduce working memory. That overwhelmed feeling you have when you look around a messy space is real. Clutter makes it harder for you to think and stay focused, manage the anxiety you feel about it, and summon the focus you need to tackle it.
Clutter and anxiety escalate each other in a feedback loop, which is why it can feel so hard to make progress. The more clutter you experience, the more overloaded you feel, and the less capable you are of solving it.
3. Difficulty making decisions
It’s also easy to blame laziness or poor time management for the buildup of common household clutter. Unfolded laundry, piled up mail, and dirty dishes, for example, all seem to beckon your attention with their simple, yet time-consuming, demands. You know that if you take the time to tackle the chore, you will see progress.
But not all procrastination is so simple to dismantle. For much household clutter, decision-making is required, too. We don’t just need to fold our laundry; we also need to decide where it goes and then put it there. Dishes need organized cabinets for safe keeping, clean clothes need available storage space, mail needs opening and attention to read and sort its various messages.
Creating an organized environment isn’t just about spending time cleaning up messes. It’s about deciding what to do with your stuff. Not knowing what to do, or what you want to do, with your stuff can sometimes be the thorniest culprit of chronic procrastination.
Decision-making can feel overwhelming, and its demands can lead to feelings of anxiety, fatigue, and self-frustration. Who wants to admit not knowing how to sort their drawers more efficiently or their dread of bill paying when it’s always easier to put it off until another time?
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Solving this set of challenges doesn’t require more time to focus on what’s wrong with you because you procrastinate. Nor does it require fixating on what you perceive to be your “ignored responsibilities” around cleaning up your clutter or making faster decisions. Managing chronic procrastination is about recognizing the role anxiety is playing and working through it more productively.
My advice to you is this: Instead of beating yourself up, recognize the impact of anxiety on your behavior. Your feelings of anxiety are trying to send you a message to gain your attention so you can use it to solve problems. You will resolve your chronic procrastination faster by understanding the anxiety underneath it that’s getting in your way, and holding you back.
This can be worked on with your therapist, or you can try a few things I wrote about in “8 Tips For Tackling Procrastination.”
In the meantime, remember that when it comes to chronic procrastination and clutter, things are rarely as simple as they seem. The first thought of “just clean it up” isn’t really going to solve the problem if you have been a procrastinator all of your life. Nor will you solve it by repeating the litany of negative thoughts you are so used to hurling at yourself when you have let yourself down again.