Confusion between Lethargy and Procrastination

            Remember that lazy day where you lounged on the sofa, ate snacks and watched TV.  It was perfect, except for that niggling sensation that you were supposed to do something.  Maybe it was something your parents, or boss or teacher wanted, but the deadline was far off, so why worry?  Yet that sensation kept bugging you every commercial break.  You tell yourself you just had a hard week at work or you are feeling ill, or you’re mentally drained from some personal drama.  You need a rest.  Maybe after a little nap you can focus on what-ever-it-was.  Maybe tomorrow.

            Except the next time you think about it, you have even less energy than you did before.  Funny how tired you get when faced with something you don’t want to do.   Lethargy and procrastination are not the same thing.  Lethargy is a feeling of tiredness and may arise from many sources.  Procrastination is an active aversion to doing a task.  If you don’t want to do something, your mind can induce a lethargic state to inhibit productivity.  You are telling the truth when you say, “I’m too tired.”  You do feel tired, and this justifies to yourself why you should put off the activity.  However, the more you use this excuse, the more practiced your mind gets at accessing a lethargic state.  You get “better” at becoming lethargic.  This doesn’t serve your interests as you are forming a barrier to motivation.

     Unconscious development of lethargy is very common because it is such a passable excuse for procrastination.  It feels like there is something physically wrong with your body, so you have a hard time seeing it as something you mentally have control over.  While habitual thinking can cause lethargy, it can also be caused by physical problems as well.  It is best to deal with physical problems before tackling psychological ones.

Eliminate Physical Before Psychological

            Many diseases force the body into a listless, low energy state as it directs more energy to the immune system.  When lethargy is accompanied by shakes, sneezing, and nausea, we know we have a common cold. We don’t worry when we know an obvious source of physical lethargy, as we also know we will recover in time.  

            There are many other physical complications which could cause lethargy but lack associated symptoms.  Parasitic infections, cancers, and early stages of diabetes are some examples of internal health concerns.  Environmental contaminants that restrict the flow of oxygen such as pollution, smog, fungal spores may also be at fault.  Then there are dietary problems such as bad food combinations, erratic eating patterns, and malnutrition.  Any of which could be a physical source of lethargy.

            Unknown means “out of control.”  Human beings hate being out of control of anything.  Mentally, we require an explanation, to allow our mind to say “Oh, I know what that is.  I can safely forget about it.”  It need not be the best explanation, it need not even be correct.

Why We Jump to Psychological Solutions First

            When facing lethargy from an unknown source, we tend to jump to psychological problems before physical.  There are several reasons why:

1) The more effective excuse

            It is human nature to take the easy path over a hard one.  Lethargy is often used as a quick and easy excuse to avoid doing an undesirable activity.  At some level the mind knows it is playing tricks on itself and doesn’t want the illusion investigated too closely.  If we became conscious of what we are doing to ourselves, the mask would fall away and we would need to construct a new and better excuse to support procrastination.  This takes even more effort.

            If we jump to the conclusion that lethargy is a mental problem then we seek a psychotherapist and spend the next 2 years recounting childhood trauma.  This provides you with even more excuses to support procrastination.  Along with not actually resolving a physical condition. 

            Doctors, diagnose and treat a condition.  If they discover that you’re sharing your digestive track with a colony of tape worms, then you are a few pills and a week from getting over it, but now it’s fixed and you don’t have your convenient excuse to fall back on anymore.  It is sad to think that humans would want to keep a negative physical condition to use as an excuse, but it happens all the time.

2) Fear of a Serious Problem

            If you have been running for 5 hours and you’re tired, you’re not worried.  If you’re tired for no reason at all, you may get a little worried.  Why?  Because you can’t sense the source of what is making you tired.  What is it?  Am I dying?  Is there something seriously wrong with me?  When unknown lethargy persists, people tend to think the worst and start assuming there is something seriously wrong. 

            Some people are so afraid of cancer that they procrastinate on seeking medical advice.  At some level in their mind they feel that if they don’t go, they won’t hear the bad news, and thus can live forever.  They can then talk themselves into believing the lethargy is just in their mind because they feel they have more control over it.  This is less threatening.  So they resort to prayer, meditation, smudge sticks or other Homoeopathic solutions hoping the problem will go away on its own. 

            Don’t get me wrong.  I have personally witnessed many weird things surrounding energy work, Reiki, fire walking and the body’s ability to heal.  The power of belief is a very real power.  It is so influential in the healing process that all new medical drugs must be tested against the placebo effect to determine if it can produce better results than the suggestion of treatment.  There are many case studies where a change in attitude and belief can cause untreatable cancer to go into remission.

            Having said that, seeing a doctor will require less than an hour to do.  Not seeing a doctor can get you killed.  It is a fact that the earlier you identify and treat cancer, the better your chances of survival.  The greatest cause of death in relation to cancer is from finding out too late (aka procrastination).  When your life is on the line, you need to do everything in your power to ensure your survival. 

Unknown Lethargy: See your Doctor Today.

            Eliminating physical causes of lethargy is easily done by booking an appointment with your medical doctor, tell them you’re feeling lethargic, and ask for their advice.  They may ask you about your diet and what you do for physical activities and they will send you to a lab for blood work.  If there is a physical problem causing lethargy, then you will be on the correct path to treatment.  A physical problem cannot be treated by psychological means.  On the other hand, your doctor may find nothing wrong with you.  This is when you should consider psychological problems as a source of lethargy.

The Language of Doctors

            There is the possibility that your doctor finds nothing wrong with you, except an American doctor can’t say, “You’re healthy.”  Every decision a doctor makes is subject to legal scrutiny.  There are so many doctors being sued, the entire profession is trained to use legally conservative language.  They can say, “All the tests show negative responses,” or “We found nothing wrong.” Doctors, as caregivers, would like to give you assurances and ease your mind.  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they may be right; but in that one time they are wrong, they risk a lawsuit and losing their medical practice.  No doctor is correct 100% of the time.  No matter how good they are, the odds of a misdiagnosis will catch up with them sooner or later.  So the entire medical profession adopted a “legally exact language” which makes it sound like they are hiding mysterious illnesses from you.

            The long and the short of it is: if your doctor hasn’t found anything, you probably don’t have a physical problem.  But what about the small chance they are wrong?  When you cross a street you may get hit by a car.  Nothing about life is 100%.  We make the best decisions with the best information we have available.  If you saw a competent doctor, and they say, “… blah negative this… blah blah… negative that… blah blah… found nothing…” you can interpret that legal language as “You are healthy and move on to Plan B.”  Time to consider habitual sources of lethargy.

     This is both good news and bad news.  It is good to know you have checked yourself out and you have nothing medically wrong.  The bad news is habitual lethargy cannot be treated with a pill.  Like it or not, the only person who can fix mental lethargy is you.

Separating Physical and Mental Lethargy

            The feeling of “being tired” is associated with hard physical exertion.  Your muscles produce lactic acids as you use them, a waste product which needs to be flushed out.  You also use up your reserves of glucose which gives them energy.  Hormone concentrations, chemical states of the body, and messages of many muscle clusters send a wide range of information to your para sympathetic nervous system.  All of these get bundled up into a neat communication package which is the feeling of exhaustion. 

            Your mind knows the body needs rest, but it is also charged with balancing the needs of the body with what is happening in the physical environment.  This was one of the most important functions of our mind from an survival perspective.  Our ancestors may have been exhausted from foraging for nuts and berries and chasing squirrels all day.  They may have sat down to rest when they noticed a sabre-tooth tiger stalking them in the shadows.  Within a split second their mind decided that running their ass off was a better deal than dying.  In the next second their body was flooded with a chemical cocktail of hormones, reserve glucose and adrenaline as the flight or fight response activated.  All feelings of fatigue were gone in an instant as the whole body revved up into high gear to flee.  This “choice” carried a high price in torn ligaments, severe cramps, sprains, even increasing damage to existing injuries.  All sucks, but not nearly as bad as being the meal for something else.

     In the modern day, we are not usually at risk of being eaten by tigers, but our mind is still tasked with interpreting the needs of the body and balancing this against what is happening in the immediate environment.  You may remember a time you were driving on the highway and desperately needed to go to the bathroom.  Because you were driving, you chose to ignore your body’s need for relief.  Of course, you know your body doesn’t stay quiet.  As bladder pressure builds up, your body sends stronger and stronger signals to your mind.  “Mind over matter” is a concept which stems from the mind exerting control against needs of the body. 

            Many people think the brain and mind are the same thing; they are not.  The brain is an organ in your body.  It is a remarkable organ that uses approximately 10 times the energy of any other organ (based on caloric usage against its weight).  In a high-stress job your brain can become fatigued even when there is little manual labour involved.  Nerve tissue, just like muscle tissue, needs recovery time; though requires sleep or changing activities to do so.  The mind, is a myriad of complex cognitive systems that leads the body and brain.  It interprets the situation and makes judgement calls as to what the best course of action to take.

            This brings up the idea that neuro chemical messages of the body and the experience of tiredness is not the same thing.  Different people who run a marathon (even ones of the same size, weight, and physical fitness) can have wildly different experiences of tiredness based on what their mind is used to.

Exhaustion is Not Physical

            Exhaustion is not as physical as you think… exhaustion is exactly as physical as you think it is.  Personality, experiences, and beliefs have more of an impact on interpretation than constraints of the physical flesh. 

            While I was an undergraduate psychology student, I had an opportunity to tour a psychiatric ward.  There I encountered a tiny schizophrenic woman who the nurses kept a very close eye on.  They were concerned for my safety and veered me away from her as soon as possible.  I had no clue I was in danger; I was in my early 20s, about 6 foot tall and 200 pounds plus I was a black belt martial artist.  She was emancipated, wiry build, around 80 pounds, old, was on drugs most of her life and anti-psychotics.  It wasn’t apparent that she was also one of the most dangerous inmates in the asylum.  She was prone to psychotic rages that would take a coordinated effort from 5 large orderlies to administer an injection to calm her down; hence why the nurse was concerned when she passed us in the hall.

            Her strength seemed supernatural, but it wasn’t.  Normal people have mental safe guards so they don’t blow out their bodies out unless it is a life-threatening situation.  Mothers have been known to lift a car to save their trapped child.  They don’t tell you how much ligament and muscle damage they do, nor the months of recovery after the event; sometimes that sort of effort can cause permanently damage.  Pain is like a safety limit which prevents you from doing damage to yourself.  This inmate was dangerous because her malfunctioning mind ignored a natural safety restrictions (pain) which would stop her from overdoing it.  As a result, when she had an episode, she was extremely dangerous to herself and others.

            This story suggests that your mental experience of exhaustion is a set point rather than an actual physical limit.  Think of the gas tank in your car.  When your gas gets low, the light comes on to tell you that your car is “hungry” and it wants gas now.  The car can still travel further, it isn’t out of gas yet, so you can still make it to the next gas station.  But when the warning light goes off is arbitrary.  It doesn’t mean you are out of gas, just an indicator that gas is low.  Say you set the warning light to go off when your tank is 90% full.  You will “running out” of gas a lot, and you would be stopping at gas stations far more frequently than you need to. 

            By practising lethargy, this is exactly what you are doing with your body.  You are pushing the alert (the feeling of being tired) further from your real limit so you get tired faster and give up sooner. 

            Martial artists, body builders, and professional athletes often push themselves to true physical exhaustion.  Sometimes they even push to the point where they damage muscles and strain ligaments.  Just as they build up muscles their minds also develop a clear understanding where their true limitations are.  The closer they can get to their true limitation the more of a competitive advantage they have.  Awareness of true physical limits through mental conditioning is just as important to an athlete as building up muscle mass and coordination.

A Difference in Interpretation

            Homo sapiens have existed for around 60,000 years.  For most of that time, we had to deal with dangerous predators.  “Tiredness” evolved to enhance our survival and there are many factors which set your “low gas light” off.  The current fatigue of your muscles is one factor, but so is availability of food, level of dehydration, presence of competition, estimation of potential threats, recovery from sickness, injury, habitual patterns of what the body is used to, sexual arousal, and your overall physical health (just to name a few).  Your unconscious mind evaluates a myriad of complex factors and within a few seconds it summarizes all the information into a nice little package.  You feel tired.

            As it turned out, a complex, flexible system to determine “Tiredness” was highly advantageous when our survival depended on having a reserve of energy.  In the modern age, we are rarely in mortal peril; however we still have this flexible system.

            “Will Power” is the idea that an individual can use an internal well spring of strength to push themselves beyond what they are physically capable of. 

            Rocky Balboa, a fictional boxer in the “Rocky” series, is a great example of iron will.  Rocky always has the odds stacked against him.  His opponents are taller, stronger, heavier, younger and more aggressive.  Usually Rocky becomes a bloody punching bag in the early part of the movie taking the role of the underdog.  Yet he always manages to “powers through” and takes victory through superior physical and mental endurance.  Rocky’s unrelenting will made him an icon of American culture.

            Your mind is a two-way street.  When you say, “I can’t go on, I am spent, I am done,” your conscious mind is issuing orders to your unconscious process.  The listen and make adjustments to your tiredness set point.  Rocky is an example of an athlete who has learned to push his exhaustion threshold very close to his physical limits.  Most of us get tired far before we get anywhere close to our real limits.

Interpretation Changes

            If you accept the idea that interpretations live in the mind, then the follow should make sense to you:

A) Interpretations are different from person to person.

B) Beliefs, attitudes and personality influence interpretations.
C) Daily, habitual experiences can radically alter interpretations from one year to the next.

            Mental control and physical development go hand in hand.  If you have ever trained for a marathon, you know that each day you practice you can run a little farther.  Training trims up your muscles and optimizes support systems (circulatory and digestion) to get nutrition to those muscles.  However, the greatest benefit of training is that the mind becomes more experienced in using and coordinating those muscles.  It notices errors in old beliefs about when “I am tired” and updates them.  In the re-evaluation of beliefs, the mind pushes the point where it the ‘feeling of exhaustion’ kicks in to a point closer to your physical human limitation.

Learning Lethargy: Shitification

            Now for the shocker: Mental training works both ways.  We love to hear stories about the athletes, the heroes, the ‘Rockies’ who have this undefinable strength of character.  We like to imagine ourselves being the same way.  For good or bad, we are training our minds every single day.  We are constantly accumulating new experiences.  As we do, we test and redefine our beliefs and capabilities every day.  Most people are not aware that non-positive development is still development. 

            People who use lethargy as an excuse are unaware that they become more efficient at becoming exhausted.  They become more sensitive to the slight effects of fatigue and activate that feeling of exhaustion sooner.  They are not lying, they are ‘too tired to continue’ but they push their set point further away from their physical capacity the same way the athlete pushes it closer.  Just as you can enhance your endurance, you can also ‘enhance’ your lethargy through habitual inactivity.  Every time you procrastinate on a job you get better at procrastination.  You train your body to exhaust your energy faster.  Some people are so good at lethargy, they are tired as soon as they wake up in the morning.

            At this point you may be thinking, “WTF?!?!  Why would anyone do this?  Why the hell did I do this?  What the serious f*[%!?!?!” 

            They don’t consciously do it.  In all the literature on motivation, nobody explains how we train our brains to fail.  Why?  Everyone assumes that success requires persistent action.  Without it failure happens by default.  Your mind is always in a state of growth.  It isn’t about trying to develop your mind… it’s already developing.  It is a question of direction.  Every day you choose to become more energetic or you can choose to become more lethargic.  Most people make their life worse and worse by not realizing they can direct the growth of their mind.  I call this “shitification.”  It takes just as much work to make something worse as it does to make it better.  Shitification is found in the little choices that we make every minute of every day.

            The real question now is to decide if you want to know of the process and make it go where you want, or to ignore it and be at the mercy of a blind dude driving your car.  Becoming more energetic, more passionate, more enthusiastic, more creative and more curious are the result of little choices we make every day.  It is just as easy to get out of bed as it is to hit the snooze alarm and try to go back to sleep.  It is just as easy to eat an apple as it is to eat a bag of potato chips.  It is far easier, when waiting in line, to strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know and express an interest in them rather than stand there bored, like a mindless zombie.  It takes just as much time to be polite as it does to be rude.  Any positive trait you wish to cultivate is the result of small choices you make every day.