Psychology of laziness

Laziness is the act of not doing things, avoiding tasks. Sometimes it may become apathy and be a symptom of depression. The bad thing is that laziness leads to bad health, low self esteem, lack of hope and self confidence. Laziness goes together with procrastination really often. It may lead to crisis, sense of guilt and loss of productivity.
There are 6 types of laziness: physical, emotional, creative, philosophical, intellectual, and pathologic. Each of them reveals itself in different situations in life – when a person has to go somewhere suddenly, to figure out some kind of problem in an unusual way & so on.
This distribution is not the only one. There are other types of laziness but we don’t use them so often in psychology. Eastern laziness – people are hanging around all day, drinking tea, listening to music, when western idlers rush around all day, do many things but actually they’re not important and not worth the time they take. In the end of the day people realize that they haven’t done anything useful.
If people want to overcome their laziness the most effective way is to keep themselves busy. Because you start being lazy when you feel tired. But you don’t feel tired until the moment you stop being busy. Planning your day (writing a schedule) is also very helpful. If you plan many things and make your day busy, you’ll be determined to do all of them so that your next day won’t be too busy. People are not deep in thought but friends and others also have influence to their laziness. If you communicate with people who have high motivation to do something, they’re determined - you’ll be alike them, at least try to. But if people in your surroundings are lazy, postpone their tasks and activities all the time, perhaps you’ll follow them.
What concerns children and their homework they should get prepared first. Their working space should be tidy, no useless objects, no music or TV so there would be no distraction. It’s also good to promise a reward for doing something difficult but food should be avoided in this case. Many kinds of activities like phone calls, walks outside are preferred. Children should also think of bad consequences – if they don’t accomplish their homework they’ll get a bad mark, their teacher will be disappointed in them & many more. Another small but meaningful point is the order of homework. It’s best to start from the easiest task. You finish it quickly, don’t put much effort and it gives a kind of estimation to do more because you were successful.

_SUMMARY_

Thinking and reasoning
In this chapter we learned some new things and remembered some already known. For example that people use mental images to remember something or in sport training. Also there was much attention paid to concepts – how they influence our behavior and how they differ in various cultures. I discovered that people sometimes use syllogistic reasoning - it’s drawing a conclusion from a set of assumptions. If a person has to make a decision, he may use algorithm which guarantees a solution to a problem or heuristic which may lead to a solution but cannot ensure it.

Problem solving
Before starting to solve a problem people have to understand and diagnose it. This is the start of the chapter. Then goes a list of kinds of problems: arrangement, problems of inducing structure and transformation problems. The way a problem is phrased is very important because its solving depends on that. Many ways of problem solving were presented: trial and error, means-ends analysis, dividing problems into parts and solving each of them. Some difficulties of problem solving were mentioned too – functional fixedness and mental set. It’s interesting that creativity has also much to do in problem solving – it gives an ability to combine ideas in novel ways; it’s also suited with divergent thinking – the ability to generate unusual responses to questions.

Language
The chapter starts with describing 3 main components in language – phonology, syntax and semantics. Each of them is irreplaceable because they all have their specific sphere in language. Before using these components children start to babble, then they acquire language, start to use telegraphic speech, learn some rules and produce language.
There are 2 hypotheses – one says that the notion that language shapes may determine the way people understand the world in particular culture; the other says that thinking produces language. It’s known that some chimps use “language” but it still lacks the grammar and novel constructions of human language. Another interesting discussion was about bilingual learning and immersion programs. It’s proved that bilingual speakers show more cognitive flexibility, understand concepts more easily & so on.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) describes an ability to perceive and manage the emotions of one's self and others. It has a very strong meaning in our achieving purposes & so on. If a person has a poor EIQ he may be held back from achieving his goals while those with a higher EIQ have more motivation to achieve success in life. This is so because emotionally intelligent people overcome difficulties more easily, they are able to control their moods and have more motivation to reach something. These people feel comfortable when closely surrounded by others. Besides, it’s easy for them to support and advise others.
Emotional literacy is the ability to understand ourselves and others, to use information about emotions of others so we could perceive what they are feeling and thinking. Literacy also helps us to respond to other’s emotions, especially in the helpful ways for us and other people. Emotional literacy can be divided into some parts: self understanding, understanding and managing emotions, understanding social situations and making relationships. To my mind that’s all really important because we live among people and to know the ways to deal with them gives us self confidence and much more in nearly all situations.
Another important issue in this topic is human needs. Most of the needs are basic but each person has a different strength in particular need. It’s the same like when one of us needs more water, more food & so on. One human may need more independence, while the other may need strong social connections and security. Basically people feel the need to be accepted, heard, confident, forgiven, admired, helpful, listened to, loved, supported, valued & the list goes on and on…
So if emotional intelligence has something to do with emotions it has some basic feelings that can be positive or negative. Positives ones are interest, excitement, joy, enjoyment. Negative – shame, humiliation, disgust, anger, rage, fear, terror, stress.
There are many more things about emotional intelligence like its criticism or how can it help to solve conflicts & so on. By the way there are many discussions on measuring the EI. Some scientists say that it can be measured like IQ and some disagree. I did a test to see what my EIQ is. It was quite strange because the questions reminded me the ones in a women magazine, they didn’t seem to be serious, despite that there was over a 100 of them. I also was unsatisfied with my results because I totally disagree with them. Maybe psychologists and other scientists still have to do much work on this subfield :) As we know tomorrow brings us some news to life.