Why Do I Procrastinate? (Hint:
It Is Not Laziness)

If you are asking why you procrastinate, there is a good chance you have already tried the obvious fixes: the lists, the apps, the stern talks with yourself. And the thing is still not done. In Who Told You That? The Beliefs That Keep You Small, and the Choices That Set You Free, Mariyah D. Acka’a gives a whole chapter to this – Chapter 18, The Procrastination Myth – and its subtitle is the short answer: You Are Not Lazy. You Are Avoiding Something. Here Is What.

The tomahawk steak

The chapter opens with a story. Mariyah’s MBA dissertation was due imminently, and she was perfecting a tomahawk steak – a project that had taken several experimental attempts across the preceding days. Her friend Sola rang, asked what she was doing, and then asked, with genuine and curious warmth: ‘What are you avoiding?’

They both laughed, and in the laughing she knew the answer. She was working full time, raising her boys and in the middle of a legal battle. She wanted the dissertation to be good and could not see how she would make it good. The steak was the dissertation’s decoy. The procrastination was not laziness. It was self-protection.

The book also tells a harder version: letters she knew she needed to write to her brother, which she kept putting off until she felt ready, until the window closed. Procrastination, she writes, is not always about a dissertation or a steak. Sometimes it costs the thing itself.

Why procrastination is emotional, not a time-management problem

Chapter 18 draws on research by Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl, which reframes procrastination as an emotion regulation problem rather than a time management one. When you procrastinate, you are not failing to manage your diary. You are managing, in the only way available in that moment, an uncomfortable feeling the task is generating.

The avoidance works – briefly. The relief is real. But the task is still there afterwards, and now there is guilt, shame and less time too. The book maps it as a cycle: discomfort, avoidance, temporary relief, guilt, more discomfort about the original task, more avoidance. And the belief that grows in the middle of it – I can’t follow through, I’m unreliable – is often more damaging than the missed deadline.

The book is direct about the word ‘lazy’: it is used as diagnosis, verdict and character assassination all at once, and it is, in the vast majority of cases, wrong. For many people who procrastinate, the problem is not too little care but too much. Often, procrastination is perfectionism wearing a different coat.

What you might actually be avoiding

The chapter offers a recognition list rather than a rigid taxonomy. Often, simply naming the one that fits begins to loosen it.

• Fear of failure – if I don’t finish it, I can’t fail at it. The unfinished project can still be good in theory.
• Fear of success – finishing means being seen, and being seen means being judged. Some part of you finds the unfinished state safer.
• Fear of the size of it – when something matters and feels enormous at once, not starting can feel safer than confirming it cannot be done.
• Fear of losing identity – finishing the degree means no longer being a student. Completion is an ending as well as a beginning.
• Resentment – sometimes the avoidance is about who assigned the task or who benefits, and not doing it is the only protest available.
• Genuine depletion – not all avoidance is fear. Sometimes the tank is empty. The book leans on the broad evidence that chronic stress exhausts our cognitive and creative resources, and is careful to say that in this case avoidance is not a failing; it is the system protecting itself.

Chapter 12 adds a related point about self-sabotage: waiting, dressed up as preparation, patience or respect, is ‘one of the most socially acceptable forms of self-sabotage we have’.

When walking away is not avoidance

One of the more freeing parts of the chapter is its defence of the productive walk-away. The book describes incubation – the way the mind keeps working on a problem while you are not consciously thinking about it. The answer in the shower, the clarity after sleep.

The difference is in the return. Incubation means stepping away with the intention of coming back; the task is resting, not abandoned. Avoidance means stepping away to escape the discomfort, and the walk-away expands to fill all available time. Mariyah writes that she learned she is someone who needs to walk away from something to finish it – the problem was never the walking away, but the shame about it.

What helps

The book’s first step is small and specific. Next time you find yourself avoiding the task, do not start it straight away. First, say: ‘What I am actually avoiding is the feeling of ____.’ Then work on it for ten minutes only – not to finish, just to stay in contact with the feeling while you do the work. The cycle breaks at the contact, not the completion.

If someone else named your procrastination first – a parent, partner or manager calling you lazy – the book offers this: being named is not the same as being accused. The question is what the noticing is pointing to.

If what sits under the task is grief, or the thing you are avoiding is tied to loss or trauma, please be gentle with yourself and consider support from a qualified professional. Our safeguarding page lists emergency numbers if you ever need them.

Where to go deeper

The companion workbook, Choose Forward: The Practical Guide to Rewriting Your Life, expands Chapter 18 into Tool 18 – The Unblock. It asks you to locate your block at one of three layers: logistical (the task is too big or vague), emotional (it requires a feeling you are avoiding) or identity (it requires you to become a version of yourself you are not yet willing to be). As the workbook says, most people only treat the top layer, which is why most people stay blocked. You then move through Identify, Interrupt, Initiate, and the Incremental Path: ten graduated steps from naming the thing privately to letting it go and sitting with the discomfort of having sent it. A final part shows how to offer Sola’s question to someone else without turning it into a verdict.

To see what staying stuck is costing you, try The Buyback. For the decision you keep deferring, The Calculus sets the risk you feel against the risk that is real. Take the free Freedom Assessment to find the belief pattern underneath, or read Chapter 1 free.

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