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Flex Your Emotional Muscle to Overcome Procrastination 49

• Discover a simple-easy conflict that can interfere with your
productive choices, and learn to see through that conflict.
• Find the key to a double-agenda dilemma that, if left
undetected, can leave you baffled why you procrastinate
when you tell yourself you want to go a different way. You’ll
learn to redirect your efforts by putting the emphasis on the
right syllable.
• Use a cognitive action exercise for putting the dilemma into
perspective and giving weight to a realistic view.
• Learn how to free yourself from procrastination impulses
and put yourself on a purposeful and productive cognitive,
emotive, and behavioral path by slowing down, creating a
productive perspective, and acting on that perspective.

Emotional Procrastination

Procrastination has a strong emotional component. I’ve seen hun-
dreds of people who complained about their procrastination who
either don’t tune into their procrastination emotions, recoil from
them, or ignore them. Emotional conditions associated with forms
of procrastination are varied and complicated, and in the following
I point to some of these complications:

• You may get emotional signals following perceptions of up-
coming productive activities that you view as ego-threatening
(a threat to your sense of worth or image) or uncomfortable.
These threat sensations can range from whispers of unpleas-
ant emotions to a distinctive emotion of anxiety or fear. Either
the whisper of unpleasant emotion or the emotion may be
sufficient to divert you from the activity you connect to it.
• Procrastination may be affected by mood. Moods are a gray
area of consciousness; they can reflect your disposition, your
temperament, your circadian rhythms, your sleep patterns,
barometric changes, and other such factors. You can create a