If you consistently struggle with procrastination, there’s a good chance you’ve tried the usual tips and tricks without much success:
- The 5-Minute Rule. Commit to working for just five minutes. Once started, momentum carries you forward.
- Remove Distractions. Silence your phone notifications, block distracting websites, or change locations.
- The Pomodoro Technique. 25 minutes of focused work + 5-minute break.
These are all fine. But if they’re not working and you’re still procrastinating, chances are there’s a deeper cause of your procrastination you’re not addressing. Of course, deep doesn’t necessarily mean old: being bullied in 4th grade is probably not what’s causing your procrastination as a 45-year-old who wants to start their own business.
Whatever’s causing your procrastination lives in the present, not the past.
I use the term deep causes of procrastination to mean the non-obvious ones. And often they’re non-obvious because we’re defended against them: we don’t want to believe that they’re true so we develop habits that help us avoid them.
In my work as a psychologist and coach, there are three common deep causes of procrastination worth considering…
1. Mimetic Desire
Mimetic desire is a phrase coined by Rene Girard to describe a mostly-ignored feature of human nature that we tend to want things imitatively, not intrinsically. In other words, we want things because we see other people wanting them, not because we actually want them…
- I don’t actually want a new iPhone. I want one because I see my friend who just bought a new one wanting one.
- I don’t actually want to major in Biology. I want to major in biology because I admire my high school biology teacher and want to study biology because she wanted it.
Desire is far more social than we like to admit.
And while wanting things because other people want them isn’t necessarily bad—in many circumstances it can be good!—it can get us into trouble if we don’t realize this is what’s happening…
- We all know the kid in college who was miserable as a pre-med student because his father (and his father before him) were all doctors and he was trying desperately to convince himself that he wanted to be a doctor too even though everyone else could see it was a terrible fit for him.
- Or the unhappy wife who married the wrong guy because he had all the qualities she thought she was supposed to want—charming, intelligent, adventurous, romantic—but had almost none of the qualities she actually wanted but didn’t realize she wanted: kind, thoughtful, emotionally mature, and responsible.
- Sometimes we do know what we want at one point in our lives but then outgrow that desire: the senior executive who’s burned out after a successful career in finance and wants to do something more creative in her second half of life.
Now, you’re probably wondering:
Okay, interesting. But what does this have to do with procrastination?
We typically think of procrastination as a form of laziness: I don’t feel like doing that now so I’ll put it off until later. We’ve all been there. But if you’re chronically procrastinating on something, there’s a good chance it’s your brain’s way of trying to tell you that you’re pursuing mimetic rather than authentic goals.
Procrastination is a sign you’re living someone else’s life.
It might be your parent’s life. It might be your best friend’s life. It might be your favorite Instagram influencer’s life. It might even be a past version of yourself’s life.
For example:
- Are you procrastinating on writing that novel you keep telling yourself you’re going to write because you’re lazy? Maybe, but I bet most people who know you well would have a hard time describing you as lazy. Instead, is it possible you’re procrastinating on the novel because while you want to want to write a novel, you don’t actually want to?
- Or, do you keep procrastinating on going to the gym regularly to lose those last 15 pounds because you’re undisciplined? Or is it possible that you’re procrastinating on going to the gym because, despite what you think you should want based on those instagram influencers you admire—you don’t actually care that much about having washboard abs vs a little extra fat around the belly?
Very likely your immediate reaction to this idea will be resistance if not outright denial. Mine always is when I do these exercises. We instinctively resist the idea that something as intimate as our desires might not actually be our own. But if you’ve been seriously struggling with procrastination, and nothing else seems to help, I think you owe it to yourself to reflect seriously on this as a possibility.
Go Deeper
If you’re interested in reflecting more on how mimetic vs intrinsic your own desires are, values work can be a helpful way to begin.
I have a brief PDF guide, The Values Discovery Toolkit, that guides you through several of my favorite exercises. And this article on values clarification might also be helpful.
2. Fear of Success
The first time I heard the term fear of success I remember thinking to myself:
What a load of crap! No one actually fears success—that’s just a bunch of psychobabble.
But over the years, I’ve tempered that reaction a bit because I’ve found that there’s actually a lot of truth to the idea that we sometimes fear success. And that one of the consequences of that fear is chronic procrastination.
Here’s how I see it:
We don’t fear success itself so much as the consequences of success.
For example:
- If you successfully get promoted, that promotion might come with a lot of extra stress, responsibility, and work with comparatively little benefits to offset them.
- If your small business were to become wildly successful and profitable, it might cause strains, resentments, and conflict with members of your family who have deep-seated beliefs about the accumulation of wealth being selfish and immoral.
- If you became extremely successful with your new painting hobby, it might lead to your spouse feeling ashamed and inferior for never achieving success with their own artistic endeavor which they’ve poured decades into with little recognition or outward success.
- If you became a bestseller with your first novel, you might feel pressure to be even more successful with your second which would be stressful and anxiety-inducing.
For just about any form of success, there are a lot of potential downsides that accompany the upsides. And on some level, it’s rational to be at least a little concerned about those downsides.
But for some of us—especially those of us who are risk-averse—those reasonable concerns can morph into debilitating fears and anxieties. And when they do, procrastination is often how we avoid and cope with those anxieties…
- If you’re afraid that a promotion at work will make your life too stressful, you might find yourself procrastinating on or avoiding projects that are likely to lead to a promotion—agreeing to deliver a big presentation before the CEO, for example, or drafting up a proposal for a creative new initiative.
- If you’re afraid that too much success in your creative hobby will lead to jealousy and resentment from your spouse, you might find yourself procrastinating on getting started or displaying it publicly.
If this sounds plausible, that means you’ve probably been avoiding even thinking too deeply about what success would look like and mean. And this lack of reflection is often what allows reasonable fears and concerns to morph into more intense and procrastination-inducing anxieties.
So consider spending some time reflecting on success in different aspects of your life and what the implications would really be. Here are a few reflection questions to get you started:
- Who were your childhood models of success?
- Who are your current models of success?
- How do you feel when people you know are successful?
- If you could be wildly successful at one thing, what would it be?
- What would the downsides of such a success look like?
- Describe a time from your past when you achieved something meaningful?
- Which of your relationships would be most impacted by major success on your part?
- If you could wish significant success for another person, who would you wish it for and in what area?
- Pick one area of your life where you’d like to be successful: What does success actually look like? Be very specific.
- What are some achievements in your life that other people would consider a success but you don’t?
A Final Thought: If you don’t think you deserve to be successful, you will always find ways to sabotage that success—including chronic procrastination.
3. Low Agency
Agency is the belief in your ability to positively influence yourself and the world around you.
For example:
- People with high agency take responsibility for their lives and live as if they were the hero of their own story—seeking out challenges, exploring new possibilities, and generally taking ownership over their life.
- People with low agency tend to see themselves as supporting characters in someone else’s story—they often frame challenges as threats and avoid them, stick to the familiar despite being unhappy, and feel resentful that life didn’t work out the way it “should” have.
Chronic procrastination is often a manifestation of low agency.
For example:
- If you tend to see challenges as threats and obstacles, you will usually default to avoiding or procrastinating on tasks that are meaningful because just about anything meaningful will be challenging in at least some respect.
- Even if you’re a fairly confident and assertive person generally, if you’re overly-conventional and afraid of uncertainty, you will frequently procrastinate on tasks or projects that involve risk and taking you outside your comfort zone.
Unfortunately, low agency and procrastination often combine to form a vicious cycle that becomes increasingly hard to escape:
- Because you lack agency, you tend to procrastinate on meaningful but intimidating new challenges.
- Procrastination further reduces agency by giving your brain “proof” that you can’t handle novelty and challenge.
In situations like this, it’s often best to hold off on addressing your procrastination directly, and instead, focus on small ways to increase your sense of agency. Then, once your agency improves, you can revisit the task you were procrastinating on with much more confidence and conviction.
Here’s an example from a coaching client of mine we’ll call Jeff…
Mini Case Study: Engineer Jeff, The Aspiring Sci-Fi Novelist
- Jeff was a senior software engineer for a financial services startup. Despite being an engineer, Jeff had a secret passion for science fiction—not just reading it but writing it. For the past ten years he’d been posting anonymous fan fiction on science fiction forums. And ever since he was a kid, he’d wanted to write his own science fiction book. Unfortunately, he’d been procrastinating on this dream for nearly as long as he’d had it. He came to work with me because he was on the verge of giving up on it as “just a dream.”
- I pretty quickly guessed that despite his professional success, Jeff was caught in a low agency mindset. While outwardly successful and confident, Jeff had a lot of anxiety about trying new things, especially if they were unusual or “weird.” This was a constant dilemma because in many ways, Jeff himself was “weird”—like the sci-fi fan fiction, he had a lot of interests that were non-mainstream but that he frequently resisted or ignored because he worried about how he’d be perceived.
- When I started working with Jeff, I told him to put the sci-fi novel on pause for a couple months and then got to work building up his sense of agency in smaller, less threatening contexts. He started inviting his buddies to go hiking instead of their usual weekend routine of watching football at someone’s apartment; he volunteered to facilitate a book club at work even though no one else from the engineering department participated; and he started going to a weekly creative writing workshop sponsored by a local bookstore. No one of these things was nearly as intimidating as writing his own novel, but in aggregate they started shifting him from a low to a high agency mindset—to believe that he could do something unconventional and “weird” simply because he wanted to.
- A few months later during one of our coaching calls, I reintroduced the idea of getting started on his novel. I remember Jeff looked up at me and a coy smile spread across his face as he told me: “I didn’t want to say anything too soon in case I might jinx it, but I actually got started outlining the novel a couple weeks ago.” We ended our work together several weeks later and Jeff had already drafted the first two chapters of the novel.
One lesson I hope you take away from Jeff’s story is to stop treating procrastination as something bad that has to be overcome, and instead, think of it as a messenger that might be trying to tell you something.
Next Steps
If you enjoyed this essay, here are a few more from me that might be helpful:
Work with Me
If you’re interested in working with me directly, I have a small mindset coaching practice where I work with motivated individuals to overcome inner obstacles to success.
