Chapter One

Imagine for a moment, a person visiting his doctor and complaining about feeling listless, or lacking the energy to deal with his chores. He then goes on to mention that procrastination has become an annoying part of the lackluster period that he finds himself in. Generally speaking, the medical community often sees procrastination as one of a number of symptoms that relate to the condition of mental depression, and rightly so because procrastination is a symptom of depression.

However, if a person procrastinated for a very long time, what levels of happiness and self-satisfaction would you expect to see in that person? Do you think you would see such a person as having high self-esteem or low self-esteem? Although I am not a health professional, as someone who has suffered first-hand with procrastination as a long-term debilitating condition, I believe procrastination is not merely a symptom of depression, but it can also be a direct cause of depression in some individuals. For a person like myself, whose last name is not followed by “M.D.,” the most scientific name that I can come up with for the kind of immobilizing procrastination that I and other procrastinators have suffered from, is a “conundrum.”Simply put, it is my belief that there is an inverse relationship between the conditions of procrastination and mental depression. In other words, as the habit of procrastination becomes pronounced and grows stronger, the sufferer’s self-esteem can weaken to the point where he feels hopeless, helpless, and terribly depressed.

If this wasn’t bad enough, there is yet another conundrum where procrastination can be observed, and that is through its similarities to the condition known as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). It has only been in the last few decades that OCD was at last recognized as a disabling condition in its own right. Today, it is generally defined as a psychiatric disorder characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions. For our purposes of defining OCD, we can think of obsessions as recurrent and persistent thoughts, while compulsions are repetitive behaviors and mental acts.

Interestingly, procrastination has aspects of both branches of OCD; in other words, one can find both obsessions and compulsions within the procrastinator. For example, a procrastinator might obsess over a past inaction by thinking, “I should have taken care of those bills yesterday; why didn’t I do it when I had the chance? “At the same time, his behaviors can also mimic the compulsive component of OCD because