Brain Essay
Nothing screams “procrastination” more than beginning a project on the last day after a whole week or month. It always comes with many regrets and assuring myself that next time will be different, a new me with better time management skills. Spoiler alert: nothing ever changes! It’s always funny how I suddenly get an endless amount of time to clean my room or scroll through TikTok and Instagram when I know I have fast-approaching deadlines. At some point, it almost feels like I am destined to procrastinate since I seem to have no control over the pleasure I feel by ignoring work until I have to do it at the last minute. The moments leading to the 11th hour are pleasurable, but the 11th hour itself never is. I do not usually subscribe to the idea of destiny, but it seems I may be anatomically destined to procrastinate.
Procrastination and Brain Architecture.
The amygdala, found in the limbic system, plays a crucial role in emotion-based decision-making. It relies on top-down processing to figure out what poses a threat and what is worth rewarding. Actions produced by the amygdala are mainly autonomic, usually called fight-or-flight. The size of the amygdala has been linked to procrastination – the bigger the amygdala, the more one tends to procrastinate (The Neural Signature of Procrastination | Psychology Today, n.d.). Since the amygdala warns the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dorsal ACC) about the negative aspects of a particular action before it decides whether the action will be done, a bigger amygdala would make one think more about the negative aspect of the action. In my case, one of these aspects would be thinking about how much work I must do. As a perfectionist, I also worry more about my work being substandard. As the anxiety related to these worries build up, rewarding the brain with some Instagram reels and stories makes me feel better.
A study by Zhang, Wang, and Feng (2016) found that hyperactivity of the default mode network (DMN), can cause procrastination. DMN is the system of interconnected areas of the brain that become more active when the brain is not focusing on the outside world, i.e., during daydreaming, self-reflection, wandering, monologues, etc.
It has also been shown that the amount of activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and ventrolateral cortex (VLPFC) was negatively correlated to procrastination (Wu et al., 2016). vmPFC plays a key role in the valuation of options presented to the brain. VLPC plays a role in regulating negative emotions and cognitive reappraisal, that is, deciding what you think of something objectively rather than emotionally. It is, therefore, probable that when I am faced with an option like a task with a deadline that should have more valuation and another option like scrolling through my feed, my vmPFC and VLPFC will not be sufficiently activated. The decision-making center (dorsal ACC) will therefore receive more impulses from the amygdala, effectively relegating the more valuable task.
Chemical Formula
While there is limited research on neurotransmitters and their effects on procrastination, I could make some informed inferences. When presented with a task, its negative aspects like workload and tight deadlines increase my anxiety. To counter this, more gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) is released into the brain to stabilize my mood. The moment I decide to watch a movie or scroll through my feed before “starting” my tasks, I pump my brain with the “happy hormone” – Dopamine. Since this is like a reward to the brain (Happy Hormones, 2019), the brain enjoys its presence and wants to keep it that way, so my natural response would be to keep watching movies or scrolling through social media. In doing so, I sacrifice a long-term goal in place of short-term pleasure (Hu et al., 2018). Since serotonin also stabilizes mood, it may also be present in high concentrations at this point (Serotonin, n.d.).
Firing the Neurons
When researchers presented a group of people with a choice between a reward now or later, the EEG results showed that procrastinators had a higher but delayed P2 value, meaning that they paid more attention to the immediate rewards and had a harder time switching their attention from the immediate reward to the delayed reward(Wu et al., 2016). This might mean that the regions in my brain responsible for decision-making have a low threshold for reward, so neurons related to reward do not have to fire much to get a positive response from the decision-making regions.
Citations
Happy Hormones: What They Are and How to Boost Them. (2019, September 30). Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/happy-hormone.
Hu, Y., Liu, P., Guo, Y., & Feng, T. (2018). The neural substrates of procrastination: A voxel-based morphometry study. Brain and Cognition, 121, 11–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2018.01.001
Serotonin: What Is It, Function & Levels. (n.d.). Cleveland Clinic. Retrieved July 12, 2023, from https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22572-serotonin.
The Neural Signature of Procrastination | Psychology Today. (n.d.). Retrieved July 11, 2023, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/dont-delay/201808/the-neural-signature-procrastination.
Wu, H., Gui, D., Lin, W., Gu, R., Zhu, X., & Liu, X. (2016). The procrastinators want it now: Behavioral and event-related potential evidence of the procrastination of intertemporal choices. Brain and Cognition, 107, 16–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2016.06.005.
Visual Mnemonic of Procrastination
Visual Mnemonic
Visual Mnemonic of Procrastination