Anxiety And Procrastination At Work

Can Anxiety cause Procrastination?

Absolutely.

Anxiety and Low Mood can both result in Procrastination at work.

In this article, I’m going to take a closer look at what Procrastination is, and how to help yourself if you struggle with Anxiety AND procrastination.

Let’s start with Procrastination:

First of all, people mistake procrastination for “laziness”. They talk about it as if it was some nasty character flaw.

But procrastination has nothing to do with being ‘lazy’, especially if it’s caused by anxiety and/or low mood.

People will often use definitions like, “putting off”, “postponing”, “delaying”, “deferring”, “leaving to the last minute” – all of which are valid.

We could say that procrastination is:

“Making a decision for no valid reason to delay or not complete a task or goal you’ve committed too, and instead doing something of lesser importance, despite there being negative consequences to not following through on the original task or goal.”

How does Anxiety contribute to Procrastination?

Anxiety has a massive impact on our:

• Energy levels. We are so absorbed by our worries, we tend to have very little energy left for the actual work.

• Productivity. Again, if we are constantly ‘scanning’ for threats and preparing our response to that perceived threat, we have very little time and energy to do our work.

  When we feel OVERWHELMED at work, we tend to procrastinate.

Procrastination helps us ‘escape’ and/or ‘avoid’ tasks (or people) we deem as scary, overwhelming, too difficult, too much and so on.

Anxiety causes us to:

• Over-estimate the problem, and;

• Under-estimate our abilities to cope with the problem.

Procrastination serves as a coping mechanism to help us ‘survive’ these overwhelming situations.

What can you do right now to help yourself tackle both Anxiety (underlying issues) AND Procrastination?

Change starts with Self-Awareness and Understanding.

In order to change something, we first need to UNDERSTAND why we do what we do.

In my free workshops, I’m going over psychological and physical responses of Anxiety & Worry to help you understand WHY you worry and why it’s taking so much valuable energy out of you.

Start with *Understanding Worry* workshop:

Next, watch my Psycho-Educational workshop on *Procrastination*:

Each workshop comes with valuable, easy-to-use freebies that I’d recommend you download.

Everything starts with understanding. Don’t skip this step.

*Do you struggle with Anxiety & Procrastination? Book Complimentary Consultation to talk about Psychotherapy support:

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