One of the most common reasons that clients in my Fort Greene practice seek therapy is work and productivity issues. Many of my clients have problems with procrastination. They feel like they can’t ‘get going.’ Blocks to action—whether work, socializing, exercising, planning—are a common consequences of strong negative emotion. Sometimes, procrastination and the anguish that it generates becomes its own problem, and may be easier to experience than the original emotions themselves. Procrastination is an especially severe problem among people in the creative professions—artists, entrepreneurs, etc—but it can affect anyone. Treatment of procrastination and its variants, such as writers’ block, is two pronged. First, I work with my client to understand and experience the strong emotions—sadness, feelings of failure, anxiety—that are preventing you from doing what you really want to do. Next, we work to understand how procrastination creates a vicious circle of shame and depression—as you blame yourself and your lack of productivity. As we try to normalize and forgive doing ‘nothing,’ it becomes easier to take small action steps, and can lead you to return to your normal state.
Some of my strategies for treating procrastination come from my cross cultural research. I’ve come to realize the very cultural component that contributes to these problems in my own practice. Our society values productivity above almost anything else. Paradoxically, this has led to an epidemic of depressive procrastination. People, naturally, are highly creative. We want to work, to act, and to make things. But when the stakes become too high, we can get paralyzed.
My paper (link below) examines how culture affects the ways that European American women and a comparison group of South Asian immigrants, understood their health and daily symptoms. A key finding from this paper is that European Americans conceptualize health in terms of productivity, energy, creativity, and output. Maybe that is why American Depression takes its peculiar form—as sluggish, slow, and unproductive. I think the research can help us think more creatively about depression and anxiety. To what degree is our suffering caused by cultural values insisting on endless innovation, creativity and get up and go—all part of the culture of late capitalism.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1363461508094674
