Procrastination is the biggest killer of all time, in my opinion. It makes you lose focus; it halts you from reaching your goals; it deprives of being productive; and it can kill your dreams. Procrastination is something I know nothing about from a scientific perspective; specifically from a neurological standpoint. I mean, I don't know what in your mind causes you to procrastinate and not just stop. It must be some strong chemical or something released in the brain because I literally always try my hardest to not procrastinate and I just won't budge. I feel like a crack cocaine addict sometimes the way I can't break focus from something unimportant, such as social media or an argument through text, to focus on something much more important in my life. I wish it was easier to stay focused.
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The picture above is literally me on a typical week night. I will be doing an important assignment or some other task, and I'll decide to take a "quick" social media break. We all know what happens then: five minutes turns into 30 minutes - an hour. How many people around my age, 21, and especially in college, can relate? I read some of the psychological reasons for procrastinating, and I found that the whole idea behind procrastinating has to do with doing pleasurable things in place of non-pleasurable things. I think the chemicals, hormones, or whatever it is in the brain that make procrastinating so hard to quit, take action with the pleasurable. I believe that addictive chemicals, hormones, etc. similar to ones that make people addicted to drugs get released in our brain to make us procrastinate even longer when we are doing something more pleasurable than the task that we should be doing; well at least for me.
There are many different reasons for why people decide to procrastinate in the first place, but I believe what causes people to prolong their procrastination is the same for everybody. People get addicted to the pleasurable thing that they are doing. This explains why I, and many others, sometimes end up being on social media for an entire hour when we should have been doing something more productive and important. "Addicted" might seem like a harsh word since we are not talking about drugs, but anything has the potential of being addictive.
I'm the type of person that likes to get to the ROOT cause of a problem. For example, many people like to blame gangs for killings in ghettos. I, on the other hand, blame our economic system because if it wasn't for high inequality and high rates of poverty in the U.S., we would not need to worry about gangs and high rates of crime. I have the same belief with procrastination. I believe the root problem is an addiction to something that we find so pleasurable that it causes us to procrastinate longer than we intended to. The root cause is not just simply because we want to avoid doing something. It goes deeper, why do we want to avoid doing something? Simply because we're lazy? NO, it goes way deeper than that. You have to dig in your brain and find why you would rather procrastinate than accomplish a more important task that you have.
For people around my age, I feel that social media leads to the most procrastination. Social media is great for certain things, but it definitely can waste time. I want everybody to practice not doing whatever thing you find "pleasurable" that leads you to procrastinate. You don't have to stop it completely, but try to not do it as much. I know I will with social media, I don't want to end up like this guy below me.
