For a long time, the hardest part of my dissertation wasn’t writing it. It was starting it.
The project felt enormous. Where do you even begin? Every step came with its own set of decisions. Which analytic strategy fits my questions best? What’s the right threshold for outliers? How deep do I go? Should I write the introduction, or start with the methods because they felt the most concrete? And how do you know when a literature review is thorough enough? There was always one more paper.
So I’d sit down to work and end up doing something else. Sometimes a lot of something else. An email about my dissertation would land in my inbox, and my stress response would go into overdrive. At one point, instead of writing, I remodeled my entire garage. New flooring. Cabinets. A full tool organization system and a workbench. I also built my sneakerhead husband a custom closet for his shoe collection. Mind you, I didn’t really know how to properly use an electric drill when I started, so the learning curve was steep. I poured hours of time and energy into learning something completely new and genuinely hard, all to avoid my dissertation. I also read books about procrastination, which, I can see now, was just another way to procrastinate.
This is what productive procrastination looks like. You’re busy. You’re even accomplishing things. Just not the thing.
In fact, even today, my husband can tell when I’m stuck. I’ll be cleaning out the fridge, organizing the pantry, setting up a new family command center, or analyzing the soil composition in my backyard garden, and he’ll look at me and ask, “What are you avoiding?”
Weeks went by without much to show for them, and the longer that went on, the worse it felt. My anxiety climbed. I started to feel like an imposter. The shame grew right alongside the anxiety, and the shame made it even harder to start.
When I did finally find a foothold, it rarely lasted. Every time I built momentum, I was asked to change direction. New analyses. A different topic. Then back to what I had originally proposed. It felt like someone kept pulling the emergency brake.
I did finish. I wrote and defended my dissertation, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Looking back, I can see what was happening in my brain each time I froze, and why the shame only made it worse.
That’s what this post is about.
Freezing isn’t laziness
When a task feels huge and unclear, your brain doesn’t read it as “a lot of work.” It reads it as a threat.
The part of the brain that plans, prioritizes, and gets you started is the prefrontal cortex. It’s also the part most sensitive to stress. In a well-known review, neuroscientist Amy Arnsten described how even fairly mild stress that feels out of your control can cause a rapid loss of prefrontal abilities (Arnsten, 2009). In other words, the exact skills you need to break a big project into steps are the first ones to go offline when the project feels overwhelming.
That’s what was happening every time one of those emails landed. My stress response fired, my planning brain went quiet, and remodeling a garage somehow felt more doable than writing one paragraph.
So the freeze isn’t a character flaw. It’s a stressed brain doing what stressed brains do.
The shame cycle
Here’s where it gets sticky. Avoiding the task feels better, for a minute.
Researchers Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl describe procrastination as a way of repairing your mood in the short term. When a task brings up bad feelings, putting it off gives quick relief. The cost gets handed to your future self (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013).
And your future self pays it. The deadline gets closer. The gap between what you’ve done and what you “should” have done gets wider. That gap turns into shame. Shame is its own kind of threat, so the task feels even bigger, and the freeze gets stronger.
Avoid. Feel relief. Feel shame. Feel more threatened. Freeze harder. Around and around.
Why it hits neurodivergent brains harder
Starting, planning, holding steps in mind, and shifting between them are all executive function skills. For many neurodivergent people, including me (I’m late-identified neurodivergent), those skills take more effort to begin with. Add stress, and there’s less room before things stall.
The research fits what I lived. In a study of nearly 1,900 Hungarian university students, those with the most ADHD symptoms overall reported the highest levels of unhelpful procrastination and of feeling mentally depleted (Müller & Pikó, 2026). That study relied on self-report at a single point in time, so it shows a link, not a cause.
Another study tracked university students with and without ADHD through their days for a week. In both groups, self-esteem dipped in the moments when students were alone and when they were procrastinating (Turner & Harty, 2025).
Alone and procrastinating. That was most of my dissertation.
What helped me, and what might help you
1. Borrow someone else’s presence.
What finally got me moving was not working alone. I joined virtual writing bootcamps. I asked friends and family to sit with me while I worked. Sometimes they had their own work. Sometimes they just read a book across the table. Either way, it was easier to start.
This is called body doubling. People who use it describe it as having someone present, in person or online, while they get something done (Eagle et al., 2024). To be honest about the science, the research is still early: one large survey and a couple of small lab studies so far, with mixed results, and no clinical trials yet. So we don’t know exactly why it works or for whom. But many neurodivergent people find it helps, and I’m one of them.
Why might it help? We don’t know for sure yet, but there are good guesses. One of psychology’s oldest findings, social facilitation, shows that having someone nearby tends to help with simple, familiar tasks, and can make complex, unfamiliar ones harder (Zajonc, 1965; Bond & Titus, 1983). That may be why body doubling seems to help most with getting started and with the tedious parts. For ADHD brains, research has also linked low motivation to differences in the brain’s dopamine reward system (Volkow et al., 2011), so another person’s presence may supply some of the push that’s hard to create on your own. These are theories, not proof.
2. Break it into micro tasks.
“Work on my dissertation” isn’t a task. “Do the literature review for one paragraph of the introduction” is. So is “write up one result.” A stressed brain can say yes to a task that small. And you don’t have to go in order. Methods and results often feel the most solid, because you already know what you did, so they can be a good place to build momentum.
3. Work in short, timed blocks.
The Pomodoro method uses a timer: work for about 25 minutes, then take a short break. A clear end point makes starting less daunting. You’re not committing to “the dissertation.” You’re committing to 25 minutes.
4. Never end on a cold start.
Before you close for the day, write the first sentence of the next paragraph or section. It doesn’t have to be good. Tomorrow you’ll sit down to something already in motion instead of a blank page.
5. Decide when “enough” is enough, ahead of time.
For a literature review, one rule that helps is to stop when new papers stop changing your argument. Without a stopping rule, there’s always one more paper.
6. Keep a parking lot for pivots.
If your direction keeps changing, don’t delete the old work. Move it into a separate file. Then if you’re asked to go back to the original plan, it’s still there. When a change is requested, follow up in writing so everyone agrees on what’s next.
7. Name the shame, then take one step anyway.
You don’t have to argue with the shame or wait for it to leave. “I feel behind, and I’m going to write for ten minutes” is enough. Progress shrinks shame faster than pep talks do.
Shame shrinks when the task does
I didn’t finish my dissertation by becoming a different person. I finished it by making the task smaller, borrowing structure from people around me, and letting progress be messy.
If you’re frozen right now, it doesn’t mean you’re not capable. It may mean the task is too big, too unclear, or too lonely. Those are things you can change.
If body doubling sounds like something you’d want to try, The Focus Studio opens today. It’s group body doubling with a coach present in every session, and founding members can join free through November at surrogatefrontallobe.com/focus-studio.
Borrow mine while I help you build yours.
This article is for educational purposes and is not therapy, diagnosis, or treatment.
References
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Bond, C. F., & Titus, L. J. (1983). Social facilitation: A meta-analysis of 241 studies. Psychological Bulletin, 94(2), 265–292. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.94.2.265
Eagle, T., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Ringland, K. E. (2024). “It was something I naturally found worked and heard about later”: An investigation of body doubling with neurodivergent participants. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 17(3), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689648
Müller, V., & Pikó, B. (2026). The combined ADHD profile faces the greatest risk of delay, depletion and disengagement in university students. Scientific Reports, 16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41256-1
Sirois, F., & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011
Turner, E. H., & Harty, S. C. (2025). Daily activities and self-esteem among university students with and without ADHD. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 16, 1622354. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1622354
Volkow, N. D., Wang, G.-J., Newcorn, J. H., Kollins, S. H., Wigal, T. L., Telang, F., Fowler, J. S., Goldstein, R. Z., Klein, N., Logan, J., Wong, C., & Swanson, J. M. (2011). Motivation deficit in ADHD is associated with dysfunction of the dopamine reward pathway. Molecular Psychiatry, 16(11), 1147–1154. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2010.97
Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149(3681), 269–274. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.149.3681.269