The Thief of Time: Combating Procrastination

The ‘Keeping Up With Yesterday’ Complex

Procrastination: It's commonly referred to as ‘the thief of time’ or ‘the art of keeping up with yesterday’. However procrastination is just intentionally choosing to do something other than what you have to do despite knowing its delay will cause you to ‘suffer’ in the future. It's about emotional avoidance, not a lack of willpower. While it's common to all, procrastination greatly impacts students: a study conducted by Piers Steel, estimated that ~80-95% of a studied college group  engaged in procrastination. And the truth is, that procrastination isn't just to do with your willpower or mood, dopamine plays a huge role in this.

Why Motivation ‘disappears’ – and how Dopamine plays a role

While dopamine is often mistaken for the ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter or hormone in the body, dopamine is actually what drives motivation and reinforcement, including the anticipation of a ‘reward’. When you have a homework assignment, you might immediately feel bored, overwhelmed and unsure where to start. This makes your brain less engaged because the task doesn't feel rewarding.

Dopamine helps anticipate the potential ‘reward’ of a task before you even start it, which widely affects your motivation – your brain prefers quick dopamine-hits (like your phone) over low-dopamine, boring tasks like your homework. In turn, your mood and emotions affect procrastination (where you choose short-term mood reliefs over long-term goals) which can create this vicious cycle of 'putting things off’ and always feeling ‘unmovitated’ 

Why is Dopamine so important–The Sandwich Analogy 

We all have ‘baseline dopamine’ which is just your natural level of dopamine. We can think about it like a kiddie pool with the ‘waves’ or ‘spikes’ being those rushes of motivation (like getting a notification, opening an app or eating a chocolate) and those ‘dips’ or ‘spills’ in the pool the lows, like the aftermath of a sugar rush. 

To better understand dopamine and those peaks in motivation, we can see The Sandwich Analogy presented by Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. For example craving a club sandwich really badly increases that baseline dopamine to a spike with a corresponding craving for having that sandwich. A ‘dip’ after craving the sandwich motivates you to get one. Eating the sandwich will then satiate that craving and give you that sense of reward (or another spike of dopamine) especially if the sandwich is better than you thought it would be. However if the sandwich was actually disgusting this would cause a dip from your baseline dopamine which would lead to dissatisfaction and frustration. This shows how dopamine influences our anticipation and motivation and drives us to act. Understanding this can help us overcome procrastination.

Getting out of a slump–how your Baseline Dopamine gets you going

Understanding what baseline dopamine is just makes it easier to comprehend how you view motivation. So whenever you are demotivated or procrastinating, you can better combat it. While we've all had our moments of pure demotivation and procrastination, like having to get through that mound of homework or impossible-looking goals. It can feel horrible just to wait to get out of that ‘slump’ and feel motivated but truly just waiting actually doesn't work– or just doesn't work quickly enough. 

So in order to combat these dopamine dips or demotivation you actually have to, ironically, think of something worse. Thinking: what is worse than the state I am currently in? (while still being something safe) actually helps you ‘rebound’ from your dopamine dips quicker. 

While it's different for everyone, completing a ‘tangential activity’ (an activity which isn't related to your ‘goal’), puts your body in a different state. For example, a cold shower boosts your dopamine levels quickly. This is because a cold shower is seen by most people as something ‘painful’. And that ‘pain’ causes a quicker escape from your dopamine dip faster than sitting around and waiting for your motivation to ‘suddenly appear’. So this can be anything from a push-up to an ice-cold shower or bath. 

It's like being stuck in a slide at a pool: sitting there will keep you there but if you just push yourself (taking that cold shower), you’ll slide back down. So even just thinking about something that seems worse than what you actually have to do, can just bring you back to your original baseline dopamine.

Hacking Procrastination: The Top 5 Tips

There are a few other things, apart from taking a cold bath that can help combat procrastination:

1. The ‘just start’ method: Simply counting down from five and starting can give you that push you need to get started. By counting down, you prevent giving your brain time to overthink or make an excuse to start: It’s simple, instant and can start-up momentum. 

2. Introducing a new stimulus: When tackling that boring, unavoidable task, simply introducing new stimuli like using different coloured pens, sticky notes or even the style of note taking which makes notes more visually stimulating increases dopamine released, making dull tasks feel more rewarding.

3. Negative visualization: Simply imagining a ‘worse’ scenario than the one you're in can make the original task seem significantly more appealing in comparison. For example, ‘if I don’t do my essay right now, I’ll end up pulling an all-nighter.’ Your brain perceives this task as less threatening which boosts motivation.

4. Creating a ‘reward system’ after completing a task. Dopamine spikes with anticipated rewards, so giving yourself something like a 5-10min break, a candy or something fun after completing a task gives you that boost of motivation to actually complete it.

5. One step at a time: Instead of writing ‘do math homework’ or ‘write the 500 word essay’, write more specific and efficient tasks. For example ‘Do 5 exercises of math’ and ‘Start essay plan.’ or simply ‘Write one paragraph’. Smaller steps are less overwhelming, which makes it easier to start.

In summary, procrastination may be common, but it’s not unconquerable. Understanding that procrastination is a natural emotional response shaped by our dopamine helps us realise why certain tasks feel harder to do than others. Recognising this is the key to using biology to boost motivation, use effective approaches and reshape habits — especially on those days when getting things done feels impossible. 

Ana K (Year 11)