I Never Procrastinate...

...on what I want to do now, like eat a piece of chocolate, read a good book, or wander around the internet.

Procrastination is the gap between intention and action: a voluntary, irrational, delay despite the expectation of a potential negative outcome. Usually we procrastinate on important tasks which move us toward our goals and improve our relationships.

Procrastination costs too much in many ways. It wastes the most time and creates the most stress. It causes us anything from mild discomfort to lost opportunities and grinding worry. It undermines our performance and disturbs our well-being. It often leaves us feeling guilty and frustrated.

According to Timothy Pychyl, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology at Carlton University, Ottawa, who has been researching procrastination since 1995, everyone procrastinates, but some of us definitely do it more than others.

In my case, for many years I believed that “I work better under pressure.” I believed this because, in my 20’s and 30’s, I was often able to rush at the last minute and still do a credible job - at least in my own eyes. But according to Pychyl’s research, procrastination results in less time to do a thorough job, so my performance was probably not as good as it could have been.

But a bigger problem arises out of believing you work better under pressure. You will inevitably get promoted to a position where you cannot get away with last minute scrambles. You are at your level of incompetence. At that point, you will have a lifetime habit you need to change quickly. This requires clear understanding and persistent effort.

It is bad enough that procrastination may be negatively affecting your performance at work, but what if it is also affecting your relationships with your spouse, your children, and other people you care about? What are the things you intended to do for someone else, but just didn’t do?

The stress of procrastinating and then trying to get too much done in too little time is bad enough, but some of us procrastinate in taking care of our health. We procrastinate on exercising regularly, shopping for and eating the right foods, and getting to bed on time. When you are on the hospital gurney, it is too late to wish you had developed healthy habits.

Here are some procrastination Do and Don’t suggestions that have helped me:

• DO start sooner than you think you need to.
• DO turn off all social media and email alerts.
• DON'T fall into “This will only take a minute” trap.
• DO block off time and space early in your day.
• DO protect your willpower. See Strengthen your Willpower on my blog.
• DO know you will “be in the mood” to do the work once you are well started.
• DON'T strive for perfection.
• DO the best you can with the time and energy you have now. If you get interrupted, ask, “Does this have to be done right now?” See Kelly Swanson’s article.
• DO try focus@will for music to help you concentrate.
• DO specify the what, the when, the where, and the how you will accomplish the task.
• DO forgive yourself for lost opportunities due to your procrastination.
• DO say, “Done is better than perfect.”
• DO be kind to yourself; expect two steps forward and one step back as you reduce your procrastination.

For additional inspiration, please check Tim Pychyl’s Procrastination Research Group Home page. Enjoy the video and the other tips.

photo by sean94110 / Flickr

Sculpt Your Brain

From my reading about brains and minds, I have become convinced that we can compensate for many weaknesses in our own brains by deliberately stimulating the weak part of the brain. For most of us, that is not a big deal until we start to notice that our brains are aging. Then it gets important pretty quickly. If you have any doubt about how much control you have over keeping your brain firing on all cylinders well into your 90’s, please read on.

We have Learning Disabilities in our family, so The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: How I Left My Learning Disability Behind and Other Stories of Cognitive Transformation by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young gave me hope.

Barbara’s book explains how she developed a brilliant auditory and visual memory in her struggle to compensate for several severe learning disabilities. By sheer dogged persistence, she graduated from high school, then university. Later she was accepted for graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and here her struggles continued.

To understand a research paper, she often had to read it twenty times. Everything involving reading, writing, and thinking took persistent repetition before she could derive any sense from it. In fact, she did not learn to tell time from clocks until she discovered just how to remediate her many deficits.

Barbara had tried the typical treatments for Learning Disabilities which involved 'compensation'. People who had difficulty reading were told to listen to audio tapes of the information. Those who were 'slow' writing, were given extra time in exams or were allowed to take exams orally. If they had trouble following an argument, they were taught to colour-code the key points. The problem with these compensation techniques, is that the person using them could get through certain academic challenges, but their deficits in reading, writing, or doing math did not change.

In fact, Barbara’s Master’s degree thesis on the results of her study of children with learning disabilities being treated with compensations at the OISE clinic showed that most were not really improving.

One day, a friend urged her to read some books by Aleksandr Luria, a Russian neurophysiologist who studied people with brain injuries. She read about Zazetsky, a soldier who had been wounded at the juncture of his parietal and occipital lobes and had trouble with grammar, logic, and reading clocks – just like Barbara did.

She then knew that she had deficits in a particular area of her brain, but she had no idea what to do about it.

At age 28 and still in graduate school, but getting more and more exhausted and depressed, she read a paper by Professor Mark Rosenzweig who had studied rats in stimulating and non-stimulating environments. He found that the rats in the stimulating environments had heavier brains, with more blood supply and more neurotransmitters than those in non-stimulating environments. He was one of the first scientists to show brain neuroplasticity, the possibility that stimulating certain nerve cells in the brain could lead to changes in the wiring of the brain.

Barbara designed a series of exercises for herself to stimulate her weakest function – the ability to relate symbols. One exercise involved reading hundreds of cards showing clock faces with different times on the front and the correct time on the back. The clock faces started out showing simple times with just two hands, and advanced to having second hands and even sixtieths-of-a-second hands. After weeks of daily drilling, she could not only read clocks faster than average, but she was able to grasp grammar, math, and logic. Gradually, she developed and drilled on other weaknesses for her spatial, kinesthetic, and visual disabilities, and brought them up to average level.

She then started designing exercises for children and adults who had various learning disabilities. Barbara’s Arrowsmith School in Toronto has been running for thirty years and has helped thousands of children and adults strengthen the various weaknesses in their brains.

After months, sometimes two or three years, of daily drilling under the direction of teachers trained by Barbara, these children and adults can return successfully to standard school or university programs. Over the years, Barbara and her team have developed exercises for the nineteen brain areas most commonly weakened in people with learning disabilities. There are now Arrowsmith programs in 35 schools across Canada and around the world. To learn more about these schools, please visit arrowsmithschool.org.

If you don’t want to take the time to read her book, then check into her website (barbaraarrowsmithyoung.com) and click on Articles, where there are many, many articles you will find very interesting. If you really want to understand the detail behind her breakthrough ability to help so many people with learning disabilities, read the article there called Building a Better Brain (.pdf) by Norman Doidge, MD.

Instead, consider the possibility that any man could, if he were so inclined,
be the sculptor of his own brain, and that even the least gifted may,
like the poorest land that has been well cultivated and fertilized,
produce an abundant harvest.

 - Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852–1934), Spanish neuroscientist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1906

Build and Condition Your Brain

If you were offered a pill that could do the following for your brain...

• Increase the growth of brain cells in your memory centre (hippocampus)
• Improve blood flow and nutrition to your whole brain
• Enhance your ability to learn and remember
• Improve your daily mood
• Delay the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer’s

...would you take the pill?

Most of us would say "yes". But you don’t have to take a pill to get these benefits. All you have to do is exercise regularly and you can have all of the advantages above and more. In fact, the more you exercise, the more advantages you can accumulate. The easiest way to get more power from your brain is to take part in aerobic exercise for 20 to 30 minutes preferably daily, but at least 3 times a week.

Aerobic exercise is where you move the big muscles in your legs, hips, and your arms, as when you walk briskly, run, or swim, or use one of the cardio machines at your gym. This movement increases your heart rate and the depth of your breathing. This gets more oxygen into your blood which fires up the recovery process in your muscles and your brain neurons. As Dr. John Ratey explains in his book Spark: The revolutionary science of exercise and the brain:

“It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes.”

In fact, Dr. Ratey has been quoted as referring to one of these proteins as “Miracle-Gro for the brain”.

If you need some more motivation, take a look at the YouTube video, 23 and 1/2 Hours by Dr. Mike Evans.

An easy way to start an exercise program is to start counting the number of steps you walk per day. You will need a pedometer, or you might want to go high tech and get a fitbit, which will track steps, distance, calories burned and even stairs climbed.

Here is what my friend Jeannette Folin says about using a fitbit.

“Being self-employed, I always thought my time was best spent working on generating income, not exercising. But after using the fitbit to track my daily exercise, I quickly discovered that I was billing 10-15% more hours during the weeks when I got at least 45 minutes of exercise a day. And now I realize that the exercise was boosting my physical AND mental energy levels.” 

When you have some hard intellectual work to do or some important decisions to make, take 10 minutes first to climb the stairs in your building or take a brisk walk around the block. Then come back to your desk and reap the benefits of your re-charged brain for the next hour.

Disputing Your Irrational Thoughts

That *** makes me so mad!!

It feels as if ***'s behaviour instantaneously makes us angry, but really it is our own thinking that is making us that way. When we tell our subconscious, "*** should listen to me," when clearly *** is not listening to you, your subconscious will get very angry or anxious because it believes exactly what you're telling it.

But in your conscious mind, you know that other people don't often do what you think they should or shouldn't. It would be nice (but a little crazy) if everybody behaved exactly as you think they should.

In fact, you don't even behave as you think you should behave sometimes.

How often have you told yourself you should or shouldn’t do something, and then just ignored your own advice? It’s more rational to recognize that, although you would rather other people behave as you’d prefer, getting angry and frustrated about it is like getting angry with the weather. The following chart outlines popular Irrational Thoughts and the corresponding Rational Disputes that will give you more power.

You can use the chart below to reduce your stress about a situation that has caused you trouble in the past and that you anticipate may happen again.

Imagine you are in the middle of the situation again, for example – missing a deadline with your boss. Enter that as A, the Activating Event. Then, continue to imagine yourself in the middle of the situation, and record the different strong, unpleasant feelings under C, Consequences. Choose one of the strongest, most unpleasant feelings. Visualize yourself in the middle of the situation, feeling that feeling, and record the exact words you were probably saying to yourself at the time. For example,” My boss will be really angry with me.” Record your words under B. Then say to yourself, “If she is really angry with me, that means _____” and record the words that next come to mind. If _____, that means _____ - until you find yourself writing down an irrational thought (as described above). Then choose a Dispute that makes sense to you and record it under D, Dispute. Whenever you start getting uncomfortable about the issue, say the Dispute firmly to yourself as often as you need to until you feel strong enough to handle it differently.

The next time that situation arises, and you begin to feel those strong, uncomfortable feelings, say the Dispute to yourself several times and notice how your feelings change.

As you practice Rational Thinking, you will find that you can turn difficult situations into interesting challenges and even opportunities for growth. Listen to your thoughts, identify when they’re becoming irrational, and figure out a rational dispute.

photo by peretzp/Flickr

Am I at Risk for Alzheimer’s?

Joan and Shirley don’t know each other, but they’d enjoyed similar careers. Each was a well-respected accountant who became Chief Financial Officer of her organization. After years of demanding work, each retired about seven years ago.

Joan followed her passion for fly fishing and now has her own TV program. She’s having a ball.

Shirley watches TV all day. She needs constant care in a nursing home. Shirley has Alzheimer’s.

So why is Joan living the good life and Shirley doesn’t know what life she is living? There’s evidence that it might be, in part, because Joan took care of her brain and Shirley didn’t even realize she needed to.

In her forties, Joan noticed she was gaining weight and slowing down. About the same time, her older brother had a mild heart attack and took early retirement. That was enough for Joan. She installed a machine in her family room and exercised every morning. As she was developing an interest in fly fishing at the time, she started watching instructional videos while exercising. She used the same approach to learn Spanish as she prepared for fishing trips to Costa Rica and Argentina. Combining exercising with learning worked well for Joan.

Shirley also gained weight in her forties, but she was too busy to exercise. In her fifties, her doctor warned that her blood pressure was elevated and she should change her lifestyle. Shirley tried, but her job required regular travel and entertaining, so exercising and adjusting her diet was difficult. About five years before she retired, her new boss turned out to be a bully. Shirley stood up to him, but the stress took a toll and she developed full-blown high blood pressure.

When Joan had found herself in a particularly stressful period at work, she recruited a coach to help tackle her problems with less stress. At retirement, Joan started walking 30 minutes a day and weight lifting three times a week. She started thinking about the benefits of fly fishing. She decided to encourage more women, especially those recovering from cancer, to take up the sport. Gradually her interest built into a weekly TV program and a reputation as an expert.

Watch this YouTube video by Dr. Helena Popovic called "A Daughter’s Determination to Defeat Dementia". It will give you loads of valuable information that Shirley needed, but never received.

By the time Shirley retired, her doctor was encouraging her to lose 20 pounds and get her blood pressure under control. She tried for a while, and then decided it was time to see the world. Over the next two years, she visited Australia, Africa, and Europe. But it was difficult to exercise regularly and she gained another 10 pounds. One day in Italy, she tripped on cobblestones and broke an ankle. When she got home her ankle had to be operated on and the bone pinned. It took six months to heal. She kept meaning to exercise more. She even joined a gym. But during her convalescence she had gained more pounds and was uncomfortable about her appearance. She abandoned the gym.

In their early forties, Joan and Shirley had equal risk factors for Alzheimer’s. But, as they grew older, Shirley’s risk factors increased while Joan’s stayed level.

Resolve that during 2014, you will reduce your risk factors for Alzheimer’s by:

• Taking a brisk walk, swim, run, or stair climb every other day
• Reducing your risks of hypertension or diabetes, by reaching your goal weight
• Learning something that engages and challenges you weekly, if not daily

It was well over 2,000 years ago when China’s Yellow Emperor wrote,

"Maintaining order rather than correcting disorder is the ultimate principle of wisdom. To cure a disease after it has manifest is like digging a well when one feels thirsty, or forging a weapon when the war has already begun."

You might want to read Halina St. James’ article after she met Dr. Popovic at the Global Speakers Summit in Vancouver last December.

photo by kaotso/Flickr