The End of Procrastination

Why You Don’t Achieve Your Goals (And How to Change That Using Neuroscience)

Imagine traveling back in time. You find yourself face to face with who you were a year ago. You were setting your goals. SMART method, planning, visualization. You were doing everything right. And today, how many of those goals have you actually achieved?

The problem is that these classic methods ignore something fundamental: when it’s time to act, it’s not your rational mind that’s in control, but your emotional brain. And if your goals don’t resonate with it, you’ll procrastinate or give up.

System 1 and System 2: The Two Thinking Modes of Your Brain

Daniel Kahneman identified two thinking systems that constantly interact in your mind.

System 1 is your emotional brain. Fast and intuitive thinking. It’s automatic, emotional, instinctive. It reacts immediately, influenced by your past experiences and emotions. The majority of our daily decisions are made by System 1 automatically and unconsciously.

System 2 is your rational mind. Deliberative, logical, analytical. It plans, structures, and analyzes. It’s slow and consumes a lot of energy, making it harder to activate over time.

The 4 Key Circuits of Your Brain

These two systems rely on four key circuits in your brain.

The General: Your Prefrontal Cortex

This is the boss of System 2. Your rational mind—it structures, plans, and organizes your goals with foresight. It knows how to identify available resources, anticipate obstacles, and define an effective method for moving forward.

But on its own, it’s powerless—because a plan without motivation remains a lifeless document.

The Sentinel: Your Amygdala

This is what watches over you to keep you safe. Its role is to detect risks and avoid suffering. But its radar is sometimes too sensitive. It doesn’t always distinguish a real threat from simple discomfort related to change.

If it perceives your goal as a threat, it will sound the alarm and trigger avoidance mechanisms: fear, doubt, procrastination. But it can also become an ally if it perceives inaction as more risky than action.

The Emotional Soldier: The Representative of System 1

This is the execution force, the one that transforms intention into action. It runs on emotion and instinct. It’s fast, efficient, but also resistant to change. It prefers familiar patterns, even if they lead nowhere.

If the goal doesn’t excite it, it will procrastinate, resist, or continue repeating patterns that are currently preventing you from evolving.

It consists of two complementary circuits:

  • The Striatum: This is what releases the dopamine that gives you the drive to act when your brain anticipates a reward. It’s also what transforms repeated behaviors into automatic habits.

  • The Orbitofrontal Cortex: This is the brain’s emotional accountant. It records the consequences of your past actions—successes, failures, pleasures, disappointments—and assigns an emotional value to each option. Before you even think, it whispers to the soldier: “Last time we did that, we felt good” or “Careful, that ended badly.”

Even if your General has planned the perfect action plan, if your goals don’t speak to these four circuits in a balanced way, it will be difficult to maintain them over time.

The Inner King: Who Really Sets Your Goals?

The key: convince the Sentinel that change is an opportunity, not a danger. Inspire the Emotional Soldier by associating action with a positive emotion so it becomes natural and instinctive.

When the Sentinel understands it has nothing to fear and the Soldier finds meaning in action, everything becomes fluid and aligned.

To live a truly fulfilling life, the General, the Sentinel, and the Soldier must serve the only part of you that should set goals: your Inner King.

The Self according to Carl Jung—this is what feels the call for change, the desire to evolve, experiment, and create. It exists beyond your fears, your conditioning, the success model you were taught—a model that often doesn’t match your deep aspirations.

These desires aren’t dictated by external constraints, but by an inner truth that sets you in motion. This path to your truth, no one can walk it for you. Only you have access to your King. Only you can feel what you truly want to experience.

Once you’ve identified your goal, be careful: don’t act from a space of frustration or lack. “I need to lose weight because I don’t like my body.” Find the wording that will allow you to act from a space of love—it’s much more powerful: “I want to take care of myself because I love my body.”

The “5 Whys” Exercise

Understand that a goal has little chance of being achieved if it’s not deeply rooted in you. The 5 Whys exercise allows you to explore the real motivations hidden behind your superficial goals.

Define your goal: “I want to get back in shape.”

Ask yourself why: “Because I want to feel healthier.”

Dig deeper: “Because I want to have more energy every day.”

Go even further: “Because I want to enjoy my life without fatigue.”

Why is this so important to you?: “Because I want to feel free and good in my body.”

Result: instead of a vague goal, you now have a clear and emotionally anchored motivation—reclaiming your freedom and well-being.

Once your why is revealed, don’t let it get lost in oblivion. Write down your answers and take time to reread them occasionally. This simple practice reinforces your commitment and reminds you why every small step counts.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

There are two types of motivation.

Extrinsic motivation comes from outside: social pressure, validation, fear of failure, material rewards. It can be useful in the short term, but it’s not enough to sustain lasting motivation.

Intrinsic motivation comes from within, from your deep desires, from what truly drives you. It alone is capable of generating stable and lasting energy.

Why do we tend to favor extrinsic motivation?

The Sentinel (the amygdala), which acts as the alarm system in our brain, is programmed to seek safety and avoid pain. It’s therefore naturally sensitive to immediate rewards and social signals that assure us a place in the group: validation, status, recognition.

The problem is that extrinsic motivation makes us dependent on others’ opinions, which can prevent us from pursuing our deep aspirations out of fear of being judged and rejected.

How to transform this conditioning?

Your Sentinel needs to stop associating safety and pleasure with likes, compliments, and recognition from others, and start associating them with alignment with your Inner King.

Celebrate your victories in silence. You don’t need someone to say “well done” to feel pride. Every small step counts, even if no one sees it.

Reframe your thoughts. You catch yourself saying “I’m fed up, this is too hard”? OK, pause. Remember why you’re doing this. Reconnect with meaning.

Savor the journey. Every step aligned with your King is already a victory. Life happens now, not when you’ve reached your goal.

Recognize the cost of inaction. Not changing anything isn’t a solution to avoid suffering. Regrets, stagnation, the feeling of missing out on your life—that’s painful too.

And that’s where the magic happens. When your Sentinel understands that your old behavior is causing you more suffering than anything else and that you don’t need external validation to feel good about your choices, it releases the brakes. Fear switches sides and becomes associated with inaction. The Sentinel stops blocking you and becomes your ally.

The Reward Envelope Hack

Let’s take a concrete example to see how these forces work together.

The Inner King carries the vision: “Today, I’m taking charge of myself. I’m going to the gym three times a week.”

Then the General activates: “What’s the nearest gym? How much does it cost? When do I have time to go train?”

And for this to materialize, you need to convince the Soldier that this goal is more exciting than the couch.

How do you do it?

Your brain works by anticipation. It gets more motivated when it expects a reward. This allows you to activate a powerful hack:

  1. Break your goal into 10 intermediate steps: a week of commitment, a milestone reached, a challenge completed.

  2. Prepare 10 envelopes with rewards: 7 contain simple pleasures (a nice meal, a massage, buying those shoes you’ve been dreaming of, a special evening, a movie you love, a new book, a facial treatment…). 3 are empty to maintain excitement and surprise.

  3. At each step reached, open an envelope. Your brain will anticipate the reward and stay motivated.

Bonus tip: every time you want to treat yourself to something, don’t do it right away. Add it to your envelopes.

Why does it work?

You focus on the next step, not the top of the mountain. The surprise effect stimulates dopamine. Your brain associates effort with a rewarding experience. It’s the same principle as video games: random reward + clear sense of progression.

Visualization to Activate Dopamine

Another powerful tool: visualization. When you imagine your success in detail and the sensations that come with it, your brain reacts almost as if you were actually living it and releases dopamine.

Once again, we’re creating a positive association in your mind: your goal = pleasure.

  • Close your eyes and feel how proud and energized you’ll feel after each session.
  • Remember past moments when you felt that deep satisfaction after an effort.
  • As soon as your first workout is done, take a few seconds to savor that feeling of victory.

The more your Soldier associates this habit with a positive emotion, the more it will want to do it again. You can’t force your Soldier to act. You can only lead it to want to act.

Reassuring Your Sentinel: Managing Your Fears

Let’s address the Sentinel to see what fear is preventing you from taking action.

“I won’t have time.” “I’ll be too tired.” “It costs too much.” “It seems complicated.”

Take each fear and reassure that part of you that’s trying to protect you:

  • No time? → “I can find two slots in my week.”
  • Too tired? → “Movement gives me energy back.”
  • Too expensive? → “I’m investing in my health before anything else.”
  • Too complicated? → “I’ll start simply, not perfectly.”

And most importantly, flip the fear. The real threat isn’t the effort—it’s inaction. “If I don’t start exercising, my health will deteriorate faster.”

The 4 Levers of Atomic Habits

Remember: your Soldier and your Sentinel love habits. So use that to your advantage. James Clear in Atomic Habits proposes four levers to create a habit.

Let’s use the gym example:

  1. Make it obvious: pack your bag the night before.
  2. Make it attractive: pair it with your favorite playlist or a podcast you love.
  3. Make it easy: start small. The goal is automaticity, not performance.
  4. Make it satisfying: savor that moment of pride as you leave.

To break a bad habit, reverse the levers:

  1. Make it invisible: remove Netflix from your home screen.
  2. Make it unattractive: visualize yourself after three episodes—tired, not nourished inside.
  3. Make it difficult: change the password, add friction.
  4. Make it unsatisfying: remind yourself that it’s taking you away from your goals.

Identity Transformation

The real transformation happens when your sense of identity evolves. You’re no longer someone who “goes to the gym”—you are an athlete.

When this identity takes root in you, everything becomes natural.

Summary

In short, to break free from the constant struggle, it’s essential that:

  • The Inner King sets the direction
  • The General (your prefrontal cortex) structures the path
  • The Sentinel (your amygdala) is reassured, not fought—and fear switches sides (inaction must seem more risky than action)
  • The Soldier (your striatum and orbitofrontal cortex) is inspired, not forced

When these four forces move forward together, you no longer need discipline. Action becomes natural and your sense of identity evolves.

All these forces only want what’s best for you. It’s up to you to explain to them, in the language they understand, what you want, why you want it, and why it’s going to be amazing.

Enjoy the journey.

📖 Scientific References

Leave a Reply