Why does the human brain tell us to procrastinate?
In: Biology
Because we have the option to. And if we have the option, we prefer to expend as little energy as possible, reserving it for when we need it. Unfortunately, we no longer live in the wild, waiting to flee from some stalking predator.
Instead, we have to build discipline and good habits, thanks to our civilized world.
A lot of human behavior can be explained by how we are supposed to behave in the wild.
Civilization hasn’t existed long enough for us to fully evolve and adapt yet.
Procrastination is probably a habit we formed to conserve energy. Our bodies way of saying ‘save that energy for something more important like getting food’
But since getting food for us is never a problem, it just makes us lazy.
That is because procrastination is a type of emotion regulation strategy of our brains.
When a stimuli puts you in a negative mood, you want to escape from that stimuli. You don’t like a particular sound? You close your ears. It is the same with tasks. You generate a short-term solution, and technically that solution works – for the time being. So in the end it turns into a chronic problem when you continue to perform this kind of behavior.
Often, doing nothing is better than doing something. It certainly uses less energy. But it also has less chances of going wrong. Often we think of things to do “just in case.” If a certain thing happens, then here’s how we might respond. But why not wait till the trigger happens before doing it?
I explained it to my mother this way:
A body at rest, wants to stay at rest. A body in motion, wants to stay in motion.
It’s hard to get started. It’s easier to finish once you have, but it’s hard to start.
Procrastination, often a coping mechanism for anxiety, is different from laziness. A new task can often exacerbate an underlying level of anxiety so putting that task off can manage one’s anxiety level.
We tend to procrastinate on big, abstract things (spend 2 hours studying tonight to get slightly more knowledge to pass a test to get a slightly higher grade to get into a good college to work for 4 years to maybe get a better job). We don’t procrastinate on things which have immediate, obvious gratification. The brain is just bad at seeing the point of spending energy where it doesn’t see benefit.
LMFAO, it doesn’t…A series of small self-reinforcing bad habits create a larger cycle of inaction that becomes procrastination. It’s got nothing to do with your biology and everything to do with how you were socialized into maladaptive reward systems.
I don’t agree with what u/1tacoshort said, procrastination CAN BE CAUSED BY LAZINESS (sorry, there’s no bold on mobile so I had to use caps instead). In example, back during when British schools were closed I always did my homework on the last days before the deadline, sometimes I even submitted it after the deadline by accidently not completing it on time and in the last two weeks of that lockdown I got so tired of all of that mess that I just skipped all of the homework and stopped bothering – I did all of that because I wanted to spend my time on something that I enjoyed rather than on something that would steal my precious hours on this Earth away from me.
There’s a Ted Ed video about this, it’s super funny, and talks about why we procrastinate in a really relatable way. Here it is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU)
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