What Happens in Your Brain When You Procrastinate

Alex mapped out his whole week on Sunday evening. Tax return on Tuesday morning, two hours, done. At ten on Tuesday he opened the folder with his receipts, looked at it for ten seconds and went to wash the dishes that had been sitting in the sink since Friday.

The interesting thing about that scene is what is missing from it: any confusion about the plan. Alex knew exactly what to do, when, and for how long. When we ask why the brain puts things off, we usually go looking for a flaw in the planning, and yet nearly all of us plan beautifully. We delay in spite of the plan, not because we never made one.

Weak willpower is the wrong diagnosis

The most common explanation of delay is that a person lacks self-discipline. That diagnosis fits neither the data nor your own experience. The same Alex who cannot survive two hours with paperwork rides fifty miles on Saturday and spends the evening fixing a neighbour's boiler. Whatever he is short of, it is not the capacity to tolerate discomfort.

Psychology has its own name for the distance between what we resolve to do and what we end up doing: the intention-action gap. It is not limited to procrastination, you will meet it in exercise, food and saving money. What matters is that it opens at the moment of execution, not at the moment of deciding. Alex decided well on Sunday and decided differently on Tuesday, because on Tuesday he was in the same room as the folder.

Over the past two decades the psychology of procrastination has moved elsewhere. Delay is now described as a failure of emotion regulation rather than a failure of willpower or time management. The distinction is not academic. It decides where to reach when you want to change something.

Test it on yourself. When did you last postpone something because you genuinely did not know when you had time for it? And when did you last postpone something because, for reasons hard to put into words, you simply did not feel like it?

A mood repair for right now

Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl summed up the research in 2013 with a single explanation: procrastination gives priority to a short-term repair of your mood over a long-term goal. The task carries an unpleasant emotion with it. Postponing gets rid of that emotion immediately, and the relief is entirely real, it arrives within seconds.

The story does not end there, because relief reinforces the behaviour that produced it. Your brain records a simple lesson: when I turn away from this folder, the pressure eases. Next time turning away is quicker and more automatic, until it becomes a habit you no longer even notice.

The whole loop looks roughly like this:

• the task triggers an unpleasant feeling: boredom, worry about the outcome, or an appetite for something more interesting
• attention slides somewhere else, because somewhere else is more pleasant
• within seconds the discomfort is gone, and that relief works as a reward
• the deadline has moved closer in the meantime, so next time the unpleasant feeling will be stronger still

Among other things, this explains why a generous deadline often makes matters worse. While the hand-in date is far away, the discomfort of the task is small, but escaping it stays easy and keeps paying off. Only when the deadline gets close enough that fear of the consequences outweighs the discomfort of the work do the scales tip. We call that "I work best under pressure", although what it usually means is that otherwise we would not get started at all.

From this follows one of the less pleasant properties of delay. The more often you use it, the more reliably it delivers instant relief, and the harder it becomes to resist. It is not a character flaw. It is learning, and it runs on the same rules as any other habit.

Two systems in one head

The popular account says there is a "lizard brain" inside your skull that wants pleasure now, and a sensible executive at the front pushing back. Please take that as a simplified model, not as a description of anatomy. A real brain does not have two separate offices, it has densely connected networks whose roles differ from study to study.

The picture still captures something. Older circuits tied to emotion and reward respond fast to what is here and now, and next Thursday does not interest them. Your prefrontal cortex, the region behind the forehead associated with planning and self-control, can override a short-term impulse, but its influence is slower and falls apart more easily.

Which of the two wins is fairly predictable. The planning part loses when you are tired, short on sleep, stressed or hungry. It also loses when the impulse is physically close: a phone lying next to the keyboard is a completely different opponent than a phone in another room.

More useful than the image of a duel is the image of weighing. Your brain assigns a value to the options within reach at every moment and takes the one that comes out best right then. Value is not fixed, it shifts with fatigue, mood, the distance of the reward and whatever happens to be at hand. Delay is then less a rebellion against yourself and more the result of an arithmetic whose parameters you never set.

Hannah described it in one sentence. Until two in the afternoon she writes her thesis fairly smoothly, and after three she catches herself twenty minutes into listings for flats she cannot afford. Her willpower did not deteriorate. The battery ran out in the part that operates willpower.

Your future self as a stranger

The other half of the explanation is about time. Hal Hershfield and colleagues used neuroimaging to watch what happens in the brain when people think about themselves in ten or twenty years. In many of them, the brain's response looked much like thinking about a stranger rather than about themselves.

This fits a phenomenon called temporal discounting. A reward you have to wait for weighs less in a decision than the same reward available immediately, and the longer the wait, the steeper the drop. Exact numbers differ by person and by type of reward, but the direction is consistent.

Now combine that with an ordinary working evening. On one side sits discomfort now plus a payoff in three weeks for somebody the brain processes almost like an acquaintance from the office. On the other side sits a pleasant video available within two seconds. Written out like that, the outcome of the contest stops being a mystery.

What is interesting is that this mechanism has almost nothing to do with how much the goal matters to you. Alex wants to file his return. He wanted to file it on Tuesday morning too. It is only that in that particular second, looking at the folder of receipts, the urge to do it weighed less than the urge to close it.

Why self-blame makes delay worse

The standard reaction to a postponed task goes like this: you tell yourself off, resolve that tomorrow will be different, and go to bed with an unpleasant feeling in your stomach. It looks responsible. In practice it takes the loop one turn further.

Guilt is just another unpleasant emotion, and it is firmly attached to the task. When you open the folder next time, it will not be only boredom with paperwork that shows up, but the leftovers of yesterday's shame. The discomfort is larger than before, so the need for relief is larger too.

Michael Wohl and his colleagues followed students in 2010 who had put off studying for a first exam. Those who managed to forgive themselves for the delay procrastinated less before the next exam than those who kept drowning in self-blame. Self-forgiveness did not serve as an excuse here, it worked by removing the emotion that had been feeding the delay.

That is the whole counterintuitive point. Being hard on yourself usually deepens procrastination, while a kinder approach reduces it. This does not mean waving the problem away. It means separating the sentence "I made a mistake" from the sentence "I am a hopeless case", because only the second one produces an emotion you then have to run away from again.

In practice it means no longer treating a postponed task as evidence about your character. "I failed again" is a statement about a person. "Yesterday afternoon I went around it because I did not feel like it" is a statement about a situation. Both are equally true, but the second one leaves the task a little lighter than it was.

Work with the emotion, not the schedule

If emotions drive delay, most of the usual advice misses. A new planner, a colour-coded priority system and a task app all address the schedule. The schedule was never the problem, which shows in how reliably we make plans and how reliably we then break them.

Three directions follow straight from what is described above:

• shrink the aversiveness of the task until the first step is not worth escaping: open the folder, write one sentence, sort the receipts into two piles
• let the reward arrive today rather than in three weeks, even if it is only the end of a twenty-minute block and a coffee afterwards
• reach your future self through a concrete picture of next Tuesday rather than through the abstract thought that "it will pay off"

More useful still is knowing which emotion you personally are running from. Delay out of boredom, delay out of fear of the outcome and delay out of impulsivity look identical in a calendar, but they respond to opposite interventions. The differences are laid out in the piece on types of procrastination, and in short it comes down to this:

If you are not sure which way it pulls you, the procrastination test has 21 questions, takes about three minutes and separates three sources of delay. It is not a diagnosis, more a quick mirror to start from. All three sources are variants of one thing: an emotion now beat a goal later.

One boundary is worth clearing up, because it gets confused most often. Laziness and procrastination are not the same thing. Laziness is a reluctance to spend energy, whereas procrastination tends to be expensive in energy, because the person wants to and does not want to at the same time. While avoiding his paperwork, Alex washed the dishes, vacuumed the flat and took the glass out to the recycling bin. The difference is covered in more detail in procrastination vs laziness.