Why Are People Chronically Late? What Are The Psychological Reasons For Being Late?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

1. The first and most important psychological reason for being late, which is not only noted by psychologists in clients, but you can also notice in your friends and acquaintances, is anxiety. A person is so internally tense and anxious that he does not want and cannot come to a meeting on time, and then sit silently and wait. For him, waiting is tantamount to an inevitable and catastrophic collision with his anxiety, a nervous "vibration" arises inside his consciousness ("We urgently need to do something! But what? Watch Facebook, Vkontakte … But this is so boring … You need to communicate with people. This whole situation only causes internal tension! "). What will a person do in such cases? He will just come later, when everything has probably already begun, and he himself will be definitely interested!

2. The person is not interested. Sometimes there are situations when it is simply not interesting to go where you need to go. As a result, we are often late for work or school. Why? All this is rubbed off, becomes uninteresting, emotional burnout occurs.

3. Sometimes a person does not calculate his strength. If the degree of violation of inner awareness is deep enough, the person is actually not connected with reality. For example, it seems to him that he will get ready in 5 minutes, day after day the situation repeats itself, and he is late, but still continues to believe that he can get ready in 5 minutes! In fact, each of us can find ourselves in a similar situation. Here I would like to give an example from personal experience. During therapy, I was always late and each time I wrote to my therapist: “I will be late for 5 (7 or 9)

minutes . At one point, she jokingly noticed that I am an amazing person, because I always know how many minutes I will be late. After this remark, I realized - if I know how many minutes I will be late, then somewhere I have a runaway with reality (Maybe I'm not leaving on time? Or at the wrong time?). Knowing how long it will take to get there, for some reason I deceive myself that I can get ready faster. But why?

So, if a person does not manage to dock these nuances with reality, this is directly related to his lack of understanding of the situation in this place.

4. A person has an unconscious, one might even say pathological, need to be noticed. It is very important for him to attract extra attention to himself - even if I will be bad, but you will notice me! What is the reason for this behavior? Probably, in childhood, such a person did not have enough attention from the parents, as a result - the need is not fully satisfied.

5. A person is too nervous about an upcoming and important event for him (an interview about a job in a company, which he dreamed of all his life, a date with a boyfriend / girlfriend of his dreams). As a result, he begins to gather for a long time, is in an agitated nervous state, as a result, there is a discrepancy with reality. Why? In the mind of a person at this moment, time passes more slowly than in fact, according to the clock.

Each of us at least once in our life has met people for whom being late is the norm. Such personalities are always late, moreover, during each conversation on the phone, they constantly repeat: "Yes, yes, I'm already driving up!"

As a rule, such a psychology is characteristic of people whose sluggishness and sluggishness in childhood were treated with condescension. These can be the only girls among brothers or, conversely, the only boys among sisters, children with overprotection from their parents (“Let me do it for you, so that it’s faster!”). A condescending and patient attitude to the pace of the child (no one urges the kid - "Let him think whether to do this task or not!" Or "Didn't do his homework for two weeks? It's okay!").