Swing/AWT/SWT :: Controls Not Updating Until Method Is Completely Finished

I have this method that does several RegEx queries along with a lot of searching and replacing of text, and each regex search / replace takes some time and a total of maybe two minutes for all of them to finish up. So I added a ProgressBar to my JavaFX form and I added code after each step to simply use the ProgressBar.setProgress method by a factor of 10% each step ... so the code would resemble something like this:

do a regex query
if it finds things then do a replaceAll method on the string being searched
ProgressBar.setProgress(.1)

do another RegexQuery
If it finds stuff, so a replaceAll method
ProgressBar.setProgress(.2)

etc...

What is happening is that the progress bar will not actually paint any progress until AFTER the entire method is done executing. So from the users perspective, they click on the button and the program appears to freeze until its all done with that method at which point it instantly changes the progress bar to the last value I set ...

So the desired effect is simply not working, and I don't know why.

I tried changing (as in replacing the progress bar with a different control) the progress bar value settings with updating text in a text box on the form, and even that didn't display any of the text messages until AFTER the procedure was done executing at which point, all of the text logs appeared at one time instead of gradually adding text to the box in increments as the method executed.So it FEELS like any time a method is actually running, the JavaFX scene simply freezes until the method is done running. And it doesn't matter if I change the progress bars value directly or put it into its own method which gets called throughout the execution of the regex method ... either way, nothing actually happens on the form until the software is done executing all of the procedures called and then it comes back to a "resting" state...

I tried simplifying it by making a single method that does two things ... it updates the progress bar and then it waits for 1 second. Then it increments a variable then updates the progress bar, then waits a second, thinking to myself that 1 second pause would give it time to update the progress bars value but even that little method would not work.

Here is the test method I created:

private void testProgressBar() {
for(int x = 0;x<10;x++) {
progressBar.setProgressBar(.1*(x+1));
try {
sleep(1000);
}
catch(InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

Even that little piece of code will not actually show any changes in the progress bar until after its done looping at which point, the progress bar is filled to 100%, but I never see the first 9 changes in the progress bar within that for next loop.