Everyone procrastinates to a certain extent because our brains are hard-wired to seek pleasure and to avoid doing things we don’t like. But for some people, procrastination is a serious, life-limiting problem, and one which is not taken seriously. Procrastinators are often portrayed as lazy, undisciplined, disorganised people. This is not at all the case: chronic procrastinators are unconsciously responding to fear. It is not their fault. If you think that you have this problem, please read on.

There are many different reasons why you procrastinate, but in my experience, the majority of them originate in childhood. If you experienced abuse or neglect; bereavement, poverty, or a parent with an addiction; if you were subjected to constant criticism or punishment, then the likelihood is that you will have a procrastination problem.

The more traumatic and/or regularly stressful your childhood, the more severe your procrastination response. You may be reading this, thinking that your childhood was okay, but if your primary care-givers were stressed, or even if you were teased by a close relative, this will affect your view of how safe the world is; your self-image, and your ability to get things done.

Conventional self-help books will not work. This is because they assume that all individuals start adulthood on a level playing field. They fail to acknowledge that procrastination is an emotional response to a fear-inducing activity, therefore, no amount of external ‘systems’, organisational apps, time-management skills, or motivational videos are going to work until our compulsive avoidance responses have been dealt with.

Your procrastination is a self-protection mechanism, triggered by the part of your brain that governs your fight or flight response. This is your brain’s way of protecting you from any activity that may be painful for you, emotionally as well as physically.

Explaining to a chronic procrastinator that they just need to break a task down into smaller chunks, is the equivalent of telling a depressed person to ‘snap out of it.’ We know the logic of this; that we should start the essay/tax-return/job application earlier. But until we understand the nature of our trauma; how our brains are triggered, and how to collaborate with ourselves, nothing will change. Our brains are literally applying the brakes on our ability ‘to do’, and to remove them, we need the superpowers of therapeutic writing. No skills are needed, just a notebook and pen.