Last week was much like the week before. You meant to check the oil in your car but it really wasn’t that convenient, so you put it off once again. Sure the red “check engine” light was glaring at you, but that damn thing’s been on for so long that it hardly registers. The smell of smoldering oil radiating from your car’s hood is harder to ignore. Is it finally time to get your oil changed? No, of course not. Deep down you know that you really should have done this task months ago. Years of engine life have evaporated because you keep putting off a trivial chore.

So you think to yourself, “Am I crazy?” Is this inability to do things that I know need doing, at great long-term cost, a sign of mental illness?

We don’t use the term “crazy” in clinical diagnosis any more; it has too much baggage and patients don’t like it. So frame the question this way: Do I have a mental disorder that makes me procrastinate? There are a few psychologists who would argue that you need to begin regular sessions of cognitive therapy right away to overcome your dilly-dallying. But I’m not one of them.

Since 95% of people admit to procrastinating, does the entire world suffer from some sort of neurosis? Unlikely. In his book SHAM, Steve Salerno critiques the self-help industry for making everyone into a victim and everything into a disorder. I agree. The human race has procrastinated since the dawn of history [or, for as long as we have written records]—putting things off is part of our DNA. It may not be one of our better traits, but it is human.

Still, there is a grain of truth in the idea that procrastination reflects a mental disorder. I didn’t emphasize this in my book, The Procrastination Equation, as it is the exception rather than the rule, but it is only fair to give the other side. There are a few clinical conditions that create or are at least thought to create procrastination. You might as well get the entire picture here.

Here are the most significant mental disorders that may contribute to procrastination.

Depression

Last month, a reader wrote to me asking whether losing his job and his long-term relationship could have contributed to his procrastination. “Most definitely so,” I wrote back to him. In its extreme form, depression is a crippling disease with many symptoms, and one of them is indeed procrastination. The Beck Depression Inventory, for example, will score you higher if you answer the following question in the affirmative: “I put off making decisions more than I used to.” For depressed people, any chore, including a routine oil change, can seem like just another pointless task.

Depression heightens procrastination in two major ways. First, it saps your energy, and we all tend to put things off when we get tired; being exhausted is actually the number one reason for procrastination. Second, it increases your feelings of helplessness, to the point where you feel nothing you do makes a difference. When you lack confidence in your ability to complete a task, you are much more likely to procrastinate. Still, only about 5% of people get seriously depressed, and not all of them procrastinate. So if 95% of people procrastinate in one way or another, the numbers don’t add up—depression can’t be a major cause of procrastination.

 That said, depression can be a life-threatening illness and is not to be taken lightly, regardless of whether it affects your procrastination. And if you want some help that focuses exclusively on the depression/procrastination double-whammy, I recommend the book Get It Done When You’re Depressed by Fast and Preston.

Irrational Beliefs

Irrational beliefs come in many forms, but the ones thought to be connected to procrastination have two defining features. First, they almost always get in the way of your happiness and the fulfillment of your desires. Second, they are arbitrary and can’t be disproved. If you are miserable and motivationally crippled because you think “It always has to be perfect” or “Everyone has to like me,” you harbor some irrational beliefs. 

When it comes to procrastination, the relevant forms of irrational belief are evaluation anxiety, fear of failure, and the ever-popular perfectionism. From these perspectives, an oil change could be a potentially traumatic event that speaks to your self-worth. Did you get the right oil? Did you pay too much for the service?

If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, science agrees with you; studies show that perfectionism doesn’t have a significant relationship with procrastination. Only a small percentage of the population, about 10%, report that fear of failure drives at least some of their procrastination. And other types of irrational belief are only slightly more responsible for dilly-dallying. The most significant connection between irrational beliefs and procrastination comes from low self-confidence, the same factor that came up for depression. If you don’t believe you can meet your standards or goals, be they high or low, you are less motivated to pursue them.

Self-Handicapping

Technically, self-handicapping isn’t procrastination based on the way I and others define it. To be a procrastinator, you have to believe that you are worse off for putting off, and this doesn’t appear to be the case here. Self-handicappers purposefully try to damage their own performance, including putting off their work until the last minute. This looks a lot like procrastination, but self-handicappers don’t believe they are worse off for it. They delay for a good reason—to protect a rather fragile self-esteem. They believe that no matter what they do, they will never win or be successful, and consequently shun any situation that will shine a clear light on their performance. If they put off that oil change or any other action, no one will ever know what they could have done if only they had truly tried.

Self-handicapping is the result of a past history where everything was against you. If you do self-handicap, you have my sympathy, and I truly hope you seek some assistance. The good news is that this disorder needn’t define your future. There is a solution: rational-emotive therapy, which has proven to be a very effective treatment for self-handicappers. However, I am still in agreement with Clarry Lay, the developer of the General Procrastination Scale and one of the father’s of procrastination research: “to intend to put off some activity to protect one’s self-esteem is not procrastinatory behavior.”

Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder

If there is a procrastination homeland, it is filled with people with ADHD. Reading the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual symptom checklist, it is almost as if those with ADHD were custom-tailored to be procrastinators. Being impulsive, distractible, and poorly organized will make procrastination worse for anyone. You will crave every pleasurable diversion and, being easily distractible, will find you have to make the decision to work again and again. Since people with ADHD have these qualities in spades, it is no wonder that procrastination is a big problem for them.

So does ADHD cause procrastination? Not directly. The prevalence rates of ADHD just aren’t high enough to make a causal link. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates only about 3% to 5% of children suffer from ADHD, and the numbers are even lower for adults—and that’s with a lot of people complaining that it is over-diagnosed. That said, the underlying traits that explain why those with ADHD procrastinate—being impulsive and distractible—are universal. Anyone can have these characteristics, but people with ADHD are more likely to.

Getting Treatment

In conclusion, if you suffer from a mental disorder, it could make your procrastination worse and you would probably benefit from some professional help. However, this doesn’t mean that the average procrastinator needs clinical treatment. In fact, the opposite is true.

A lot of techniques that work for everyday procrastinators—and there at least a dozen scientifically proven ones—will work for people with a mental disorder as well. In addition to whatever professional advice your therapist gives you, you might add on a few more practical tips that any good life coach should provide.

If the “check engine” light in your car is blinking, don’t rush to the psychiatrist’s couch. Your car might break down, but that doesn’t mean that you are having a break down too. Still, you should do something—cars are expensive! Try the straightforward first; here’s a simple commonsense technique from my book. Make a specific goal, like driving by your local lube shop after work tomorrow, and see what happens. I suspect that the concrete visual cue of the shop combined with its physical proximity will be enough to get you to pull right in.

Tell me how it goes.

 Click here to take “Are You a Procrastinator Quiz!”

If you want to procrastinate when you are supposed to be working, your options are bountiful and growing every day. You can go old school and do the Sudoku or crossword from the newspaper. Or, if you’re a more active type, take inspiration from the television show “Minute to Win It,” which features such diversions as Office Tennis and Coffee Topper. Season two of “The Office” put all these options together in an Office Olympics, starting off with the sport of Flunkerton.

 But if you’re like most of us, getting the entire staff involved without the boss noticing won’t really be doable. So why not just enter the digital age and do some serious surfing? It’s not like anyone can stop you.

 There are dozens of step-by-step sites detailing how to circumvent those office firewalls, with tricks like leapfrogging to the rest of the Internet by connecting first to a specially configured home computer. Add a “boss key” that hides your application when the wrong person steps into your cubicle and your downtime becomes pretty much invisible.

 Unless you overdo it, that is. People will still notice that you haven’t produced anything in weeks and that aside from using your keyboard to log on, you favor your mouse for the entire day. But do you really need this advice? A quarter of workers are already playing games at work and most entertainment and even adult websites get their heaviest traffic during those nine-to-five office hours. You are probably an expert on how to procrastinate already, which is a good thing too, because that really isn’t what we are here to talk about.

 Instead of sneaking games into work, I want to focus on making work a game. Let’s take a page from Mary Poppins, the magical British nanny who counseled us about how a spoonful of sugar can make the medicine go down. “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun,” she sang. “You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”

 The scientific term for Ms Poppins’ sugar-coating method is interest enhancement, a legitimate technique that is very helpful for overcoming procrastination (it affects the value part of The Procrastination Equation). It works because one big reason people put off tasks is because they find them especially boring or unpleasant. In 2008, Peter Gröpel and I conducted a study on this aspect of task-avoidance, entitled “A mega-trial investigation of goal setting, interest enhancement, and energy on procrastination.” A mega-trial involves an unusually large sample of participants, in this case almost ten thousand of them.

 What we found is that people who say “Yes!” to questions like “I am capable of finding the pleasant aspects of an initially unpleasant activity” or “If an activity gets boring, I can usually find a way to make it fun again” don’t tend to procrastinate. People capable of interest enhancement, of finding the joy in work, were rewarded with an increase in energy that enabled them to get stuff done. It follows that if you can do this yourself, you won’t need too much else to reduce your own procrastination. When work is fun, it doesn’t even feel like work, and you’ll find yourself doing it for pleasure, in a happy reverie.

 To make this technique work, an arbitrary goal, a stop watch or some competition is sometimes all you need. You could challenge a co-worker to see who can do the most filing by lunch hour, or challenge yourself to see if you can write that report without using the letter “u.” Find a way to keep score and off you go.

 To see this technique in action, I tracked down a few examples. There is the movie Super Troopers, by the comedy group Broken Lizard, where five Vermont state troopers weave shenanigans into their work lives; I like their cat game quite a bit. In the show “Kitchen Nightmares,” celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey creates a restaurant bingo game for waiters, with the winner being the first person to get their tables to order every single item on the menu. And Olympic swimmers will occasionally imagine a shark on their tail to make their practice more exciting.

 Personally, I get a kick out of zombie shows, particularly the new hit series “The Walking Dead.” It parallels my line of work in that it features people with severe motivational problems who are walking around but not yet fully alive. While grocery shopping, I sometimes imagine that I have to stock up on food and get home before the imminent zombie apocalypse. I find it adds some interest and urgency in choosing coffee filters and papers towels.

 So here’s the problem, and I need your help: we need more examples. A lot more. For people to benefit from this technique, we all need to see it in action and be inspired by some positive results. So how do you make your workday passable while still working? Do you imagine some fantastical world? Are you trying to beat the clock or do you have some sort of informal competition with colleagues?

 How do you make your work fun?

New Year’s resolutions are one of our best traditions. Originally devised by the Catholic Church as devotional pledges to counter “heathenish customs … dedicated to the devil-god Janus,” they combine dozens of cultural sources today. All over the world, the New Year represents a fresh start, a new beginning we can use to change the course of our lives. About fifty percent of people take part in the tradition, typically resolving to stop smoking, lose weight, or start exercising. Getting your finances under control is also a popular choice.

Making resolutions is a great idea. Compared to those who make no resolutions, resolvers are more likely to make the change. Still, it‘s too bad they only happen once a year. Resolutions may be better than nothing, but they’re not that much better. By the time January 1^st rolls around again, most of us will be making the same promises for reform once more—on average, for ten years in a row. Some time before June we will probably lapse back into our old habits. Aside from creating a new holiday that makes July 1^st a second chance to turn over a new leaf, we need to pump up the power of our resolutions so they last the full 12 months. While I can’t review in one post my entire book, The Procrastination Equation, we can deal with one element of it: expectancy or self-confidence.  

Expectancy or self-confidence is a key component of The Procrastination Equation, but be careful not to over do it. Not only can you have too little self-confidence, you can also have too much. We are going to focus on the latter of these two possibilities to help you accomplish your New Year’s resolutions. It all starts by accepting our limitations.

First, acknowledge that you can’t do it all by yourself. Most people need some help, and there are a lot of proven techniques that pump up the power of resolutions. That first step—just accepting that your will isn’t perfect—will point you in the right direction. People who try to fulfill their resolutions by willpower alone are more likely to fail. On the other hand, if you accept that you are likely to fail, then you should be more willing to learn a new trick or two that will help you succeed. None of us knows it all and there is always another tactic that might work well for you.

Second, it is important to find the sweet spot between under and over confidence. Be confident that you can eventually succeed. Millions of people have made similar changes before, including a lot of people with far less going for them than you do. But don’t be overconfident in your execution. You need to believe that you will eventually succeed, but not so much that you aren’t prepared for a stumble or two along the way. Thinking that you can do this without a hitch is a little over-optimistic, like walking a tightrope for the first time without a net. I truly hope your will never fails, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

Fortunately, success isn’t measured by how many times you stumble but by how quickly you get back on track. Keeping your lapses brief and contained is the next best thing to never having lapsed at all. To do this, you need to make a disaster recovery plan. What are you going to do when, despite the best of your intentions, you find yourself smoking cigarettes and eating desserts once again, and haven’t gone to the gym in a month?

Make plans now for reinitializing your resolutions when the inevitable slip-ups happen. Many people use that first failure as an excuse to give up completely. Called the abstinence violation effect, this is like smoking an entire pack after having one smoke or polishing off the rest of the pecan pie after one tiny forkful. But resolutions needn’t be all or nothing. You need to limit the damage as soon as it starts.

For example, if you catch yourself smoking, make a mini-goal to see how few cigarettes you can puff that night. Then, the next day, consider upping your game by getting assistance from one of the myriad of smoking cessation programs around. The same strategy works for any resolution. Focus on reducing the number of violations and shortening the time it will take you to get back on track. This is a reasonable aspiration and a way to make real progress towards your goals without feeling like a failure for being fallible. 

Finally, don’t underestimate the power of temptations. Right now, calmly making our plans, we can’t fully appreciate how much that couch will beckon or how loudly that chocolate chip cookie will call out to us. We can’t hear their call when we are quick to satisfy such urges; but when we stop giving into them, they will only increase in volume. Be warned—there will be times when our cravings will feel excruciating and inescapable.

And our minds will often play tricks on us, soothingly telling us “Just this once.” Of course, it never is. That primrose path leads downhill, and on each step are inscribed the words “only one more.” However, knowing when and where your willpower tends to fail is extremely useful. It helps us avoid the situations that tempt us in the first place. Dieters pack brown-bag lunches, not only to control what they eat but also to shut out all the temptations that fill a food court. Smokers learn to avoid their old hangouts, because it is here that the desire to light up becomes overwhelming. That’s why some people learn to pack their exercise clothing in their cars—they know that going directly to the gym from work is a good habit. If they first went home, it would be too easy to say “tomorrow.”

Over the course of my own life, I have quit smoking, started exercising regularly, and began eating more healthy meals. Still, I have been known to lapse, especially with the last two. My family celebrates with food, so packing on a few pounds over the holidays is pretty typical. But I have come to expect this and as I see my weight creep up on the bathroom scale, I know how to reinitialize my better habits. Come Monday, that gift basket of chocolates will get shared with everyone at the office. I know my limitations, and I can’t be trusted with it at home.

Now it’s time for you too to own up to being fallible. Complete this sentence for me: “When my resolution fails, to get back on track I will…”

By acknowledging that we might fail, we build the foundation for success in the year ahead.