ADHD: Why Do We Procrastinate & How to Overcome It?

The Greatest Enemy of Success: Procrastination

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

—Emerson, Journals, 1834

Jokes about procrastination abound. The Procrastinators Society issued, in January 1995, its predictions for the year 1994: they were uncannily accurate, of course, implying some odd upside to procrasti­nation. On the other hand, the society has never successfully had an annual national meeting, because everybody puts off their planning of attending the thing to the last minute, by which time it’s already over or been canceled.

In small doses, procrastination can be cute. It can even be useful. One of the time management strategies that’s often taught to businesspeople is to only read your mail once or twice a week, and then answer it all at once. A similar strategy is to never return a call the first time, or never to take calls when they come in, but to batch them together for a day or two. Then, like the mail, allocate an hour or two to return them all at once.

The rationale for the former strategy is that most calls are about “problems” that will simply go away if they’re ignored, and the latter is a way of concentrating effort on one thing at a time.

But chronic procrastination, the type that permeates every part of our lives, is a different thing and can be very destructive. It’s part of the suggested diagnostic criteria for ADHD in adults proposed by Drs. Hallowell and Ratey, and is a constant source of difficulty for virtually every Hunter I’ve ever met.

■ Why do we procrastinate?

One of the more widely-accepted theses about ADHD is that the hyperactivity often associated with it is not the result of the person being in an over-aroused state. While that’s what it looks like from the outside, as noted earlier, more and more scientists are now postulating that the person is under-aroused, that they feel like they’re slipping away, drifting off, and having a hard time focusing on the events or details of the moment. They possibly even may feel like they’re drifting away from experiencing living at that moment.

In response to this under-arousal of the brain, they behave the same way a non-buoyant swimmer would: they periodically lurch up through the surface of arousal to gasp a deep breath of air.

These lurches up through the surface of arousal we see as hyperactive behavior: the person makes an inappropriate remark, jumps up and paces around, starts a fight, provokes someone, makes a joke, speaks out of turn, or somehow creates a crisis.

But none of it’s coming from their being over-stimulated in the first place—instead, it’s the result of their being under-stimulated. These eruptive behaviors are attempts to bring on an adrenaline surge that will shock the brain into awareness, wake them up, and give them the few moments of focus that’s necessary to re-orient them.

This also may explain why so many children and adults with ADHD are sugar junkies. Sugar gives the brain a jolt, since it’s the raw material that the brain runs on. That jolt pushes them up and through the arousal surface that they feel just above their heads. The unfortunate part is that sugar jolting usually leads to sugar crashing, as the blood sugar is re-balanced by the pancreas and drops back to normal (or, often, even slightly below normal) levels.

It also explains an oddity I noticed when collecting personal stories from Hunters for this and previous ADHD projects. A surprising number of people (usually requesting anonymity) commented that they were con­cerned that perhaps they were sex addicts. One woman commented that she masturbates, on average, three to five times a day. Others told tales of promiscuity that they felt helpless to control. And few had any psychological or historical reason to explain it. They weren’t sexually abused as children, and felt themselves to be largely normal in most other facets of their lives.

But if an orgasm produces a burst of adrenaline and therefore brings the person to awareness and consciousness, then this, again, confirms this hypothesis. The sexual experience is just another form of stimulation that brings them to a feeling of aliveness. In fact, one police officer and Vietnam veteran wrote that, “I feel most alive when I’m making love: the only other thing that even comes close is when I’m in a firefight.”

Joseph Campbell wrote, in The Power of Myth (1988):

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking 1 think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

So if all this is symptomatic of a person being chronically under­aroused, then procrastinating as a way of life makes perfect sense. If we put off things until they’re a crisis, then that crisis itself provides the adrenaline, the panic, the rush that brings us to awareness and aliveness and allows us to do the work, often in an extraordinary fashion.

This also fits in well with the Hunter/Farmer theory of ADHD. The reason the Hunter is out in the woods in the first place is because he’s bored and under-aroused: he wants something to hunt in order to get the juices flowing. When confronted by prey, or a predator, he then experi­ences that moment of aliveness and shifts into a state of hyperfocus to pursue the game. The “attentional deficit” vanishes, and is replaced by an attentional surplus, as he races through the forest or jungle, spear in hand, chasing after his lunch.

The cat is a good analogy from the animal kingdom that most people can relate to, although just about any of the predatory animals will do. A young housecat roams around the house, bored silly, looking for something to play with. It chases things, pokes into corners, and gets into everything. (Remember the cliche, “Curiosity killed the cat.”)

But if you’ve ever seen a cat that’s found game, standing stock still near a mouse hole or moving slowly through the grass, you are seeing a totally different attentional state. The cat has shifted from being highly distractible, in an open awareness state, to a state of total focus and concentration so intense that if you make a noise she will completely ignore you.

■ Overcoming procrastination

So, assuming for a moment that procrastination is a type of self- medication, a way of pumping up our brain’s neurotransmitters, then how do we overcome it? While it’s occasionally useful, most people would agree that living in a state of constant deadline panic is less than desirable. It often leads to substandard work because we don’t have the time to go back and do the proofreading or double-checking or careful thinking that might have produced a better product or project had we built in enough time to do the job right.

One solution is to stick with a line of work that provides the constant adrenaline jolt, and doesn’t require procrastination to bring it about. Emergency room personnel in hospitals, for example, often describe how much they love the atmosphere of crisis that surrounds “incoming wounded.” Every patient is new and different, and everyone is in crisis, be it a gunshot wound, an accident, an overdose, or an unknown problem that’s life-threatening

Combat personnel have described the near ecstasy that they expe­rience when in a fire-fight: Hemingway wrote about it, as have hundreds of others over the centuries. War correspondents for news organizations have a special glow in their eyes when they’re on the TV screen describ­ing the incoming missiles that we hear exploding in the background.

An old pilot’s cliche is that flying means hours of boredom punctu­ated by moments of sheer terror. If you pick up any of the popular magazines for and about pilots, though, you’ll see that the majority of the first-person stories dwell on those moments of terror. That’s where the juice is—where the aliveness in being a pilot is found. And when the subject of ADHD was brought up in a pilot’s discussion on CompuServe, there was a virtual avalanche of pilots self-diagnosing, and then arguing about whether it was a liability or an asset in the cockpit.

Wilson Harrell, founder of the Formula 409 Corporation and for­mer publisher of Inc. Magazine, enthusiastically and proudly points out that he’s a Hunter. When I asked him how he dealt with procrastination, he said that he’d organized his life so that the things that he’d normally procrastinate about—the paperwork and taxes and correspondence— were done by other people.

“That’s why you hire assistants and secretaries,” he told me.

And then he’s free to make his living writing (which he says gives him that high-stim jolt..as it does me), giving speeches (another good source of adrenaline), and, then in his late 70’s, flying around the world as a consul­tant to businesses with his “Total Quality Entrepreneurship” program.

Like the people in the emergency room, or those who volunteer for the riskiest combat missions, or the cops who walk the beat in the worst parts of town, Harrell has organized his life and his work to keep his stimulation level high.

After all, if you love your work and are stimulated by it, why would you ever procrastinate?

So much procrastination is caused by simple mismatches, people taking on responsibilities that they really aren’t suited for. They assume job that require farmer-type mentalities, and then find themselves in life situations that lack the regular stimulation to keep their heads above water. They procrastinate to avoid failure.

■ Find a coach to hold you to deadlines

Thomas Edison was a brilliant inventor, but he probably qualifies as one of the world’s worst businessmen. He kept poor records, made impulsive decisions, and hated the details of business. In his day there was only the tiniest fraction of the red tape that modern business people must wade through, but even that was enough to drive him to take in a series of business partners to handle the details while he went back to his beloved inventing.

This demonstrates the value of having a preceptor or coach.

When you consider the Catch-22 nature of procrastination and its possible solutions, the value of a preceptor becomes obvious. Consider:

• The situation is not yet a crisis, so it’s not interesting.
• Because it’s not interesting, we can’t build up enough enthusiasm to want to dive into it.
• So we put it off until it’s a crisis, and then we do it at the last minute.
• But when it’s done at the last minute, it’s often (usually!) not done as well as it could be.

While this strategy may work for hunting, combat, or emergency room surgery, where there are few other options than to react to things as they happen, it’s a lousy way to do the taxes, write a report, or design a sales presentation. And even the surgeon in the ER would tell you that she might have done things differently—and perhaps better — if she wasn’t under the deadline of the patient’s drifting near death.

So many solutions to procrastination fall under the umbrella of creating stimulation now, rather than later.

■ Creating short jobs

A final strategy for overcoming procrastination is to break big jobs into little pieces.

In the stories from individuals who’ve achieved success with ADHD I’ll be profiling here in future articles on this Hunter in a Farmer’s World site, you’ll find several examples of this, from writing books to doing homework. If you know that after about fifteen minutes on a boring job you begin to drift off, for example, then take that two-hour job and break it into eight parts.

Then do each part at a different time.

While this is counterintuitive to the binge-at-the-last-minute-to-get-the-rush and hyperfocus strategy that many Hunters have lived their lives by, it can be learned and is a powerful way to overcome procrastination.