Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Procrastinating: A Lesson

I HATE procrastination. What is procrastination? It's when you take aside doing something productive to something that will give you immediate satisfaction. So, basically it's when you're putting of  or delaying an action to a later time. So pretend you have an essay due tomorrow, but you NEED to check your e-mail, or see whats on in TV, or see what happens in the fifth Harry Potter book, etc. These are examples of procrastinating, and the more you do procrastination, the less work you get done. Procrastination is something everyone has to deal with, but you can actually lower your temptation, once you know how it actually works.
When you procrastinate, two individual parts of your brain are battling out with each other. The first half, called the  prefrontal cortex, does the "I need to get some work done or I will be in detention!" type of thinking, while the other half, called the limbix system which thinks "I'll just do it later, let me just take a short nap!" Unfortunately, the limbix system is much more powerful, because it's connected to your pleasure center of your brain. So right now, you might be asking yourself, "What can I do, Sam?!" Well, the limbix system gets more powerful whenever the temptation to do something other than work becomes more tempting (i.e. you can smell it, hear it, touch it, etc.). So for example, you need to get your work done, but you're blogging (yes, I'm reffering to myself), so maybye turn off your internet! I think everyone can deal with their temptations if you learn how to control  it.

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