As an entrepreneur with ADHD,
I've spent years misunderstanding my own procrastination. 🐒
It is easy to do.
The neurobiological explanations are everywhere and increasingly accessible; TED talks, bestselling books, popular science podcasts.
Dopamine dysregulation. Executive function deficits. The "monkey brain."
Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation, Andrew Huberman's protocols, an entire content ecosystem built around the biology of why we struggle.
And none of it is too wrong, but it is incomplete in a very important way.
It explains a mechanism.
It doesn't ask the more uncomfortable question: what is the procrastination for?
Individual psychology pushes further.
When we ask what goal a behaviour serves rather than what causes it, the answers can be confronting, and perhaps that is precisely why we reach for the neurobiology first. Not because it is the most complete explanation, but because it is the most comfortable one.
A brain chemistry problem requires a brain chemistry solution.
It does not require us to look inward.
Pychyl and Flett (2012) found that procrastination is not much of a time-management problem but rather a failure of emotion regulation, specifically the avoidance of negative internal states. But what does it actually mean?
Sometimes, if we're brave enough to look, the answer is this: we make our work, our chores, our entire lives into a mountain. Not because the mountain is too large to climb, but because the mountain is useful. It holds the space between us and what lies behind it - stillness, loneliness, shame, fear, grief etc.
Busyness, in this reading, is not a productivity failure.
It is a remarkably effective psychological defence.
The overworked professional is frequently not more productive, they are more protective.
And that protectiveness makes complete sense.
If stillness contains something painful, avoiding it is not weakness, it is intelligence of a kind. The nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
But there is another way through.
Not around the stillness, through it.
The question worth sitting with, when the calendar is full and the to-do list keeps growing, is not how do I get more done. It is: what am I not yet ready to face?
That question, honestly answered, is where something can actually change.
This is growth.
In the pic- me on a typical Monday morning
#BehaviouralScience #Leadership #HighPerformance #ExecutiveCoaching