Somewhere around 20% of people identify as procrastinators. Far more of us procrastinate occasionally without deserving the label. But almost everyone carries the same quiet shame about it — the sense that if we just tried a little harder, cared a little more, we’d simply do the thing. Neurocognitive and behavioural expert Gregory Caremans has spent his career dismantling that idea, and what he’s found is both more forgiving and more useful than anything willpower alone can offer.

Two Myths Worth Retiring

The first myth is that procrastinators are lazy. In practice, the opposite tends to be true. Procrastinators are frequently hardworking people who pour real effort into alphabetising a bookshelf or reorganising a desk drawer — anything, in fact, except the report due tomorrow. The energy is there. It is simply pointed at the wrong target.

The second myth is that procrastinators are slow, or lack ability — a particularly damaging assumption when applied to children who are underperforming for exactly this reason. The real issue is rarely capability. It is that the task in front of them isn’t entertaining enough to compete with everything else the brain would rather be doing.

Why We Postpone What We Know We Should Do

The word itself comes from the Latin procrastinare — to put off until tomorrow — with roots also in the Greek akrasia, meaning to act against our own better judgment. That contradiction is the real puzzle: we know the cost will be stress, anxiety, guilt, yet we postpone anyway. Caremans locates the answer not in weakness of character but in the unconscious self. We are, before we are ever rational, social, emotional, contextual and instinctive beings — and most of our decisions are made by an unconscious layer working from three underlying drivers.

1. The Genetic Driver

Millennia of survival instinct have wired the brain to steer us away from anything it perceives as dangerous — and today’s version of danger can be as ordinary as an unwelcome phone call or an uncomfortable conversation. If an activity feels unpleasant, the brain quietly files it under “to be avoided,” regardless of whether the danger is real. This driver also carries our natural inclinations — the things we were built, or raised, to love doing.

2. Life Experience

We are, in Caremans’ words, born incomplete. Every experience becomes an instruction for how to behave next time, shaping our confidence, our limiting beliefs, and our coping mechanisms long before we’re consciously aware of any of it. The governing rule is simple: we repeat what we enjoy, and avoid what makes us uncomfortable.

3. Context

Colours, sounds, the people around us, the pressure we’re under — all of it shapes behaviour in the moment. For a procrastinator, context is generous: there is always something nearby offering a plausible excuse to postpone.

These three drivers don’t always agree with each other, and when they clash — instinct pulling one way, experience pulling another — the friction is exactly what produces the guilt and shame so many procrastinators carry.

Nine Faces of Procrastination

Caremans identifies nine distinct types of procrastinator, each traceable back to one of the three drivers above.

— Avoiders: steer away from anything the brain perceives as unpleasant, even mildly.

— Freezers: shut down entirely under perceived threat — a stress response, not a character flaw.

— The Non-Motivated: disengage from tasks outside their intrinsic interests and need an external push.

— Rebels: procrastinate as quiet resistance, often shaped by an overly authoritarian upbringing.

— Low Esteem: don’t believe they’re capable, so they wait for a permission that never comes.

— Perfectionists: delay because the result never matches the image in their head.

— Thrill Seekers: chase the dopamine hit of finishing at the very last possible moment.

— Equalisers: treat every task as equally urgent and can’t find a place to start.

— Addicts: aren’t avoiding the task so much as consumed by something else entirely.

“Procrastination is not a character flaw to be shamed out of us. It is a signal — pointing, quite precisely, at whatever in our lives is out of balance.”

— Gail Cameron

Why Willpower Isn’t the Fix

The instinct is always to reach for more willpower. But willpower is a conscious-self resource, and procrastination is largely an unconscious-self problem — which is why forcing it rarely works and sometimes actively backfires. For the Low Esteem type, demanding more willpower simply manufactures further proof of failure. For Perfectionists and Equalisers, willpower is already being spent in abundance, just on the wrong things. For Thrill Seekers, willpower removes the very dopamine hit they’re unconsciously chasing.

The landmark Marshmallow Test, led by psychologist Walter Mischel in 1972, is often cited as proof that delayed gratification predicts life success. It does — but the more interesting finding, for our purposes, is why some children waited and others didn’t. It usually had less to do with raw willpower and more to do with how tempting the marshmallow was to that particular child in that particular moment. Non-procrastinators, in other words, don’t necessarily have more willpower. They simply find their surroundings less tempting.

What Actually Works

If willpower is the wrong lever, motivation and environment are the right ones. Caremans offers a toolkit worth keeping close:

— Visualise: picture yourself enjoying the task and finishing it, not just enduring it.

— Gamify: break the task into levels, turn the hardest part into a “boss” to defeat.

— Lists: small, checkable steps release dopamine with every tick.

— Motivation bundling: pair the task with something you already love — music, movement, company.

— Remove temptation: tidy the desk, not the room; silence the phone; work in short, protected bursts.

— Change your environment: a new setting keeps the brain alert instead of running old avoidance patterns.

— Team up: shared tasks are more enjoyable and, often, genuinely faster.

— Watch your wording: swap “I really should” for “I’m doing this now” — the tension pulls you into action.

The Real Point

We do not work better with our backs against the wall, and we are neither lazy nor incapable for struggling with this. Procrastination, well understood, is simply information — a signal that something in our lives, our environment, or our approach needs rebalancing. The task, then, isn’t to shame it into silence. It’s to listen closely enough to hear what it’s actually telling us, and to respond with something more effective than willpower alone.