Not Releasing Inaction
This piece is a contribution to the STSC Symposium, a monthly set-theme collaboration between STSC writers. The topic for this upcoming issue is Procrastination.
You from now on know that any action is neurologically started by a process called disinhibition. The counterintuitive truth is, there is hardly any energy involved in setting off a movement. The neurons responsible for triggering any activity, be it extending your arm or uttering a sound, are charged with the energy to accomplish it at every moment. When the signal of “do this” comes from the brain, the process of disinhibition is merely an opening of the floodgates at those synapses and the charge turns into an electrical signal which contracts the targeted muscles necessary for that act.
A toddler can already perform most movements, many are already practiced before birth in the mother's womb. What we see as learning to walk, speak, throw, grab, etc. is only the coordination of many different movements into a directed deliberate act. The constituent elements that together form those guided activities are in themselves easy, always ready to go and as explained before, starting them costs barely any energy.
Imagine a bucket of water suspended in the air – that is a single movement one is capable of. A string is stopping it from tipping over – that is the ready neurological charge. A little knot one simply has to pull on will allow the bucket to tip over – that is the disinhibition. Now there are a few dozen buckets suspended for which one knows how to quickly untie the knots to reach a specific effect – that is a complex learned behavior.
Only complex behaviors that require the coordination of many different small movements are in themselves hard. At least until one is accustomed to performing them routinely. For example, a trained musician who knows a relatively easy song by heart, does not think of playing every single one of the hundreds of notes. He only has to disinhibit one compiled sequence of motor tasks for playing that song. Only learning to perform this sequence in adequate speed and rhythm is a strenuous task.
When performing any action is such a simple thing of only unleashing a couple of knots, presuming one knows already the sequence for it, and it supposedly costs barely any energy, then why do the simplest things seem so hard when contemplating of whether one should get over themselves and finally do them? Why do many of us often experience such a strain for starting something, often waiting to do it until it is close to too late? Why do we procrastinate?
Being a human, or any living organism, is a matter of energy economy. We wear cloths in heated homes to save expending calories on keeping our body temperature stable. We cook food to outsource some of the stomach’s work of denaturing proteins and fibers. When we don’t have to do something, we instinctively won’t.
While opening the neurological floodgates to start a motion barely costs any energy and the muscles store the nutrients to repeat a movement many times before needing to refuel, any sort of activity requires a follow-up period to supply the strained tissues with the chemicals necessary to use them again. This can range from milliseconds of recharging the neurons for starting new muscle contractions, to minutes for refueling the muscles with new ATP, hours for transporting new carbohydrates and amino acids into the muscle-cells, to days for healing the connective tissues that have incurred miniature damage during the strain.
Resting to restore the body (and mind) is essential to a living organism, otherwise sleep would have been eliminated during the process of evolution. But today’s cultural and technological climate does not allow for humans to rest as much as they should. Although the main necessities of life are all easily taken care of through the powerful tools that were developed for that purpose, the stream of information any of us is confronted with has expanded by a barely comprehensible factor. The constant drive to be busy with something is not met with an appropriate counterbalance of restorative periods. Therefore, the tendency to procrastinate what does not seem vital at that exact moment is completely natural. Especially our nervous systems are overtaxed, so a little more time to recharge before going into that thing one has to get done is the healthy reaction to an instinct based on a universal survival mechanism. Untying the knots on those water-buckets is quick and easy. But refilling them with fresh water and tying new knots takes a toll one has to dedicate time and energy to.
But that is by far not the only good reason to procrastinate.
When it comes to voluntary creation, one might have made plans for how to do a certain thing. But implementing that plan gets pushed further and further out. While the to-be-creator becomes self-conscious about not getting started, something magical happens below the surface. The plan morphs in previously unanticipated ways. Certain aspects of it solidify, others get discarded or replaced or expanded. When he thinks that he’s procrastinating, he in fact is percolating. In bouts of ambition, he thinks he is ready but apparently subconsciously knows that he’s not. He upholds the inhibition, keeps the knots of the water-buckets still tied. But when he unequivocally knows in which sequence he wants to let those water-buckets loose, the time will come in which he can no longer stop himself from disinhibiting the action.
Another probably common manner of procrastination is based around the fact that humans are exceptionally capable of simulating situations mentally. Among procrastinators, a current theme is surely that of grandiosity. “My dreams are too big for reality to get in the way of them” was certainly meant as not allowing for circumstances to stop one from pursuing their ideals. Or it could be made to mean that procrastination is potentially a way to allow for fantasies of accomplishments to continue without facing the fact of possessing improper skills for their actual attainment. Dreaming about success can evoke just about the same quality (but maybe not quantity) of emotions as attaining it after all. Starting to learn the skill or developing it to the level needed for that might most often not be capable of living up to being equally as pleasurable. Since training to coordinate all those easy movements necessary for a complex activity is the most difficult set of actions, preemptively perceiving it as an insurmountable hurdle is accurate. The fallacy lies in thinking of that ability as one action, as with the previously mentioned easy song played by the trained musician. At the early stages, one still has to think of playing just the next few notes. Therefore, the procrastinator to whom this scenario applies is struggling with disinhibiting that complex not yet habituated sequence. He might no longer do so, if he were to realize that there is a single measly next step easily within his reach. Or he can keep on not releasing that inaction but instead continue dreaming of grandiosity.
There are certainly many more reasons to procrastinate. Some more valid than others. If you read or think about how not doing the things you set out to do is valid and it relieves your soul of some pressure, good. If you contemplate not going through with it when you see arguments to support putting it off but within you there is an emotional revolt bubbling up, listen to it. There obviously is something you don’t want to be stopped from doing - definitely not by yourself. You apparently want to untie those knots. If not now, certainly not never.