“All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.”

On Christmas day I gazed upon tiny birds bounding from branch to branch of the bare chestnut tree rooted outside my window. Set against the taut black rows of power lines they were like notes writing themselves on the staff of a winter’s concerto. For a few brief moments their song of movement filled the air with dotted reverberations of beauty and blithe tap-tap-taps of life against a sleeping giant of bark and limbs. And then they were gone, flying away to another vista, their voice stilled in a grand pause that became its own aria of silent splendor.

Just then a chorus of crows swept down off the sky, feathered checkmarks of ebony purpose, pausing on stretched wires and dreaming branches and dew licked grass to see what was to be had and what still was wanting before their duties of being ushered them on to all that begs to be done.

These days when the exhale of dark shifts to the slow inhale of the coming light, it’s easy to miss this chance to tarry, to rest, to embrace the stillness of this time we call the holidays, the holy days. I know for myself that in years past Christmas has been a cacophonic torrent of busyness that I allowed to pull me under in its waves of expectations and guilted giving. These last few years I’ve slowly been weaning myself from the enervating siren’s call to buy and to do with relentless avoidance of the quiet this time of year begs of us all.

It’s in stillness, in rest, in the grand pause that winter’s arrival shares its sacred gifts. This season, this rooted time opens its arms and invites us inwards to our own silence, our own breath, to a brilliant awareness and an elated welcome to all that arises.

As the new year awakens with the dawning moon, may your hearts find peace in the still, star-filled nights and may loving kindness be a garland of light to brighten all your days. 

Christmas Light

by May Sarton

When everyone had gone
I sat in the library
With the small silent tree,
She and I alone.
How softly she shone!

And for the first time then
For the first time this year,
I felt reborn again,
I knew love’s presence near.

Love distant, love detached
And strangely without weight,
Was with me in the night
When everyone had gone
And the garland of pure light
Stayed on, stayed on.

“Christmas Light” by May Sarton from Collected Poems. © W. W. Norton, 1993.

Rilke quote from In Praise of Mortality, translated and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Photo Credit:

Silhouetted birds in a tree by Angelo DeSantis via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared at DHAMMAscribe.com

Holidays: A Recipe for Moderation

How many years in a row have you told yourself that you ate too much on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve? Of course we are all happy to be sitting around the table with our dear ones. Of course there is too much food on the table and nobody wants to waste it. Of course those big meals only take place once or twice a year. But still, why do we keep repeating the same mistake over and over again?

Part of the answer may rest in the following: the holiday season is usually a little break from our hectic lifestyles when we somehow think we can massively pull the plug. All of those greasy things we do not eat the rest of the year (in Québec, it is mostly turkey with gravy, tourtière, ragoût de pattes, etc.) abound, and eating is all we really have to do since Christmas and New Year’s Eve dinners are the main drivers of family reunions during the holidays. But nobody enjoys the feeling of being stuffed that inevitably comes at the end of the meal.

Last Christmas, I decided I would not allow myself to feel that way again, because the feeling is so uncomfortable and because eating too much puts me in idle mode.

How did I succeed? Well, I allowed myself to taste almost everything I wanted to, but I took the time to savour every single bite. I knew that if I were to try my aunt’s sucre à la crème (the richest, most high-caloric dessert in Quebec’s cookbook), I would only allow myself one or two squares. Thus I ate at a reasonable pace, thereby devouring less food but at the same time feeling a more comfortable satiety than I had experienced in previous years.

Taking the time to appreciate food is probably the way we should approach gastronomy year round. If we allowed ourselves to eat the food we like regularly, but in reasonable quantities, we would be healthier and feel better. When the holiday season came around we would be less inclined toward excessive eating because the habit of moderation and the comfortable feeling that goes along with it would have been well established.

Resolutions: Band-aids for the Soul?

After we’ve eaten and drunk too much and exercised less than the minimum required to avoid having to undertake a diet on January 2, many if us make New Year’s resolutions. These resolutions often turn out to be the same year in and year out: “I’m going to lose weight,” “I will exercise more,” “I intend to stop wasting time on the Internet,” “I’m going to eat better,” and the like.

Why are New Year’s resolutions pretty much the same every year? Because they aren’t kept! And why are they not kept? Because they often necessitate lifestyle changes so big and so drastic that they quickly deter anyone from sticking to them! Imagine that you are used to eating junk food every single day of the week and then, out of the blue, make it a personal goal to eat salad from Monday to Friday. How long will you resist throwing away the bowl full of greens that your lover tenderly prepared for you in the morning and go get that burger at your favourite junk-food place instead?

But if you incrementally allow sane behaviours to become daily habits, you will gradually get used to the change so that you will feel and enjoy the good it does to your body and soul. Keeping your goals realistic will allow you not only to feel proud of yourself for achieving them but will change your initial goals into habits without your noticing: frightening and constraining New Year’s resolutions will only be bad memories. And allowing yourself little treats year round is the best way to ensure you will resist giving up on your resolution and avoid destructive habits that stem from suppressed frustration.

Even though I am the first person to admit that what I have written here is quite simplistic and may not suit everyone, it has been working for me in many areas of my life. I believe that adopting flexible, sane ways of living year round is a healthy way to avoid seeing the holiday season as a free ticket to excess and the post-holiday season as a military training camp.

Photo Credits

Image from the Microsoft Clip Art Collection

Guest Author Bio

Alexandre Duval
Alexandre Duval is a freelance blogger for Desmeules Hyundai that offers the brand new Hyundai Elantra 2013. He is also currently completing his master’s degree in political science at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

1) Set the right goals

A Resolution can really only work if it has a specific, quantifiable result that you’re aiming for. Just saying “I want to get in shape” isn’t enough. The goal needs to be something like “I want to lose 15 pounds and be able to run 10km without stopping”. The goal also has to be realistic. If you haven’t picked up your guitar in ten years and you set a goal of winning a national musician contest in September, you might be aiming a tad high, and thus setting yourself up for failure. If in doubt, set the bar a little low – it’s a lot more fun to surpass a goal than to fall short. That said…

2) Winning isn’t everything – it’s the effort that matters

A clear Resolution can be scary because it holds us accountable. Some of us hate to lose or fail so much that we’ll avoid even setting a goal for fear that we might fall short. This can be a huge deterrent to making a difference in our lives. “If I don’t even try, I won’t feel bad about failing.” Unfortunately, this mental trap ignores the fact that we already feel bad about something in our lives, and any improvement on that will probably make us happy.

For example, I could say that I failed in my Health goals in 2012. I set a goal of losing 25 pounds and I lost 23. I set a goal of limiting my alcohol intake to 149 drinks and I slid in at 151. I set a goal of 160 workouts and I only managed 156.

So did I fail? Absolutely not! I lost 23 pounds last year; I completely changed my consumptions habits for the better and I got into shape. Who wouldn’t be happy about that?

My point here is that no-one should avoid making a goal for fear of not reaching it. If the goal is precise and realistic, it becomes a target to shoot for. Even if you don’t make it, you’ll be in a much better place than you would have been if you’d not tried at all.

3) It gets easier with time

Changing any sort of lifestyle or habit is hard: there’s a reason we fall into those less-than-ideal patterns in the first place – they’re easy. Trying to break a habit can be extremely hard: at first. 

The good news is it only takes a couple of weeks before the amount of difficulty starts to drop off tremendously. Those first few, critical weeks are when you’re forcing your body or mind to do something new but once you’ve pushed through that transition period your body or mind starts to create a new habit and doesn’t fight you nearly as much.

Late January is hell for Resolution-keepers. It’s right about now that you’ve been suffering for three weeks and you dread taking on whatever your goal is. But just keep going a few more days: it is going to start getting easier. Don’t give up now.

So, did I make any New Year’s Resolutions for 2013? You bet. And in order to be accountable to more than just myself, I’m going to declare them publicly:

a) I resolve to lose 6 more pounds this year
b) I resolve to keep my “treat” consumption (alcohol, desserts, etc) below 260 this year
c) I resolve to do at least 240 workouts this year
d) I resolve to spend at least 180 hours of quality time with God
e) I resolve to go on at least 25 date nights with my wife

I’ll report back at the beginning of 2014. Have a great year, and work hard to make yourself a better person in whichever way you want.

Photo Credits

All photos courtesy of the author – all rights reserved

Don’t get me wrong: I certainly did make resolutions regarding my physical health. But one of the biggest challenges we face these days is finding time in our schedules just to enjoy life. It might sound crazy, the idea of scheduling fun or leisure, but since we schedule everything else in life, why not? And more important than just scheduling, by setting New Year’s Resolution goals for my Morale, I ensured that I would make my Morale a priority in 2012. As with all my other goals, I kept my Morale goals simple, realistic and measurable.

Each one of us will have unique Morale goals, depending on our life situation, our abilities and our interests. Some examples for the year might be: I want to spend 100 hours of real, quality time with my kids; I want to compose 12 new songs; I want to devote 50 hours to volunteer work; I want to read 10 new books. What I’m emphasizing here is that these goals shouldn’t be connected with physical activity. I’m talking about the rest of life: quality time with people who are important to you; quality time spent on a hobby; quality time giving to the community, etc.

For me, I chose two things which were very important to me and which I thought deserved to take priority over any other choice I might make with my leisure time. The first was quality time with my wife. If this goal isn’t applicable to you, you might consider more time with your kids, your parents, your siblings, your close friends, or anyone who is really important to you and with whom you want to invest effort into building or maintaining a relationship. My second Morale goal was quality time with God. If you’re not religious, this might mean a new priority on education, or learning a new skill, or just quiet, reflective “me-time” where you get away from the demands of the world. No matter what this goal might look like to you, the point is to somehow improve yourself in a way that is important to you.

For quality time with my wife, I used as a unit of measurement the “date”. I imposed this constraint because it can be difficult to quantify the regular interaction between spouses. Was that shared joke part of my score? What about that wonderful family afternoon playing with the kids? In order to make my job of measuring progress toward my goal I needed something that was easy to measure, and I figured that a date, where we actually get out of the house and leave the kids in someone else’s care, showed a commitment on our part to making time together a priority. Occasionally I would count a date that happened at home, but I only did so when we’d pre-planned to set that time aside for each other and then actually did spend quality time together (as opposed to doing chores or checking emails, etc). I travel overseas a lot, so setting up a regular date routine was challenging, but I established the baseline goal of 24 dates in the year. On top of this I added known periods where we’d be away from the kids (a week away in March, two days in July and our anniversary) and came up with a total goal of 32 dates. With my monthly milestones set at 2 dates per month plus those three extra groups in March, July and December, I had a useful progress line to follow as my unpredictable travel schedule often swept me away for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. The whole point of this goal was to ensure that my wife and I carved time out of the chaos to devote to each other.

For quality time with God, I used simple hours as the unit of measurement. Due to my travel I knew I couldn’t rely on regular church attendance to take care of this, so I was forced to find other ways to stay connected. I started reading my Bible more regularly, and I’d take breaks every so often to read a book on Christian spirituality that interested me. I made time for a Christian small group study in order to make new friends and be part of the community. And I started praying a lot more often. For anyone who thinks that prayer can only be done in church on one’s knees, I can tell you from new experience that I’m amazed at how easy it is to have a meaningful conversation with God walking through an airport (which I do a lot). I didn’t track every second that I spent in prayer towards my goal, but just by making my relationship with God a priority I found myself making time to pray much more often.

Please let me stress again that these goals were what I wanted to accomplish: yours may be completely different. The general principle on New Year’s Resolutions and goals I wanted to make in this article is that it’s essential for our overall health to consider aspects of life separate from physical health. Our emotional/mental/spiritual health – our Morale – is at least as important as our physical health, and I encourage everyone to consider their real priorities when setting resolutions for 2013.

Photo Credits

All photos courtesy of the author – All rights reserved

Great – now what?

In my previous article I talked about the importance of setting a goal for your resolution which is both clear and realistic. In my case I said that I wanted to lose 25 pounds (just over 11 kilos) in 2012. In addition I described how successful it was when I set monthly milestones to keep track of my progress on a regular basis.

But as many of us know, it isn’t very helpful to make a resolution to lose weight and leave it at that. If only losing weight was as simple as just stating a goal! Losing weight requires effort and determination, and very likely requires some significant changes to our habits. This is where supporting goals come in – goals that are means to an end. In my case, my ultimate goal for 2012 was to lose 25 pounds, but I had to set two other goals to direct my activities in support of that end.

In its simplest form, weight loss is generally controlled by two things, and two things only: exercise (how many calories we burn) and diet (how many calories we consume). I set a single goal in support of each of these: for exercise I set a goal of doing 10 workouts a month, rising eventually to 15 workouts a month; for diet I decided to keep it really simple and set a goal of keeping my alcohol consumption below 10 drinks a month. This is very important for supporting goals: they have to be something you can directly control, entirely through your own efforts.

With exercise, it’s important to recognize the reality of your current age and condition. I played varsity soccer at university, for example, and I’ve run marathons and half-marathons. But I needed to remember that I did all those things in my twenties and very early thirties – approaching 39 as I was, I couldn’t expect my body to be able to keep up with what my mind thought it could do. This point was made crystal clear to me when, on a rainy January morning, I went for a 20-minute jog – and was so exhausted I actually had to have a nap that afternoon (I kid you not). So be realistic in your early expectations, and don’t be discouraged when you can’t do what you used to do. Setting the bar low also allows you to make significant gains in performance early on, which can be very rewarding and help you build the crucial new habit of exercising.

How did I define a “workout”? Since the workout was the unit I was measuring for my goal, I needed to be very clear on what this was. Everyone has to set their own definition, but here’s what I set for myself: one workout was either 30 minutes of intense activity (in my case a run or a workout on my punching bag) or 60 minutes of moderate activity (a quick walk or some intensive housework). I also allowed for a half-workout, which was a 30-minute quick walk, since I realized that I had lots of opportunities to do this, either on my lunch break at work or while I was waiting for the ferry. These half-workouts were extremely valuable, not so much for the additional units they contributed toward my monthly goals, but instead because they encouraged me to try and get some sort of exercise every single day – this shift in mentality was a huge boost toward changing my habit and getting me moving more easily.

What about my diet? First of all, I didn’t do a “diet” at all. No crazy foods, no shakes, no gluten/dairy/meat/grain/egg/protein/carb/fat-free regimes. I didn’t do anything extreme, simply because my intention was to change my lifestyle for the long-term, so whatever I did had to be sustainable. Forever. And I like food a lot, so cutting out entire groups of it didn’t appeal. I have done Weight Watchers in the past (where you can eat anything you want but everything is worth a number of points that you have to track) and it was very effective for me, but with my busy lifestyle I just didn’t want the bother of having to track and calculate every single thing I ate. As always, when you set your goals you have to make them as easy as possible to implement, even if the final target is challenging. Tracking food and calculating points was just too much trouble, I knew, and trying to go something-free would just be impossible, especially since I travel overseas so much with my job.

So instead, I looked at my consumption habits and spotted a clear source of calories that wasn’t in any way part of my nutritional needs: alcohol. My wife and I are long past the partying days, but we both like wine and enjoy having a relaxing drink together in the evenings. A single glass of wine here and there may not sound like much, but when I actually started to track it as part of my 2012 goal I was astonished at how quickly the numbers added up. Travelling, likewise, offered a horrific number of opportunities for free alcohol (aircraft, hotel happy hours, business dinners). So I made the goal very simple: eat normally, and cut down on the alcohol.

Your weakness might be chocolate, potato chips, sugary soda or fast food: whatever it is, take a good, honest look at your eating/drinking habits and pick the worst offender to your health. If you want to set a goal to reduce more than one thing that’s great, but in the beginning at least I recommend just choosing one item because it will be very easy to control and it will build your confidence that you can control it. Interestingly, I don’t have a sweet tooth and I didn’t think to track my dessert consumption because that had never been a big deal for me. However, as the months went on and my alcohol consumption stayed low, I found myself reaching for a donut or a cookie far more often, just to get that “little something” I craved. Interestingly, at the same time my sister-in-law was cutting down on sweets – and she noticed that she was drinking more alcohol! So as you cut back on your main consumption vice, be very mindful of any increases in other naughty foods, since you may not be technically tracking them.

One final bit of advice on annual weight-loss goals: don’t include December. I’m not saying go hog-wild in that final month, but I discovered that, no matter how hard I tried, with all the pre-Christmas and Christmas/New Year’s festivities it’s completely unrealistic to expect to actually lose weight in December. My suggestion is to aim simply to maintain your weight through this month: just gaining nothing is a triumph. Don’t give up on your practical goals (I still did my workouts and tracked my alcohol) but realistically allow some latitude in this most gluttonous of months. It would be a shame to work so hard all year and then feel disappointed with a perceived failure at the end.

My next article will look at a different kind of health that I made resolutions about in 2012.

Photo Credits

Photos courtesy of the author

To set the stage, let me tell you a little bit about me – if only to prove that I’m nothing special and that anyone can do what I did. At the beginning of 2012 I was an overweight, overstressed, late-thirties man with a wife and two pre-school children. I worked (and still do) at a full-time, regular job that required me to travel overseas quite a bit. And I really tried hard to squeeze in some kind of vague social life as well. In short: your typical North American, middle-class guy.

So what was different about my resolutions a year ago? What made it possible for the guy described above to transform himself in just one year from a stressed-out, miserable little tubbo into the well-adjusted, charming Adonis who types this? (Okay, allow me that single moment of blatant exaggeration – but I am looking and feeling much better than I was a year ago.) Determination was certainly key, but I think most people start out January with plenty of that. Discipline was paramount, but I’ve seen oodles of that too in Januaries past. I think the most important difference between my 2012 resolutions and those of previous years was the way I structured my goals.

First off, each resolution had to have a clear goal. A resolution saying “I’m going to lose weight” isn’t good enough. My goal was “I’m going to lose 25 pounds in 2012.” The goal is now clear, recognizable and precise. The first statement is woolly and doesn’t actually hold you accountable to anything: the second statement says clearly that if I end 2012 only 5 pounds lighter than I started, I’ve missed my goal and thus not kept my resolution.

Second, each resolution had to have a realistic goal. Staying motivated over the long term is definitely one of the hardest parts of keeping a resolution, and if you see no progress toward that lofty goal it can be very easy to give up. It’s great to challenge yourself, but if you set a goal that you have no hope of ever achieving, you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment and – very likely – quitting. For example, I could have said my goal was to lose 50 pounds, but based on my body size and my busy schedule, I knew realistically that there was no chance of that happening.

Third, each of my resolutions had a monthly milestone that was a portion of the overall goal. It wasn’t essential that I meet each monthly milestone, but they served as an excellent indication of how I was doing toward reaching my ultimate goal. And – very important – these milestones were cumulative: if my intention was to lose 2 pounds per month in order to reach 25 by year-end (yes, I know, with an extra pound slipped in there somewhere) then if I only lost 1 pound in January, I knew that I had to step it up because my milestone for February was 4 pounds lost – meaning I still had 3 to go. This stopped me from falling into the trap of saying “Oh well, I blew it that month but I’ll start fresh this month” and it held me accountable over the entire year for all my activity. If I fell of the wagon, I had to try extra hard the next month. Similarly – and just as important – cumulative milestones encouraged me to keep going in a month even if I’d already hit the milestone (instead of slacking off), knowing that for every success in, say June, I’d have that much less pressure in July to hit the next milestone.

Cumulative milestones are brilliant: they discourage the tendency to stop trying in a given month and start again next month, and they reward extra effort each month. I can’t stress this point enough.

So what were my 2012 New Year’s Resolutions? I had seven, divided into three different categories. The first category was physical health; the second was emotional/mental/spiritual health (call it whatever you like); the third was professional. Over the next few articles I’ll talk about some of the specific goals and share my insights from them, but the only point I want to make here is that I set goals for different parts of my overall life in an attempt to achieve a balance of priorities between myself, my family, my friends & community, my job and my dreams. One of the dangers of setting goals can be that they become all-encompassing to the exclusion of other critical parts of our lives, and by setting a broad spectrum of goals I actually managed to accomplish an unstated goal for 2012: live a balanced life.

This series of articles will examine some of my specific goals, and I’ll start the next one with the subject pretty much everybody is thinking about at this time of year: weight loss.

Photo Credit

Image courtesy of Leadership with Sass

The New Year’s resolution has to be one of the oddest of all traditions. Typically, holidays are times of celebration and family, but the tradition of the New Year’s resolution asks us to get deadly serious and make major decisions in our lives and then stick to them come hell or high interest rates. And because we’re making these decisions motivated by little more than tradition and latent guilt, New Year’s is the one holiday of the year that sets us up for failure.

Okay, say I’ve made that New Year’s resolution. Say I’ve resolved to finish that novel I’ve been pecking away at for years. What now? How do I deal with the refreshed guilt, the heavier burden? How do I actually get what I’ve decided I want? This is where Daniel Goldstein comes in. Daniel says he can help. You see, he studies decision-making. As the brains behind the blog  Decision Science News and the Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research (on leave from the London Business School), Daniel has a lot to say about making decisions and sticking to them.

For starters, I don’t think Daniel favours traditions like the New Year’s resolution, that annual exercise in futility, because we’re making decisions for the wrong reasons. But let’s set that aside for a minute because I’ve already resolved to finish that novel. Daniel says it’s not that my goal is unachievable, it’s more that factors will inevitably interfere with my self-discipline after I’ve made this promise to myself.

And a promise it is. My resolve to finish that novel is a contract between my present and my future self. To live up to that contract, I’m going to have to sacrifice some short-term fun for that long-term gain. Daniel’s a real killjoy and it’s not very Buddhist of him, all this concern about our future selves, but what he says makes perfect sense. If I’m going to write that novel, I’m going to have to sacrifice some things now to get to the future I imagine, one with a finished, published novel.

Because he works primarily on financial decision-making, Daniel Goldstein has a lot to say about retirement planning and so on, but much of his work can be extended to other kinds of decision-making. He’s developed what he calls commitment devices to help us stick to the decisions we make. A commitment device is a kind of mental motivator, often tailored to the individual, that can overcome the temptations offered the present self – the self in control right now – so the weaker future self can get what’s been promised. Locking your credit card away, keeping junk food out of the house and unplugging your internet to avoid distraction from the writing of that novel are all examples of commitment devices.

But commitment devices are problematic. They’re like a crutch. They demonstrate to you that you lack self-control. “They take the power away from you,” he says. “Self-discipline is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.” Daniel would rather us cast aside these crutches and build our own commitment muscles.

The other problem he sees with commitment devices is that they’re easy to weasel out of. I might tell myself that I can’t work on that novel today because it’s New Year’s day, a holiday and I’m not supposed to work. I’m a little hung over too, and besides, I’ve got an article to write for Life as a Human about commitment.

To avoid the pitfalls of commitment devices when it comes to personal finances, Daniel developed several tools for self-reflection designed to motivate people to make smarter financial decisions and stick to them. One such device is a sliding scale with spending on one end and saving on the other. The spending end is illustrated with a picture of the client’s face that changes from a smile to a frown as the scale slides toward savings, a frown because he doesn’t get to spend all his money on fun things now. The savings end is illustrated with a picture of the same face aged by use of a computer program with a smile that changes to a frown when the scale slides the other way towards spending. The idea is that people will see that to make the present self-happy, the future, retired self will have to make sacrifices. And to make the future self-happy, the present self will have to sacrifice some fun. Perhaps a little simplistic and an entirely material approach to happiness, but the point is well taken that decisions are often a give and take relationship between the person we are and the person we want to be.

If Daniel Goldstein is right, I should simply get at it if I want to write that novel. And if I need a commitment device to help me stick to the work, I shouldn’t be writing it anyway. If passion can’t fuel the journey of this novel from my head to the page, then it’s not worth all the anxiety, energy and guilt. I should just have fun with my time instead… okay, so that’s all for now. I’ve got to get going, got some writing to do. Happy New Year.

Photo Credits

Thinking Man @ Flickr

PROCRASTINATION

Most of us engage in some form of procrastination, at least occasionally, and some of us are “pros.” The reasons for procrastination are many, but it is important to note that procrastination can costs us lots of money, time and emotional energy we could be using for better purposes. So, as we begin this New Year, let us take a few minutes to see how procrastination affects us and as we increase our awareness of this problem, we can decrease its cost to us.

SIGNS OF PROCRASTINATION

The most common form of procrastination is waiting until the last minute to do something. However, there are other signs that may not be so obvious. These include getting sick when facing an unpleasant task, being hesitant to try something new, avoiding decisions or confrontations, blaming others or the situation for your unhappiness, or being “too busy” to get tasks accomplished. Procrastination can lead to feelings of guilt, inadequacy, depression and self-doubt. It has a high potential for painful consequences.

CAUSES OF PROCRASTINATION

The root causes of procrastination can be overt or fairly complex. There are many causes; however, an overlying cause is fear. Each procrastinator responds to their own constellation and interpretation of their fears. Procrastination serves as an escape, albeit a temporary one, from doing unpleasant or threatening things.

The dynamics of putting off an important task can vary from individual to individual and from task to task for the same person. Do any of these sound familiar?

•The task does not hold interest for you
•Shortening the time you actually have to work on the task
•Evaluation anxiety (concern about others’ responses to your work)
•Fear of failure (not trying is a form of failure, but not as painful as actually trying and failing)
•Lack of information needed to complete the task
•The task seems overwhelming or unmanageable

WAYS TO DECREASE PROCRASTINATION

If we consider the idea that the basic issue is not “procrastination” per se, but rather procrastination is our response to perceived fears, then our path to a cure becomes more sharply focused. Addressing irrational beliefs, underlying fears and poor attitudes will provide an important place to start taming our problem. Listen to your own self-talk and come up with productive, helpful ideas to replace the critical, counterproductive ones. You can also try:

•The “30 minute plan”—Work on an unpleasant task for 30 minutes and then see if you want to continue. Reward yourself and try to initiate as many 30-minute periods as possible
•Focusing on your own needs and expectations rather than those of others
•Examining your standards and evaluate how realistic they are
•Setting realistic goals
•“Workaholics” need to learn the value of setting aside time each day for relaxation, socialization, exercise and play. Productive, creative people need to take vacations and play (without guilt)! Schedule some fun.

How does procrastination affect you? You could be one of the few persons who is organized and consistently tackles problems on your own terms. However most of us engage in some form of procrastination that limits our productivity, effectiveness, and happiness. Try one new behavior to limit the effects of procrastination this New Year and you may be surprised at how much it helps and can be encouraged to do more.

As for me, cleaning closets will have to wait…I’ve got 30 minutes more to “WRITE!”

Photo Credits

Clock @ Flickr

As this New Year approached, I got thinking about resolutions and more generally about decision making and why we choose to do certain things and not others. I wondered why decisions are so often against our own best interests and why they’re so difficult to stick to, even when we know we’ll suffer if we don’t.

The first problem is New Year’s itself. The month of January is named for the two-faced Roman god Janus – he’s the god of doors and beginnings – so this month has for the last couple of millennia been a time of looking back and looking ahead. The double purpose of the month means it’s an ideal time to make decisions because looking back means we can take into account lessons learned from mistakes and successes while planning the future.

That’s all fine and good. We’ve decided that the first day of this set of days named after a Roman god will be the one we designate as decision making time, but it is after all totally arbitrary. The New Year in China, for Hindus and for Muslims among others has nothing to do with this particularly western tradition.

So, if we’re going to make decisions — whether they’re about something as self-centered and trivial as our personal appearance (I’ll lose twenty pounds in 2012 or take up body building as a hobby) or to something as fundamental as our state and future as a species (I’ll convert my car to burn vegetable oil or refuse to fly anywhere ever again) — the decision-making process shouldn’t be tied to something as arbitrary as the arrival of a particular date in our Gregorian calendar. Decisions should be made more rationally and more nobly. We should make decisions, say, about our health only after receiving the results of a medical checkup; we should make financial decisions before we sign up for a mortgage; we should make decisions about the future of our environment based on the latest science and out of concern for the planet and our own fate.

But we just don’t always make our decisions out of nobility or via a rational thought process. Too often, we make decisions in other ways for other reasons. A study by a friend of mine, Chloe Tudor, proves it. A fourth year student at the University of Toronto, Chloe was motivated by Robert Kenner’s hard-hitting 2008 film Food, Inc. exposing the worst of factory farming to study how people make ethical decisions about what they eat.

Chloe designed an elegant little study in which she showed ten participants a ten-minute film about slaughterhouse practices. Afterwards, she asked each if watching the footage was enough to make them change their eating habits. While all were disturbed by what they saw, only half were motivated to find ways to eat more humanely. Following up several weeks later, Chloe discovered that only one participant had stuck to the initial decision to avoid factory farmed meats.

Disillusion is there to read in Chloe’s report. “Animal rights activists argue if slaughterhouses had glass walls,” she writes, “everyone would be vegetarian. However, even my small experiment tells me that this isn’t the case.”

Chloe sensed there was some force at work strong enough to keep people from their commitments and even from making them in the first place. She challenged the participants by identifying at least seven shops where they could easily buy meat produced by more ethical means. They responded with what Chloe categorized as excuses. She discovered that both sets of participants felt too inconvenienced by the changes they’d have to make in their shopping practices. Meat is an essential part of a healthy diet. It’s easier to ignore the issue of ethical treatment of animals altogether. Chloe countered each excuse with a rational answer that explained how easy it was for the participants to act on their impulse to avoid factory meat. The result? No change in behaviour.

So what is it that kept the participants from making or living up to their deeply felt decisions? That most intractable of human traits, laziness. It’s just plain easier to keep doing what we do. It seems to me that Chloe’s study makes a strong argument for the New Year’s resolution. Who are we kidding? We need a kick in the pants like a day named for regeneration and set aside as the one day of the year dedicated to making decisions. Otherwise, we’d procrastinate ourselves into heart attacks and climate change. We might do so regardless, but the New Year’s resolution at least gives us a chance. Flawed as it is as a means to a better future self and a healthy future world, we’ve settled on January 1 as decision day and we’d better stick to it.

Okay, so resolutions are made. Now what? How do we stick to our commitments? In the conclusion of this two-part series on the New Year’s resolution, I’ll take a look at commitment devices, a new development in the science of decision making.

Photo Credits

Fireworks @ Flickr

Food Inc Poster @ Wikipedia