Date of completion - Feb. 14th, 2023
Everyone’s worst nightmare is a fifteen-letter word that initiates frustrating, anxiety-inducing internal monologues, forcing students to pull all-nighters, workers to collapse under the stress of impending deadlines, and just about everyone to feel despondent that they may never achieve their productivity goals. What is it? It starts with a “p” but is far worse than any “problem”. If you guessed procrastination, you are right.
Almost everyone procrastinates at some point or another, with 80% to 95% of college students identifying as procrastinators. There’s no escaping putting things off – pleasure-seeking is deeply etched into our bodies, embedded in the roots of our biology, and wired into our brains, namely, the oldest and most predominant part of our brains, the paleomammalian brain, also called the limbic system. The limbic system is always “on” and one of its main objectives is seeking pleasure. The limbic system tells us to put a vexing task aside and do something more enjoyable instead. This sparks a fight with a weaker and newer part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, which plans complex behaviors and makes decisions. In this neural conflict, the prefrontal cortex wants us to get the task done, but the limbic system refuses, insisting on something more enjoyable instead. As the limbic system is stronger, it usually wins this battle, leading to procrastination. In other words, we prefer a pleasurable activity in the present to a favorable outcome later in life, such as choosing watching YouTube videos to the joy of finishing a project or receiving a good grade on an assignment.
Surely putting things off and being unproductive has no benefits, right? It may be surprising to know that famous people such as Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Luther King Jr. have one thing in common: they all procrastinated. In fact, I procrastinated finishing this essay! Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, “wrote a to-do list for procrastinating more”. He claims that by leaving the task at hand for a period of “incubation” to do a different and more enjoyable activity, we give our brains time to work behind the scenes and come up with more creative ideas. When we first think about a task, the ideas that pop into our minds are usually the most conventional, but if we let our minds wander for a while, ideas that are more unique will start taking shape. This is “divergent thinking”; namely, according to Grant, “when we finish a project, we file it away. But when it’s in limbo, it stays active in our minds”.
This is good news for procrastinators: putting things off does not put them at the bottom of their productivity goals. On the contrary, moderate procrastination fuels creativity, helping us widen our mental focus, and just maybe allowing us to generate original solutions. So the next time you are working on a project, treat yourself to a period of incubation while you watch those funny cat videos, and let your creative juices start pumping!
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