He Beat My Brother with a Spade While I Did My Engineering Job
What underlies procrastination?
I’ve struggled with procrastination all my life and now my 18-year-old son is struggling with it too. I was on the phone with him for five hours yesterday, loving every second of our time together, but wishing I could help him. I don’t know how to help him.
I have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and I don’t know how to help him. I’m a successful principal engineer at a world-leading technology company, and I don’t know how to help him. I don’t really understand what the problem is. I don’t even know if there is a problem.
Maybe he’s just beating himself up. Maybe he’s just burned out. Maybe what he calls procrastination is just taking a fucking break, being a child, letting himself chill out, taking it easy. After all, he recently finished his A level examinations and he’s about to go to Cambridge to study engineering.
This has gotten me thinking a lot about procrastination, how it shows up in my life, and how I deal with it. The problem is that there are so many possible layers to it. I think it might be related to unintegrated traumas, but it takes time to integrate traumas, so I can’t give him a quick fix for that. I think he would benefit from more therapy, from doing the Wim Hof Method everyday, with its…
