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50 End Procrastination Now!

mood by what you think and how you view what is upcom-
ing for you to do. A pervasive gray mood may predispose you
to avoid some productive activities that you might otherwise
engage in.
• We can create emotions through the images we conjure up
in our minds. Method actors have known this for more than
a century: if you want to feel angry, reconstruct an angry
event in your mind. You can also act out pleasant emotions
and constructive habits and use these experiments to build
confidence in yourself as a change maker.
• Threat and pleasure cognitions stir emotions. These emotive
cognitions are caused by what you think. Preexisting moods
may influence these interpretations, evaluations, and beliefs.
These emotive cognitions interact with behaviors.

Emotions are distinguishable. You know when you’re sad,
happy, or angered, but emotions can also feel confusing. You can
have more than one view of a situation and experience mixed emo-
tions. Some emotions seem so general, persistent, and unpleasant
that you may do anything you can to dull them. Emotional pro-
crastination involves avoiding productive situations that you as-
sociate with unpleasant emotions. This omission can slow progress.
You see complexity, unpleasantness, or threat in various tasks, so
you back off from them. For example, do you find yourself putting
off things like fixing a leaky faucet, giving bad news, or avoiding
someone who will ask you about your progress on a project that
you are also putting off? When you retreat, you act like you were
telling yourself that the task is too unpleasant or tough to do right
now, but you’ll get to it later. When the event, emotion, explana-
tion, and behavioral diversions merge, dealing with these procras-
tination complications can seem like pulling out the ingredients
from a spaghetti sauce. However, that’s not so much the case here.
Pulling out one area for corrective action may influence the others.
The question is where to place the emphasis. When negative emo-