Codie Sanchez

That's what the rest of this episode is going to break down.

I want to take a step back and look at the hardware you and I are running in our brains.

So in 2019, researchers ran an fMRI,

study that scans the brains of high procrastinators while they worked through really high pressure tasks.

And they found measurably reduced activity in two regions, the anterior cingulate cortex, which handles error monitoring and correction, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

I mean, very big mouthful, but that basically means your executive control.

So if we talk in plain English, not like a crazy scientist, the parts of your brain that say, wait, this matters, keep going, they're firing way less.

The hardware is actually biased for you to avoid things.

Like, say it with me.

Do you feel that?

Because I certainly did when I read this.

So every time you say, I'll start tomorrow, you're not just losing a day, you're actually training that neurological pattern deeper.

So the reduced activity becomes your default and the avoidance actually becomes the automatic.

So you wake up one morning and the business you were going to start 10 years ago, it still doesn't exist.

The book is still three paragraphs and a Google doc.

I do not think this is because you were lazy.

It's because you spent a decade running the wrong program and now the roads and grooves are so deep you don't know how to get out of them.

So the good news here is that the same brain is actually plastic.

So we can rewire the inputs and your activity can change.

But before we get to how to do that, you need to know what you're actually fighting.