How Some Brains Are Hardwired For Procrastination

It has to do with faulty dopamine-signalling, and working around it can be tricky, but not impossible. Dr Tracey Marks, psychiatrist, explains:

When “no worries” is an illusion

People with ADHD can seem to go through life with no worries, but in reality, it’s more like “yes worries, however…” and an inability to translate that worry into action.

Back in the 1970s, there was a famous experiment wherein some rats were lobotomized to be completely insensitive to dopamine signalling. They died, because they did not do the things necessary for survival, including drinking water. Those rats will have experienced thirst, and will have known what to do about that, but the normal brain response for translating that into action was simply not functioning. If they had had human-level verbal cognition, they would have died thinking “I really should go and get a drink”.

In other words, a lot like the neuropsychology of ADHD. In the ADHD brain, dopamine signalling isn’t completely broken (hence people with ADHD do still take some actions), but it doesn’t work very well (due to fewer dopamine transport proteins), meaning that what for most people will give some chemical sense of reward, won’t, for the ADHD brain. And we’re not talking “just took cocaine and won the lottery and had an orgasm” levels of reward, we’re talking “brushed teeth and now have clean teeth” levels of reward. Thus, small mildly-rewarding activities are now simply not rewarding, so the brain won’t facilitate their completion.

Stimulant medications can work by boosting dopamine, but the effects are temporary and not always sufficient.

So, what else can be done about it?

Motivation in ADHD is influenced by four key factors: interest, urgency, challenge, and novelty. Boosting one or more of these can make tasks feel more doable and engaging:

• Interest can be increased by finding a way to make the task more fun, which can include gamifying it (making it a game somehow) or by “temptation bundling”, that is to say, doing something enjoyable at the same time.
• Urgency can often not really be usefully increased. Dr. Marks will advise in the video, as many do, creating false deadlines, using timers, and so forth. However, false deadlines will be recognized as such and thus ignored (and let’s face it, the ADHD brain will often disregard real deadlines, too—many people struggle for example with not paying their bills despite having the money, or not filing taxes on time, or being consistently late for social events), and timers can be run out. That said, timers can at least be useful for getting into a “flow” state, thus engaging interest, rather than urgency.
• Challenge is an interesting paradox; if one finds the challenge of [very easy thing] somehow too difficult, one can increase the challenge for a greater chance of success! This ties back into interest, for example by gamifying things, But watch out! Because, increase the challenge too much, and the brain will simply go “nope, the small reward is not worth that effort” and shut down one’s motivation.
• Novelty helps to “reset” things, and makes a challenge new and fresh, and can revitalize interest by sparking curiosity and imagination (in contrast, doing the same thing all the time will give rapidly diminishing marginal returns on effort).

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Take care!