procrastinators.

Tax Day is a horror for many procrastinators.
For many people, a little procrastination isn’t
harmful — like 15 minutes lost in Facebook or
putting off doing the laundry for a few days.
But then there are things like taxes. And all the
people who keep meaning to start saving for
retirement, but never do. And people with obesity or diabetes who constantly tell
themselves, “I’ll start eating right tomorrow” — but never do. For some people,
procrastination creates huge problems at work, at school, and at home.
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.
But getting a better understanding of why our brains are so prone to
procrastination might let us find new strategies to avoid it. For example,
psychologist Tim Pychyl has co-authored a paper showing that students who forgave
themselves for procrastinating on a previous exam were actually less likely to
procrastinate on their next test. He and others have also found that people prone to
procrastination are, overall,