Anne-Laure Le Cunff, neuroscientist, on overcoming procrastination: “Whenever we procrastinate, we start blaming ourselves”

We have all experienced moments of procrastination where we just cannot bring ourselves to get something done. And thanks to societal norms we typically associate it with a lack of willpower or that we’re being lazy.

That leads us down the road to beating up on ourselves. “Whenever we procrastinate, we start blaming ourselves for not doing the thing that we said we were going to do,” says neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

She shared with CNBC Make it that we need “get curious” about why we are procrastinating. She recommends swapping that “vague sense of dread and self-blame” from procrastination for “acting a little bit more like a scientist, like a detective, and seeing it as a puzzle to solve.”

The “Triple Check Method” for dissecting procrastination

The author of ‘Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World’ explained to CNBC Make it her method for tackling procrastination. It starts with a “triple check” system to determine if your procrastination is coming from the head, heart, or hand. She explains each as follows:

Head problems are ones that “at a rational level, you’re not fully convinced you should be working on that task in the first place.”

Heart-based procrastination is emotional, “you don’t feel like this is going to be fun or exciting.”

Hand problems are those that “at a practical level, you don’t believe that you have the right tools, the right skills, or the right support network in order to get the task done.”

Getting “unstick”

Now that you’ve found what’s causing your procrastination you can get yourself “unstuck,” Le Cunff says. This is a matter of “systematically” finding what will work for you.

She recommends that you “go back to the drawing board” and do a rethink about your approach to the task when it’s a head procrastination problem. Heart procrastination can be solved by making the environment around the task “fun,” to stimulate and excite you, Le Cunff advises. She always tells people to “raise your hand, ask for help” when dealing with procrastination of the hand type.

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