Can EMDR Help with My Procrastination and Avoidance?!?
Do you tend to avoid difficult or uncomfortable things? Do you have a habit of procrastination that is causing major problems in your life? Do you find yourself putting things off, but then the issues just keep getting bigger and bigger?
Avoidance and procrastination are behaviors that serve as a way to sidestep discomfort or anxiety related to certain tasks, decisions, or responsibilities. Choosing to avoid something unpleasant might provide some temporary relief; yet, it often creates long-term problems. For example, procrastinating on work or school deadlines can lead to rushed, subpar efforts as well as unnecessarily heightened stress as the due date looms closer. Avoiding difficult conversations can allow misunderstandings to fester and relationships to deteriorate. Over time, avoidance and procrastination can undermine personal growth, erode confidence, and perpetuate feelings of overwhelm and helplessness.
EMDR Therapy can be a unique option for addressing this issue!
Reasons Avoidance and Procrastination Don’t Work
One of the key problems with avoidance and procrastination is the accumulation of unaddressed responsibilities. Tasks or decisions left undone don't just disappear; instead, they compound, creating a snowball effect that can feel increasingly unmanageable. This can lead to a vicious cycle: the more overwhelmed a person feels, the more likely they are to procrastinate further, compounding their stress and anxiety. Even worse, chronic and habitual avoidance trains the brain to associate temporary relief with the act of postponing tasks, reinforcing the behavior and making it harder to break the cycle.
Despite looking for relief, procrastination actually often leads to increased anxiety as the task is always still looming in the back of one’s mind. The stress doesn’t actually go away! In reality, the mental energy spent worrying about avoided tasks often surpasses the effort required to complete them, leading to inefficiency and diminished productivity.
Avoidance can erode trust and credibility, particularly in professional or interpersonal settings. Missed deadlines, broken promises, or chronic unreliability can strain relationships and harm reputations. Furthermore, Addressing procrastination often requires self-awareness, effective time management, and confronting the root causes of avoidance, whether they stem from fear of failure, perfectionism, or lack of motivation.
Root Causes of Procrastination and Avoidance
There are some notable things at the root of this dynamic.
Poor time management and organization skills. You might never have been taught effective ways to manage your life or may have adopted poor habits via observation of your parents. This can be addressed in therapy with some skills training and the development of healthy habits.
ADHD. People with ADHD can be easily distracted from tasks, instead of moving on to something else. An aversion to uninteresting tasks can lead to avoidance. Multitasking or having a variety of tasks yet to be completed can lead to a feeling of overwhelm and then avoidance.
Perfectionism. You may be setting the bar so high for yourself that you become frozen in fear of falling short, doing something inferior, or letting other people down. Ironically, for perfectionists, having extremely high expectations for yourself can actually cause you to get less done and with more mistakes (after all, we are not operating our best when stress levels are extremely high).
Fear of Failure. For some, the idea of failure and what that would mean about our worth can be debilitating to the point of avoiding even trying certain things. This of course leads to unaccomplished goals, fewer chances to build confidence, and a sense of shame for not facing one’s fears.
What is EMDR?
EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy, is a psychotherapy approach that enables people to heal and recover from disturbing life experiences. It has been practiced around the world for the past 30 years or so and is an accepted treatment for trauma and PTSD by the American Psychiatric Association, Veterans Administration, Department of Defense, World Health Organization, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, among others.
EMDR is based on the idea that current dysfunction stems from insufficiently-processed, maladaptively stored disturbing memories from the past. Essentially, when a person experiences a traumatic event or something that is beyond the capacity of their brain to process at the time, parts of the experience get stuck causing them to encounter problems down the road.
The therapist leads a client in a series of eye movements or other types of bilateral stimulation (such as tapping or bilateral sounds). At the same time, the client focuses on various aspects of a disturbing memory. During this procedure, clients process the memory often in a positive and rapid way that leads to a peaceful resolution.
How Can EMDR Help with Avoidance and Procrastination?
The Avoidance Protocol
One way EMDR can help is to view avoidance as an addictive process. That is, the temporary relief a person gets from avoiding an uncomfortable task reinforces the behavior, thus leading it to become compulsive. This is just like someone who is addicted to heroin remembering only the good feelings they get, causing the use to become a habit. Since EMDR can help reprocess maladaptively stored, stuck memories, we can target these experiences (i.e., the memories of feeling good from getting high or procrastinating). The only difference is we are targeting the positive memories as opposed to negative memories in the case of trauma.
Dr. Jim Knipe, seasoned EMDR therapist and trainer who wrote the book, EMDR Toolbox, created the Avoidance Protocol which utilizes what he calls the Level of Urge to Avoid (LoA). When these urges to avoid to reduced, you’d be surprised how much easier it is to face the tasks. Doing this protocol in addition to developing healthy habits of facing discomfort immediately can lead to positive change in this regard.
In many cases, the EMDR avoidance protocol can be quite simple. The client is first asked to think of the avoided situation (this can range from a simple task that has been put off to even thinking about a painful memory that your mind won’t let you bring up). Then the client is asked how strongly they feel the urge to avoid it, then locate where they feel that in their body. For example, the client might be avoiding calling the doctor. The level of urge to avoid this is a 9 (on a scale of 0 to 10) and they feel it in their gut. Then, as the client focuses on where they feel the urge to avoid in their body, the therapist guides them through sets of bilateral stimulation to help desensitize this feeling. Often what happens is that the visceral urge to avoid reduces and many positive associations come up around being capable of doing these things, the consequences of not doing them, etc.
Focusing on the Underlying Insecurities
Another way EMDR can help is by addressing a client’s perfectionism or fear of failure. People are not born with these patterns; rather, they are learned and often reinforced through life experiences. In treatment, clients can shift their negative patterns by addressing the respective underlying core wounds.
For example, George grows up in a household with critical parents and often feels “not good enough” deep inside. As a result, he sets the bar really high for himself and feels like a failure when not able to achieve his own internal demands. Paradoxically, this actually causes him to avoid tasks and responsibilities, creating guilt and shame and then even more avoidance. Ironically, his fear of feeling like a failure leads him to actually fail at completing his responsibilities, thus reinforcing the narrative. In EMDR therapy, George can address his pattern of avoidance by targeting the trauma of growing up in a critical environment and the subsequent feeling of “not being good enough”. As these experiences are reprocessed with EMDR, he starts spontaneously reflecting on many examples he has in her life of being “good enough” (after all, we all have positive attributes and experiences despite focusing mostly on the negative ones). With some supportive coaching and encouragement to face his fears, he starts stacking up more wins and feeling more confident about himself overall.
Start Working With an EMDR Therapist in Palm Beach County, FL
Avoidance can create a ton of dysfunction and distress for people who have developed those patterns. Fortunately, clients can utilize EMDR therapy to address these maladaptive processes that keep them stuck and failing to reach their life goals. Our team can help you stop putting things off and start making real progress. Let’s get to work! Start your therapy journey with Mangrove Therapy Group by following these simple steps:
- Contact Mangrove Therapy Group
- Meet with a trained EMDR therapist
- Take the first step towards lasting change!
Other Services Offered with Mangrove Therapy Group
EMDR Therapy isn't the only service offered at Mangrove Therapy Group. Our team is happy to provide a variety of services to support you and your mental health. Other services offered include PTSD and Complex PTSD, trauma and EMDR consultations, substance use disorders, eating disorders, body image issues, anger management, anxiety, low self-esteem, personality disorders, and much more. Please feel free to learn more about how we can support you. We also offer support with addictions such as process addictions, grief and loss, “Failure to Launch” syndrome, CBT, and DBT. Feel free to learn more by visiting our blog or FAQ page to learn more today!