By nine o'clock the kitchen was clean, four unrelated emails had been answered, a recipe had been researched for a dinner that wasn't happening this week, and the document that had been open in its own tab since six — a self-assessment due Friday, four sentences currently written — remained at four sentences. The lights of Manhattan were on across the water. Nothing else in the apartment needed doing anymore. It had all been done, in the specific order of things that weren't the assessment.
It would be easy to call this laziness, except laziness doesn't organize four emails, a clean kitchen, and a dinner that isn't happening this week.
Neil Fiore, a psychologist who spent much of his career studying procrastination, made an observation that runs against the common wisdom on the subject: procrastination is rarely about time management, and it isn't laziness in any meaningful sense. It's a strategy — often an unconscious one — for escaping the anxiety that arises when a task becomes entangled with fear of failure, perfectionism, or the feeling that one's worth is somehow at stake. Once that entanglement has happened, the task itself is no longer neutral. Avoiding it doesn't remove the anxiety — it just relocates it to whatever the mind reaches for instead: the clean kitchen, the four answered emails, the recipe for a dinner that isn't happening this week.
A self-assessment is a specific kind of task. It asks a person to state something evaluative about themselves in writing, with the understanding that someone else will read it and form a judgment on the basis of it. That's a different order of difficulty than a task with a clear procedure and a knowable outcome. The four sentences that did get written are, not coincidentally, the safest four — factual, defensible, unlikely to be picked apart. What comes after them requires actually deciding how the year should be characterized, which requires deciding something about oneself that hasn't been decided yet.
The people I work with in New Jersey — many commuting into Manhattan from Hoboken, Jersey City, and along the waterfront — often bring a version of this: a task list where everything gets done except the one item that actually matters, in an apartment that, by the time the avoided task finally gets addressed, has never been cleaner. The procrastination isn't a discipline problem. It's usually the clearest indicator in the day of which task is actually carrying weight.
CBT doesn't treat procrastination as something to muscle through with better scheduling. It asks what the task is threatening, specifically, and whether the fear underneath it holds up to examination. Sometimes it does. The assessment still has to get written either way.
I work with adults throughout New Jersey — including Hoboken, Jersey City, and communities across the state — via telehealth. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
What is cognitive behavioral therapy?
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based approach that examines the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It works from the observation that how we interpret situations — not the situations themselves — largely determines how we feel about them.
What does CBT help with?
It is well-suited for anxiety, depression, anticipatory worry, and the persistent sense that emotional reactions are out of proportion to what's actually happening. It tends to produce measurable results within a defined time frame.
How is CBT different from other therapy approaches?
Most other approaches work at the level of relationships, history, or meaning. CBT works more directly on the thinking patterns that generate distress in the present — identifying them, examining them, and testing whether they hold up.
Who is a good fit for CBT?
It works well for people who are curious about their own patterns and willing to notice their thoughts rather than simply accept them as accurate accounts of reality. Some people use it alongside other approaches for different layers of the work.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist offering cognitive behavioral therapy via telehealth in New Jersey and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.