Procrastinating 101--Reactance, Revenge, and Regret, Oh My!

We are presently spending our "Procrastinating 101" Tuesdays with Dr. Joseph R. Ferrari's Still Procrastinating?  The No-Regrets Guide to Getting it Done.  This week, the focus is on Chapter 8, "The Three R's of Procrastination:  Reactance, Revenge and Regret." 

Maybe it's just me, but I am having difficulty throughout this book accessing Dr. Ferrari's logical structure, or breaking his code.  This problem arises again in Chapter 8.  

I find the chapter a mixed bag, literally.  Ferrari speaks of the three r's as "three ways of dealing with anger," and as all being related to procrastination (hence their inclusion in the book, obviously).  The kind of anger he posits, specifically, is that which results from our feeling controlled--that someone else is telling us to do something.  

He begins with this umbrella statement:

Many procrastinators overreact and/or use revenge to deal with their anger, and others do nothing worthwhile with their anger and suffer through lives of regret.

He  continues:

Some psychologists label the tendency to overreact in a violent [sic] way reactance:  reacting against pressure to engage in a task.  Social psychologists report that reactance occurs when a person feels that his or her personal control and freedom are taken away.

Already, I'm getting tangled up in subtleties.  To start with, he mentions violence, but none of the examples he discusses subsequently involve anything more violent than arriving late to meetings.  And what is the significance of mentioning social psychologists separately? Are we to understand that "some psychologists" came up with the label, and that "social psychologists" discovered its cause?  And what, if any, difference does it make?

The next section entitled "'Sorry I'm Late':  Apology or Apathy?," deals with the aforementioned nonviolent meeting tardiness.  Ferrari suggests that some late arrivals at meetings can be a form of reactance, expressing anger at having to interrupt our work to attend yet another meeting.  But I begin to get confused again when he says that latecomers also may be "getting revenge against you and others at the meeting by arriving late."  

The distinction seems tremendously nuanced to me, almost beyond the point of being distinguishable.  If the straggler thinks in terms of 

How dare you ask for a meeting when I am so busy--imposing your need for discussion on me when I have more important things to do?  Well, I'm doing my projects first, before I go to your silly meeting,

we are looking at reactance.  But if said feet-dragger has 

perceived past meetings or interactions to be unfavorable to himself or herself. . . , felt hurt by something that occurred and, by being late for future meetings can get back at the group for not respecting him or her," 

then that's revenge rearing its ugly little procrastinating head.


Ferrari further confounds things for at least this reader by tacking on a paragraph concerning regret--which doesn't seem to mention anger.  He asserts that some "latecomers [may] feel regret from being late."  He ends the section by reiterating the "chapter purpose" of the first section:  "In this chapter, I'll talk about procrastination that is motivated by reactance, revenge, and regret."  But this time he leaves out anger.

Ferrari goes on to explore "Reactance:  'O, Yeah?  Just for That I Won't Do It!'" I have written here before about "reactance," without using the term--which I find a bit clumsy.  Dr. Neil Fiore speaks about resentment as it affects procrastination, and that seems to me to be quite similar to what Ferrari means by reactance.  He delineates three possible responses to feeling that our "personal freedom has been disregarded:"

1.  Go along with the "demand."
2.  React with open aggression, yelling and throwing things at the person.
3.  Use reactance.

Procrastination in this scheme is a type of reactance.

But here's where Ferrari loses me again.  He cites a 2009 study

titled "The Loyalty Deficit" report[ing] . . . that many British workers . . . voluntarily put in an extra six hours--almost a full day--her week of unpaid overtime. . . . Many of these British employees were so unhappy in their jobs that they hoped to find new jobs as soon as possible. . . . [T]he extra demands placed on the workers were causing a breakdown of trust and commitment between employers and emplyees.  Overworked and underpaid.  Underappreciated and overextended.  Reactance is brewing here.

Indeed.

Ferrari's solution?  Employers should provide "onsite day care centers, concierge services, and referrals for professional resources."  Like, maybe, therapy?  Massage?  Coronary care?  Coming as I do from the current brouhaha in my state over workers' rights, I can't help thinking that maybe these employees' anger, leading to "reactance," is in fact quite justified.  And unlikely to be mollified by palliative measures or tossed bones that do nothing to address the issue of basic human capacities being stretched to the breaking point.

Ferrari would have the worker be more of a "team player."

Instead of using procrastination, use your skills to talk to others in a friendly and approachable manner.  Try to understand why they need that task done now, and attempt to meet their needs.

I don't think the soon-to-be-defunct AFSCME union members are going to buy that approach.

Ferrari follows his discussion of reactance with a section entitled "Taking Revenge the Passive/Aggressive Way."  And this one I get.  It provides a straightforward description of how some of us drag our feet because we feel we've been unfairly dealt with.  And his admonitions, which basically amount to "grow up" and "get over it," seem reasonable to me.  An interesting wrinkle is his mention of research demonstrating a correlation between seeking revenge and procrastinating.  The study, however, does not reveal the nature of the relationship--just that the two behaviors coexist in some people.

And now we come to regret--"Are Your Regrets Too Few or Too Many to Mention?"  Ferrari details some interesting research findings concerning regret, including its near universality; the experiences that engender it; and differences and similarities in the types of regret reported by procrastinators and nonprocrastinators.  What he doesn't discuss, despite his "tell the readers what you're going to tell them" introduction, is anger, and its relationship to regret. 

As I read what Dr. Ferrari has written, it appears that reactance and revenge drive procrastination, and regret results from it.  I don't see how regret is a way of dealing with anger, as originally outlined.

Overall, not the most satisfying of chapters, or especially practicable.  But maybe I'm just showing reactance.  And maybe I'll live to regret it.

Out of Steam

I have somehow contracted a serious case of the I-don't-wannas.  All week, I've been refusing to get up early, to get dressed, to get down to work, to attend class, to answer the phone, to deal with emails, to exercise--in short, to tend to much of what usually makes up my life.  And now, I-don't-wanna blog, and I-don't-wanna cook dinner.  And it's my turn.  I know, because I made up the schedule.

I have all sorts of excuses.  I still haven't shaken the dreary cold my grandson gave me a couple of weeks ago.  I attended an exhausting out-of-town training the end of last week, and am still dealing with a free time deficit.  We've been snowed-in the last couple of days.  My grandson is sick again--a new illness--and is disrupting his mother's, and thus my, schedule.  But mostly, if I'm honest, I-just-don't-wanna.

I suspect I have run out of self-control; just like the Heath brothers warned, in Switch.  I'm tired of the grown-up me bossing the profligate me around, judging my time-wasting and focus-lacking self.  It seems I've gone to the "suck-it-up" well once too often lately. 


And if that's my diagnosis, my treatment plan for this acute malady is to go to my minimalist gear.  So for the next few days, I'm going to lay off me, to do the things I pretty much have to, and not much else.  I need to stop ruling myself, before I go on strike for real. 

Procrastinating 101: Working on Language

Dr. Neil Fiore wants us to talk to ourselves.  He just doesn't like what we are saying, much of the time.  (See above.)


Dr. Fiore is the author of The Now Habit:  A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, which I have been examining in my Tuesday Procrastinating 101 posts for the last few weeks.  In the chapter on "How to Talk to Yourself," Fiore elaborates on how resentment fuels procrastination.  In his view, when we experience alienation from the work we have to do, we adopt a victim mentality.   We perceive "others" or "them" as dictating what we must do.  This sets up an internal conflict between the self that must resist such "threat[s] to [its] integrity", and the self that attempts to direct us to accomplish the imposed task.  The conflict can be experienced as either a stress response or a depressive response.  (Or if we're really lucky, both!)  


According to Fiore, we can observe this mechanism at work by becoming aware of our language, or self-talk.  When we work from resentment, we tell ourselves, and often complain to others, that we "should" do this, and we "have to" do that.  When we use these words, says Fiore, we communicate to the subconscious mind

• I don't want to do it.
• They're making me do it against my will.
• I have to do it or else!--something awful and terrible will happen.  I will hate myself.
• This is a no-win situation:  if I don't do it I'll be punished; if I do it I'll be going against myself. [p.59]

Using Fiore's map, the way out of this morass is through marshaling the power of choice.  And our journey "from resistance to commitment" begins with that staple of self-help advice, learning how to say "no."  In this way, we begin to thin the number of tasks that are not of our choosing.  


Having trimmed our to do lists in this way, we can then "reprogram" our self-talk to experience the power of choice.  For this, Fiore offers "five self-statements that distinguish procrastinators from producers."  He directs us to:

• Replace "I have to" with "I choose to."
• Replace "I must finish" with "When can I start?"
• Replace "This project is so big and important" with "I can take one small step."
• Replace "I must be perfect" with "I can be perfectly human."
• Replace "I don't have time to play" with "I must take time to play." [pp.71-75]

One scary piece of advice Fiore gives is that we count the number of "should" statements we issue to ourselves in a ten-minute period.  This, he says, will give us "a good estimate of [y]our degree of depression."  I'm still working on my procrastination chart from last week--I'm a little behind in my procrastination homework.  What else is new?  But I have a feeling that when I get to this little test, I'm not going to like the results.  


In the meantime, I'm going to start on my language repair, because "I choose to."  But first, "I have to" switch off the circuit powering my oven before its malfunctioning beeping drives me insane.

Building Trust With Myself

Somewhere in all of the reading I have been doing lately about procrastination, I encountered the idea that habitually failing to do what we plan to do damages our trust in ourselves.  This made sense to me.  


As the mother of two teenagers, I find myself harping on about trust way more often than I probably should.  How "once we've broken trust with someone, it takes time to rebuild it."  How "if you want me to trust you, you have to be where you said you would be, do what you said you would do, tell me the truth," etc.


So I get the whole broken trust thing.  And I see that, like an untrustworthy child, employee, or professional service provider, I have burned myself time and time again, making it more and more difficult to believe what I say.  To myself.  A legacy of postponement and shirking.


The shrinks would probably tell us about the deep psychological meaning of dealing with ourselves in this way, about the inner battles between id and superego.  This relates in an interior way to my recent post on resentment and quasi-deliberate neglect of tasks we're not happy about.  But really.  Isn't it time I grew up, and stopped tantruming and putting myself in time out?  Stopped reacting to myself as a hated authority figure?


I think maybe the place to start mending this aspect of my relationship with myself is to get more clarity about the tasks I assign myself, and their true origin.  The part of me that breaks the promises I make to myself needs to trust the CEO in me to issue only necessary and meaningful and reasonable charges.  And the slipping-off-the-hook part of me needs to quit playing hooky, making excuses, and going missing in general.  


I'll be working on this.  And it will take time.  But I'm going to risk trusting that I can, and will make progress.

Procrastinating 101: Getting Even by Putting it Off

Since it has come to me that one of the ways I avoid finishing things is by flitting from one task to another, from one book to another, I have committed for the time being to making my way through one procrastination resource in this weekly Tuesday post.  The current volume in which I am immersed is  The Now Habit:  A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, by Neil Fiore, Ph.D.


This morning, I am considering what Dr. Fiore has to say about procrastination as a way of coping with resentment.  In his chapter on "Why We Procrastinate," Fiore spends several pages on the role of resentment.  And I see that he is once again talking about me.  And, coincidentally about my children, and former students, and others for whom I have been, at times, an authority figure.  


Fiore describes a common situation in which we perceive a task as something we "have to" do,  rather than something we have chosen to do.  (Don't get me wrong.  I acknowledge that I am guilty of putting that other stuff off, too, but for different reasons.  One dysfunctional behavior at a time, here, however.)  We may be angry about our disenfranchisement in the assignment of the task, and/or about other aspects of our relationship with the individual or institution that has the power to compel us to do things.  Procrastination is one way we can express that anger in a relatively covert way.  Kind of like a partial strike, or a "slowdown," but without union support.   


Fiore points out that, when we use procrastination in this way, we are thinking like victims, and acting out of powerlessness.  And he advises us to "get over it," and to realize that procrastination is likely to increase our difficulties, and to diminish what power we have.  He suggests that we rephrase our self-admonishments, and having made the choice to keep our job, stay in a relationship, avoid lawsuits and incarceration, and stay solvent, that we accept and state that we choose to do what is therefore necessary.  


Today, since I choose to stay out of collections, I will make the time to pay the medical bills that will suck up a substantial portion of my husband's early pension distribution.  The resentment I feel about this will not lead me into further counterproductive stalling.  And I will experience my power to make the most reasonable choice under circumstances I do not control, and can't expect to.  And save my rebellion for something that's worth it.