Why your brain loves procrastination

Roughly 5 percent of the population has such a problem with chronic procrastination that it seriously affects their lives.

None of it seems logical. How can people have such good intentions and yet be so totally unable to follow through?

Conventional wisdom has long suggested that procrastination is all about poor time management and willpower. But more recently, psychologists have been discovering that it may have more to do with how our brains and emotions work.

Procrastination, they've realized, appears to be a coping mechanism. When people procrastinate, they're avoiding emotionally unpleasant tasks and instead doing something that provides a temporary mood boost. The procrastination itself then causes shame and guilt - which in turn leads people to procrastinate even further, creating a vicious cycle.

Pychyl , a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has been studying procrastinators for some 19 years. I talked to him about why people procrastinate and how they can learn to stop.

Tim Pychyl: When a procrastinator thinks about themselves, they'll think, "Oh, I have a time management problem," or, "I just can't make myself do it. There's a problem with my willpower." And when other people think about procrastinators, they use that pejorative term: "They're lazy."

I can simplify that and say that psychologists recognize we all have a 6-year-old running the ship. And the 6-year-old is saying, "I don't want to! I don't feel like it!"

TP: Recently we've been doing research that relates to the work on "present self"/"future self" because what's happening with procrastination is that "present self" is always trumping "future self."

Hal Hershfield has done some really great research on looking at how we think about "future self." He's shown that in experimental settings if someone sees their own picture digitally aged, they're more likely to allocate funds to retirement. When [the researchers] did the fMRI studies, they found our brain processes present self and future self differently. We think of future self more like a stranger.

But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions. So we see it as giving in to feel good. And it's related to a lack of self-regulation skills.

If you speak to people, they'll tell you that it doesn't feel voluntary: "I feel like I have no control over it." For some people, it feels totally involuntary, like they can't help themselves.

TP: One of my pet expressions is, "Just get started." And it's important you don't say, "Just do it" - that's overwhelming. But just get started.

Whenever we face a task, we're not going to feel like doing it. Somehow adults believe that their motivational state has to match the task at hand. We say, "I'm not in the mood."

SL: What's the most surprising thing to you about procrastination?

TP: I think the most surprising thing I'm still grappling with is that for many people, the experience of procrastination doesn't match the definition that most of us are working with: a voluntary delay of an intended action despite knowing you're going to be worse off for the delay.

My graduate student Eve-Marie Blouin-Hudon just did three studies, and what she looked at is our ability to imagine the future self. She measured people's self-continuity. You'd see circles representing present self and future self and choose how much to overlap them. Some people see these selves as completely distinct, and some people see them totally overlapping. The people who see the present and future self as more overlapping have more self-continuity and report less procrastination.