Do you sometimes (or often) suffer guilt or frustration due to procrastination? If so, you are not alone. It’s a common perception that procrastination is an inherent personality flaw, the result of laziness or other slothfulness. People get frustrated by procrastinators and label them as lazy, untrustworthy, and unreliable.

However, in recent decades scientists have learned a lot about how our brains work that gives insight into procrastination and why it happens. It turns out that when your advanced human brain sets out to accomplish a task, but can’t see a clear path to completion, the doubting antiquated lizard brain takes over. Your lizard brain, a leftover instinct-driven antique from the days of the caveman, decides the apparently unsolvable is overwhelming, and creates a bad attitude toward the task. It’s fight or flight, and procrastination is the flight response to the stress created by the task. [Read more…]