It’s a Sunday afternoon and after the post-lunch siesta, I wake up to a mixed feeling of having lost out, being left behind, guilty, and filled with self-doubt - a sense of dejà vu.
Familiar with it; deep
down I know that this will continue till I reach the office and start taking up
things. I have lived through this feeling since my adolescence and only
recently realized that many adults like me do undergo this feeling routinely
and it has a name.
It is called ‘Sunday
Blues’.
Research shows that about
66% of the respondents in the UK experience ‘Sunday Blues’ anxiety triggered by
thoughts of work the following day. Things are also the same here it seems. For
someone who has a punishing 6-day work schedule wasting 50% of his weekend time
in a state of gloom is not happy news. Also, not good news for a professional
who is suffering from work-related anxieties regularly.
What we are seeing here is the
beginning of stress.
In our professional lives,
we have to commit ourselves to some delivery. At the beginning of our career,
we are pretty comfortable delivering and very few works get postponed. But as we
grow in age other important tasks of personal nature like health issues in the
family, social commitments, and many unforeseen events make us defer things
more. In the process, only the ‘Urgent’ ones get the attention and the ones
that are also ‘Important’ gets postponed. And one day the long list of
unfinished ‘Important’ things jostles for engagement with the ’Urgent’ things of
that moment causing what is called Stress.
Simply put, Stress is our
inability to deal with the task which we have committed to do on that day.
And staying under a long
period of stress does irreparable damage to one’s mind and body affecting his
personal and professional life. A huge industry exists to solve this problem because a large number
of people can’t get their acts together to refuse what they can’t deliver what they are expected to by the scheduled days. The sincere types who
are aware of their postponement acts suffer the guilt of doing so and start
seeing themselves as habitual ‘Procrastinators’ and resign to that
nomenclature.
Experts say that there are
no Procrastinators but there are many who are in the habit of procrastinating.
What then is the habit of
procrastinating?
The anatomy of habit has
three basic components. There is a Trigger, there is a Pattern and there is a
Reward for doing so. Here the jostling of 'Urgent’ and ‘Important’ fight for space and attention and that results in stress. This stress acts as a trigger for the Reaction. As
deferring some of the not-so-urgent tasks gives us temporary relief, it acts as
a reward for someone to develop a pattern of such deferment.
We all know how the act of
organizing the cupboard, our wardrobe, the file cabinet, or the travel
documents for reimbursements gets deferred for months and months and we develop
some fear of touching it. But one day it confronts us to be taken up because by
then we would have exhausted all our excuses, it adds to the existing stress.
Once we give in to the pattern of procrastinating it results in our feeling
guilty, which causes panic and makes us take more and newer excuses to
procrastinate further.
Many of us helplessly
surrender to a downward spiralling loop of stress and guilt unless something
throws us out of it. Many people in the creative field suffer from this infamy
as more mental focus and discipline are required to deliver creative content as
opposed to those who do repetitive and routine work.
Experts say that nothing
can help us come out of this loop unless we help ourselves out of it.
They say that the core of the problem lies in giving in to the stress and reacting to it by deferring the pending tasks and enjoying temporary relief.
They say that of all the tasks
which you are too tempted to defer, at least if one task is accommodated in
that days scheduled and pushed to some start; one can complete the task soon if
he gets over the fear of restarting it. And completing one such task fuels the
confidence to complete all others.
That is the only way to
deal with it - to take the bull by its horn.
