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procrastinators don’t lack motivation.
they lack the confidence and clarity to start plugging away at it in a productive way.
combined with treatment for their anxiety, can help procrastinators become far more productive, reliable, and confident in their abilities.12
Apathetic People
When someone seems completely apathetic, I don’t see them as a failure. Instead, I tend to think that they’ve been failed in some way.
when I see that somebody doesn’t care about a particular goal—whether
I find myself wondering, Why does this activity seem pointless to them?
Sometimes people become apathetic because of depression or trauma.
When you lose power over your own life, you don’t have much reason to stay energized and motivated.
you protect yourself emotionally by checking out
When a person is pushed to their limit, supposedly “lazy” feelings and behaviors tend to pop up.
Apathy, low motivation, an inability to focus, a desire to “waste time” doing “nothing”—these are all valuable warning signs.
to benefit from this highly evolved, dynamic warning system, we have to learn to stop writing it o...
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Laziness Is a...
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there are limits to how much work a person can do.
the forty-hour workweek (which is considered quite reasonable and humane here in the US) is still probably too long and demanding for most people.
Our bodies and minds aren’t set up to perform repetitive or mentally taxing work for eight or more hours per day.
many of us live continuously on the edge of breaking down. For some, that breaking point is dramatic.
in this burned-out state, Leo couldn’t follow through on the many commitments he had previously made. Deadlines would fly by, events would go by unattended, and dirty dishes would pile up
“I always thought, This time will be different,”
Leo was convinced that his problem was a lack of motivation or effort, not that he was taking on too many responsibilities,
Feelings of laziness are often a sign that someone hasn’t been managing the demands of their day-to-day life in an optimal way.
“laziness” leaks into people’s lives against their will.
browsing Facebook or shopping online.
“cyberloafing.”
particularly likely to happen when someone has just finished an intellectually strenuous task or when they’re about to mentally “shift gears” from one activity to another.
as a way to relax and reinvigorate their brains,
brief periods of cyberloafing actually helped admins fight the boredom
hit the mental refresh button
Just as all employees need time to use the bathroom or take a lunch break, it appears that they also need time to rest their brains.
When an employee spends hours concentrating on something, their willpower tends to erode
“wasting time” is important, healthy, and normal.
spending time in these ways isn’t actually a form of “theft.” It’s a way of coming up for air.
So often, the urge to engage in behaviors that seem “lazy” is a sign that a person has worked hard enough and should just sit and be calm for a little while.
It’s very common for people with ADHD to overcommit to a variety of things they’re passionate about, and then run quickly and dramatically out of steam because they haven’t realistically budgeted their time.
When a person has been stretched to their limit, they may start to seem flaky
They might
cancel...
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have less...
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take freque...
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zone out by playing repetitive ...
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worse impulse...
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far less ...
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These aren’t signs that someone is a screwup or a failure. They’re signs of a person pushed to the brink.
Yikes. This is definitely me.
Feelings of laziness are also a powerful internal alarm signaling to us that we need additional help, more breaks, or reduced demands.
Laziness Helps Us Be Creative
Moments of insight and creativity don’t come by trying to force them—they require a period of mental inactivity.
While it seems like these ideas have come out of nowhere, the truth is that our minds have been quietly and unconsciously developing them during our downtime.
“It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life, perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life, came to me on vacation,” Miranda told an interviewer in 2018. “The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, Hamilton walked into it.”33
When my therapist, Jason, first told me to try sitting around and doing absolutely nothing for half an hour so I could truly “feel my feelings,” I thought he was absolutely full of shit. “Nobody does that,” I told him.
