Sunday Blues And Our Perpetual Fight With Procrastination

It’s a Sunday afternoon and after the post-lunch siesta, I wake up to a mixed feeling of having lost out, being left behind, guilty, and filled with self-doubt — a sense of dejà vu.

Too familiar with it. Deep down I know that this will continue till I reach office and start taking up things. I have lived through this feeling since my adolescence and only recently realised that many adults like me do undergo this feeling routinely and it has a name.

It is called ‘Sunday Blues’.

Research shows that about 66% of the respondents in the UK experience ‘Sunday Blues’ anxiety, triggered by thoughts of work the following day. Things are also the same here it seems. For someone who has a punishing six-day work schedule, wasting 50% of his weekend time in a state of gloom is not happy news. Also not good news for a professional who is suffering from work-related anxieties regularly.

What we are seeing is the beginning of stress.

In our professional lives, we have to commit ourselves to some delivery. At the beginning of our career, we are quite comfortable delivering and very few works get postponed. But as we grow in age, other important issues of personal nature like health, social commitments, and some unforeseen events make us defer things. In the process, only the ‘urgent’ ones get the attention and the ones that are also ‘important’ get postponed. And one day the long list of unfinished ‘important’ things jostle for attention with the ’urgent’ things of that moment, causing what is called stress.

Simply put, stress is our inability to deal with the task which we have committed to do on that day.

And staying under a long period of stress does irreparable damage to one’s mind and body, affecting his personal and professional life. A huge industry exists because a large number of people can’t get their acts together to refuse what they can’t do to deliver what they are expected to deliver on the scheduled days. The sincere types who are aware of their postponement acts suffer the guilt of doing so and start seeing themselves as habitual ‘procrastinators’ and resign to that nomenclature.

Experts say that there are no procrastinators but there are many who are in the habit of procrastinating.

What then is the habit of procrastinating?

The anatomy of habit has three basic components. There is a trigger, there is a pattern and there is a reward for doing so. Here the jostling of ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ fight for attention and results in stress which acts as a trigger for a reaction. As deferring some of the not-so-urgent tasks gives us temporary relief, it acts as a reward for someone to develop a pattern of such deferment.

We all know how the act of organising the cupboard, our wardrobe, the file cabinet, or the travel documents for reimbursements gets deferred for months and months, and we develop some fear to touch it. But one day it confronts us to be taken up because by then we would have exhausted all our excuses, it adds to the existing stress. Once we give in to the pattern of procrastinating, it results in our feeling guilty, which causes panic and makes us look for newer excuses to procrastinate further.

Many of us helplessly surrender to a downward spiralling loop of stress and guilt unless something throws us out of it. Many people in the creative field suffer from this infamy as more mental focus and discipline are required to deliver creative content as opposed to those who do repetitive and routine work.

Experts say that nothing can help us come out of this loop unless we help ourselves out of it.

They say that the core of the problem lies in giving in to the stress and reacting to it by deferring the pending tasks and enjoying temporary relief. They say that of all the tasks which you are too tempted to defer, at least if one task is accommodated in that day’s schedule and pushed to some start; one can complete the task soon if he gets over the fear of restarting it. And completing one such task fuels the confidence to complete all others.

That is the only way to deal with it.