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What is procrastination and how do we stop procrastinating? In this video we seek to answer a potentially life changing question - can you overcome procrastination forever?

We sift through the world of science, studies, data and theories to uncover what we know about procrastination and to find out if it’s possible to conjure a cure.

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Imagine all the things you’d accomplish if you never procrastinated. Maybe you’d have learned that instrument by now, or written that novel or would have that great beach body.If I never procrastinated I would have been done this video 6 months ago when I first started it.

So I set out to answer a simple question: Can I solve procrastination forever?

And honestly I thought it’d be this straightforward thing. All I have to do is work out what’s going on in the brain, stop that thing from happening and then I wouldn’t procrastinate anymore. But then when I actually asked a neuroscientist about it and he said this:

“People think that you can turn on an MRI and see where something is happening in the brain but the truth is that’s not so. This stuff is vastly more complicated than people are saying. So procrastination is a human level subject that we do not understand in terms of the brain and we’re not even close to those things we’re not even in the league or in the century of those things. So we have theories.”

And at this moment it became extremely obvious why it’s such a hard thing to solve. Because we don’t actually know what’s happening in your brain when we procrastinate. All we have are theories.

And these theories that tell us what’s probably happening based on what we know about how the brain works. So, in search of a way to help me understand my problem, I asked a psychologist, Dr. Tim Pychyl how he understands and deals with procrastination.

And what I got was a lot of theories different theories about why we procrastinate. But of all the reasons he suggested, the one that makes the most sense to me is this:

There’s one part of your brain that’s purely instinctual called the Limbic System. It’s your emotions, your fight or flight. All it cares about it is keeping you alive.

Then, over here, there’s this other part that’s kind of wiser and more rational. It’s responsible for your goals, your dreams, your plans for the future. That’s your prefrontal cortex.

And the theory is that when you get that feeling of not wanting to do something your instinctual part springs into action right away. It doesn’t think about the future. it just tells you to avoid the task. And you listen.

The other side. The rational side, is slower to act. It thinks things through. So you procrastinate until that part can remind you that you’re not dying - you’re just trying to doing something that’s really hard.

And the paradox here about giving in to feel good is that it actually makes you feel terrible later. It’s really frustrating and it’s really hard to stop doing.

And with all of these design flaws in the way our brains work I can’t help but think that solving procrastination is a kind of a hopeless cause. Except for this one thing that everyone I talked to kept bringing up: neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity means that your brain can change. It’s like gooey plastic. And the more plastic your brain is the easier it is to train it to do what you want. To make and break habits.

So you can develop your brain. And the best way to do it is actually thousands of years old.

“Really what we want to do is downregulate the limbic system and upregulate the prefrontal cortex. And mindfulness meditation is a path to that.”

The more you meditate, the better you become at making decisions, and the easier it is to keep on task when you know you have something important to do. That’s because it actually shrinks that amaygdala - that instinctual part of your brain and it adds more grey matter to that part that helps you make decisions.

There’s probably hundreds of theories on how to deal with procrastination, and there’s a way for each and every person to overcome it.

So can you get rid of procrastination? Sort of but it’s not really easy and it does take a lot of practice.

The thing that I realized about procrastination was the one thing I hoped that I wouldn’t. That everyone deals with it. That there’s no simple solution. And that you have to experience pain to get through anything worth doing.

Credits

Director - Stuart Langfield & Marco Patricio
Producer - Marco Patricio
Editing & Animation - Jennifer Mackie
Animation & Motion - Stuart Langfield
Director of Photography - Matt Wiebe

Original Score - Jim Guthrie

Special thanks
Dr. Tim Pychyl
Dr. Jon Lieff
Dr. Fuschia Sirois
Dr. J.H. Anderson Show less