Motivate Yourself. Do You Procrastinate?

“Do You Procrastinate? You are genetically coded to be an avoidance machine!”
by Bob Davies

Do your intentions match your actual performance? Have you ever said you were going to do something that you were motivated to do and despite your attitude you didn’t take the action?

Consider this. Exactly at 3:50 am the alarm clock rings awakening you from the deepest sleep you can recall in a long time. You intend to get up and go for your run. You want to do this. You’re excited about doing this. However, you reach over and cancel your alarm with the thought that it’s Saturday and you’ve already hit your commitment to run a minimum of four times this week. You ran Monday through Thursday, missed Friday and intended to run Saturday to surpass your goal. You simply don’t feel like running this morning and your final thought before drifting back to sleep is “equally important in a fitness program is rest. I need to sleep in!”

On the surface this sounds reasonable. However, keep this statement in mind:

“Being reasonable is the lowest level of human consciousness!”

What’s really going on? The answer is genetic coding. It all has to do with what is called the survival mechanism. Human beings have a very narrow range of perceptual abilities. We can hear a limited range of frequencies of vibrating air. The human ear can nominally hear sounds in the range 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). This upper limit tends to decrease with age, most adults being unable to hear above 16 kHz. The ear itself does not respond to frequencies below 20 Hz, but these can be perceived via the body's sense of touch.

We can see only certain wavelengths of light indicated by the arrow below. It doesn’t mean that other frequencies don’t exist; it just means that they are outside of our perceptual abilities.

Humans are very poor observers. Take a look at figure A. This is what you and I see, simply the head of a pin. That is our reality. However, as you start to increase the magnification beyond the human capacity you start to reveal an entirely different world. What are shown in figure B are a human hair and the beginning of the recognition of a dust mite.

According to some of the latest research, scientists have demonstrated that the brain processes about 400 billion bits of information per second. Usually we are only conscious of about 2,000 of those bits of data.[1] Of this input we are only conscious of up to seven inputs[2] and we are only able to take action on one item at a time.

Since we have such a narrow bandwidth of perceptual abilities, nature has coded us in such a way that we are predisposed to “see” what can hurt us and then coded to automatically avoid that stimulus. That is the law of human performance. All human performance is the avoidance of pain and the seeking of comfort. This predisposition favors survival and the passing on of our genes.

Imagine this. One caveman looks up and sees a mountain lion perched on a rock just above his head. He admires the image and thinks “pretty kitty”. That caveman does not survive to pass on the “stupid” gene. Another cave man looks up and has the subtle genetic difference to instantly see and interpret the mountain lion as a threat and avoids. This instinct of “see-recognize threat-avoid” ensures survival and is passed on through the generations. In fact, all of life has this see and avoid capacity and it’s referred to as the survival mechanism.

In this instance it’s called “fight or flight” response. Although this is absolutely necessary for survival, there is something gone wrong here. The problem is that the survival mechanism doesn’t only operate when it’s appropriate. It is easily triggered and often times operate inappropriately. Consider this example. You’re driving on a crowded highway and someone suddenly pulls in front of you and gives you the finger!

Your brain interprets this as a threat and you get the same physiological response that you would if you were threatened by the mountain lion, but you’re sitting in your car. This is an inappropriate response yet it occurs automatically anyway. I call this evolutionary debris.

Here is another example of evolutionary debris. There is an area of the brain called the appestat. This is the area that stimulates the fat cells to release the hormone lepton which signals that you are full and you stop eating.[3] There is a delay in this signaling of between ten to twenty minutes. During cave man days this delay favored survival and enabled caveman to binge. After all, it might be another week before he has a protein source like a captured deer so it’s in the best interest to be coded to delay feeling full.

Does this apply to us today? Of course not. It does not favor our survival to be coded to overeat since our next meal is a certainty! However, the instinct still exists.

What is an instinct? Instinct is the inherent disposition of a living organism toward a particular behavior. Instincts are unlearned, inherited fixed action patterns of responses or reactions to certain kinds of stimuli.[4]

The survival mechanism of the subsconscious recognition of pain and the automatic avoidance is hard wired in all of life. It is a neurological firing process that does not ask for your compliance or agreement. This is automatic and results in avoidance and rationalization. Rationalization is the justification of avoidance. The purpose of rationalization is to protect you from feeling guilty for not doing what you said you would do. Although you are many times aware of this for the most part it is a subsconscious process.

The best it can get for humans is mediocrity. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the statistics. Most of the population falls between +1 and –1 standard deviation of the mean. It’s almost 70% of the population. This is referred to as the frequency distribution or bell shaped curve.

The question to ask yourself is where do you see this in your own life? What rational lies (rationalization) do you buy into and accept as being true? It’s not good or bad so as you consider these inquiries I’ll ask you to do so without judgment.

There is tremendous information in the math of figure C. It really talks about nature’s symmetry. It speaks to polarity, in order to know good you need to know bad, hot-cold, high-low, etc.

So where in your life are you living in resignation accepting that you are doing the best that you could be doing? How does this affect your workouts?

It is the code of human nature to operate up to the range of our comfort zone and then to avoid and rationalize. The best it can be within this design is mediocrity and that’s exactly where most people sit. Unless there is an intervention.

Yes, there is a solution. This article is not designed to simply point out the limits of the human condition. I have a solution as well. The solution is behavioral contracting.[5] Behavioral contracting has two components. The first is the declaration of your intention. I will run x times, x miles this week. This is called the specific declaration.

The next part of the contract is the consequence for non-performance. The human brain is coded to seek and find the highest level of perceived pain and then compel the avoidance of that pain for comfort. This is not a request; this is an automatic neurological process that does not ask for your conscious participation. Hence my statement that humans are avoidance machines.

It is futile to fight human nature. Good news. You don’t have to. You can operate at peak performance in accordance to human nature’s coding of avoidance. You would do this by making sure that the consequence for non-performance is perceived as the highest level of pain.

Attach a consequence to your commitment to run x miles, x amount of times this week. You know that your brain already clearly recognizes the “pain” associated with running. It hurts, it takes time, it takes energy, I’m tired, etc. You’ve got those neurological patterns already firing.

So make a new pattern. Add the painful consequence of paying a $100 fine to someone you don’t like, or a cause you don’t believe in. If you’re a republican make your consequence to send a contribution to the democratic party if you don’t do what you said you would do and vice versa. (Democrat to republican.) Do you want to do this? Of course not. How do you avoid having to make the contribution to the party that you don’t believe in? By doing what you said you would do!

Isn’t that the idea anyway? You don’t need to worry about fines if you do the stated activity.

Implement this for one week and watch what happens. It is almost a certainty that you will take the action that is associated with the painful consequence. There is a science about why this is. That will be the topic of another article. For now, make a commitment that will be due within the time frame of the moment you wake up on Monday and the time you go to bed on Sunday. Be specific about your commitment. Next, declare a penalty that will be enforced if you don’t execute your promise. I’m only e-mail away for an accountability partner.

Have a great week and notice what happens to what you pay attention to with a behavioral contract in place.

Coach Bob

High Performance Training, Inc.
Bob Davies, M.Ed. Psychology, B.S. Health, MCC Master Certified Coach
20992 Ashley Lane, Lake Forest, CA 92630-5865
949-830-9192 fax 949-830-9492 Email: Info@bobdavies.com Website: www.Bobdavies.com On-Line coaching www.bobdaviescoaching.com

Named in the Top 100 Minds of Personal and Professional Development, World-wide by Excellence Magazine.

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Permission granted to publish this article with Resource information included: Bob Davies High Performance Training, Inc. 949-830-9192 info@bobdavies.com www.bobdavies.com Permission also granted to edit this article.

Bob Davies
High Performance Training, Inc.
20992 Ashley Lane
Lake Forest, Ca 92630












[1] Walker EH (2000) The Physics of Consciousness: Quantum minds and the meaning of Life. Cambridge MA: Perseus ISBN 0738202347. By the way, we have trillions of cells involved in this perception.
[2] Miller, George The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review, Vol 63, No. 2, 1956.
[3] To hear an audio interview with Dr. Philip Scarpace, professor at the University of Florida and leading researcher of Lepton, go to http://wholefoodsdetox.com/?p=8
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct
[5] Recommended reading, book by the author, The 1.2% Factor. How the Small Change of Accountability Leads to Large Results. (http://www.bobdavies.com/motivational_books.html#The12Factor)