For The Washington Post

Illustration of a woman in a garden of many enormous flowers. The woman has picked a simple small flower from the garden and is smiling.

That’ll do — why ‘good enough’ decisions can be healthier for you

An illustration of a brain with varrying patterns from left to right including a regular brain, jagged shapes, dots, lines, and a more saturated colorful brain. 

wb-brainmatters-menopause

The Washington Post

A man died in front of me. A year later, I’m still recovering.

High School Students

Contributor

An illustration of a person cleaning a table with cleaning supplies. Their head is a misshapen technicolored bubble, with smaller bubbles floating around them.

wb-brainmatters chemicals

Some 11 percent of U.S. children have been diagnosed with ADHD

Tabitha Brown In Conversation 

An illustration of a person happily floating under blue water.

wb-brainmatters float tank

How feeling envy helped me in life — mostly

An illustration of a man reading a book on a park bench, smiling. In the background someone is flying a kite, and another person is playing the guitar.

wb-comic-JOMO

ketaminediary

An illustration of a man sitting on a bed, with his back to the screen raising his arms. A sliver of light comes through the door. 

wb-brainmatters-dreamacts

hescan0319

iStock

other

An illustration of a woman lighting a candle in a dark room. Next to her there is also a lantern and a lamp.

wb-onyourmind not everyone needs therapy

Boys struggle with eating disorders. This best-selling author did too.

An illustration of a colorful bird on a branch. Next to it there is an empty bird-shaped hole in the branches, with the moon where the eye of the missing bird would be.

wb-onyourmind-grief

An illustration of a giant spoon holding a pile of colorful pills. A small man stands looking up at it.

wb-brainmatters- deperscribing

Multiracial women doing yoga exercise with social distance for coronavirus outbreak at park outdoor - Healthy lifestyle and sport concept

stock

An illustration of a woman climbing a ladder, looking down over her shoulder with some trepidation. 

wb-onyourmind-thriversguiilt

An illustration of a woman in a bird cage that is covered with a sheet. She is lifting up the sheet to look outside where the sun is shining. 

wb-onyourmind-gaslighting

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

The Post endorses April McClain Delaney and Tom Royals for Maryland’s 6th District

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Trump Media auditor charged by SEC with ‘massive fraud’

Google’s empire is massive. A judge will soon rule if it’s a monopoly.

Five tech products we actually like

In photos: At least 39 dead as historic flooding hits southern Brazil

Conservatives don't get why Kristi Noem killed her dog

Rooftop rescue of flood victims in Brazil

The new cure-all for vacation excess: the IV drip 

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Ask Amy: My boyfriend just confessed he’s almost $20,000 in debt

Miss Manners: Is it inappropriate to reach out to old girlfriends?

Carolyn Hax: Longtime friend won’t forgive being last-minute canceled for a guy

Confident of victory over Ukraine, Russia exhibits Western war trophies

Northern Gaza is in ‘full-blown famine,’ World Food Program leader says

Two women are seeking Mexico’s presidency. But the race is about a man.

The New York Times, alone in its outrage over access to Biden

The ‘Access Hollywood’ video cemented Trump’s air of invincibility

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Biden confronts campus protests; Trump hedges on accepting election results

Americans are more likely to oppose than support campus protests

The grinding familiarity of the jocks-vs.-hippies proxy fight

In a pinch, the Nationals finally find some offense

The Capitals, a team in transition, know what they want this offseason

Is Pastis as good as our food critic thought? He sent spies to find out.

An illustration of several piles of paper, with a man's feet up on the desk, obscured by the piles. To the right there is a mug with a smiley face, holding tea.

As a chronic procrastinator, I feel a sense of anguish as each new year arrives. In a time of resolutions or <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/12/29/nudge-word-of-the-year-resolutions/" target=_blank>nudge words</a>, I still have goals from the old year.

A 2022 <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33119-w" target=_blank>study</a> in the journal Nature Communications suggests that a root of procrastination may lie in a cognitive bias — we believe that doing tasks will somehow be easier in the future.

“You know it’s going to stink in the future just as much as it’s going to stink doing it now, but internally you just can’t help yourself,” said <a href="https://www.public.asu.edu/~smmcclu1/" target=_blank>Samuel McClure</a>, professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscientist at Arizona State University. “It’s a fascinating phenomenon — that myopia you can’t escape — even though if you just stop and think about it, it’s ludicrous.”

There is individual variation, but “procrastination is a tendency that we all encounter in our life in different domains, or at different time points in our lives,” said <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/motivationbrainbehavior/the-team/current-team/lebouc" target=_blank>Raphaël Le Bouc</a>, a neurologist at the Paris Brain Institute and author of the study. “But the true cognitive mechanisms behind it are not really known. And this might be a reason why it’s difficult to overcome this tendency.”

Procrastinating brains believe that tasks will be easier in the future

Researchers asked 43 adults to rate their preferences for receiving smaller rewards quicker or larger rewards later, as well as for performing easier tasks sooner or more<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/29/train-brain-for-hard-things/?itid=ap_richardsima" target=_blank> </a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/29/train-brain-for-hard-things/?itid=ap_richardsima" target=_blank>effortful tasks</a> later.

For rewards, earlier research has shown that humans tend to be more impulsive and prefer a smaller reward sooner over a larger reward later, a finding that was replicated in Le Bouc’s study. A bird in hand now is worth two in some future bush.

His study also shows people similarly discount and downplay future effort, preferring an easier task now vs. a more difficult one in the future, such as memorizing 10 digits of pi in one day or 20 digits by next week.

When the researchers had 27 of the 43 subjects perform the same experiment in an fMRI neuroimaging machine, one brain area stood out as central to making this cost-benefit calculation — the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex.

Brain activity in this region seemed to combine information about rewards and efforts for a task; more effortful tasks increased its neural activity, while more rewards decreased it.

When you are struggling to decide because the choices are almost equal, that is when this brain area is most active, said McClure, who was not involved in the study. This fits with the subjective feeling of procrastination, he said: “You’re struggling with it and doing it anyway.”

Procrastination-prone brains were especially sensitive to the idea that doing tasks in the future was much easier.

“When they imagine doing an effort in one month, for them, the cost decreases a lot,” Le Bouc said. But for non-procrastinators, the cost decreases much slower.

Procrastinating is more likely when the task is harder

To measure procrastination more directly in the lab, the researchers asked the participants to choose whether to perform tasks for a reward now, or the same task tomorrow for the same reward. The participants were informed that they would need to perform one of the tasks on their chosen day. (After the experiment, they were informed that the second day of experiments would not take place.)

As expected, the more effort something takes, or the less rewarding the task, the more likely the participants were to want to procrastinate.

Crucially, the more someone downplayed how difficult future tasks would be, the more likely they would be to delay the task.

Procrastination is also not a one-time decision, but one we get to make repeatedly to put off the task until the proverbial tomorrow.

To assess procrastination behavior in more real-life settings, the researchers turned to bureaucratic busywork.

Participants were informed that to receive their payment, they had to fill out at home and return 10 pieces of arduous administrative paperwork such as documents for passport and driver’s license renewals, within 30 days. “The forms actually were quite boring,” Le Bouc said.

Using their behavioral and brain imaging data, the researchers were able to build a computational model to predict how long each person would delay completing the paperwork.

Almost everyone procrastinated to some extent. (Six people never returned any of the paperwork but still received payment.)

For both the in-lab and at-home experiments, the hallmark of procrastination severity was how much each individual believed the tasks would be less effortful in the future by making certain choices. Differences in the neural activity of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex also predicted participant procrastination predilection.

In other words, the more your brain discounts how much effort is required to do something in the future, the more likely you are to procrastinate.

The findings from this study suggest there are two ways to tackle procrastination, though more research is needed.

Remember the task. Because procrastination is a repeated decision, you need to remember you had something on your plate in the first place. “If you forget that at some point that you have this decision to make, then obviously you will never perform the task,” Le Bouc said. Setting reminders for the task and prompting that decision more frequently may reduce your probability to procrastinate, he said.

Envision your future self. You could also try addressing the cognitive bias of believing a task is easier in the future head-on. Envisioning your future self — the one who will be saddled with unpaid bills, looming deadlines and unwashed dishes — could remind you that procrastinating is not making the task any easier.

This practice, known as <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661300018040" target=_blank>episodic future thinking</a>, has been used as a way of <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acer.13112?" target=_blank>counteracting addiction</a> or <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797613488780?" target=_blank>food cravings</a>.

“Trying to make these efforts in the future more vivid, more realistic, might increase the signal of the cost in your brain and might help you realize that, actually, the cost is going to be exactly the same as it would be now,” Le Bouc said.

Do you have a question about human behavior or neuroscience? Email <a href="mailto:brainmatters@washpost.com">BrainMatters@washpost.com</a> and we may answer it in a future column.

Sign up for the Well+Being newsletter, your source of expert advice and simple tips to help you live well every day

Johns Hopkins University, PhD in Neuroscience

Harvard University, BA in Neurobiology 

Richard Sima is a neuroscientist turned award-winning science journalist who writes the "Brain Matters" column for The Washington Post's Well+Being desk. 

Richard Sima

What causes your brain to procrastinate and how to face it

the-washington-post

George Wylesol for The Washington Post

Brain Matters: procrastination

It's not that hard to stop procrastinating. Eventually.