According to my therapist, procrastination IS caused by anxiety.
The type of anxiety you mention stems from accumulated unprocessed negative emotions or traumas. These intense feelings — such as shame, guilt, dread, remorse, rage, helplessness, neediness, and hopelessness — often paralyze or disorient procrastinators, particularly when they are compelled to confront the present moment. These emotions typically reflect deep-seated issues with self-esteem and self-confidence, and an inability to face negative feelings squarely.
In my view, procrastination is essentially a high time-preference tradeoff, where escapism is favored over confronting immediate challenges and responsibilities. Common forms of escapism include excessive consumption of media, overworking, video gaming, substance abuse, emotional eating, casual sexual encounters, and excessive socializing. These activities provide temporary relief from stress but ultimately lose their effectiveness, causing the anxiety to resurface more intensely when the procrastinator becomes increasingly aware of their predicament.
This recurring cycle of avoidance and stress often leads procrastinators to act out—either by seeking constant validation through drama, shifting contexts frequently to keep their minds engaged with novelty, or by focusing on others instead of introspecting.
Despite knowing various organizational techniques and tools, lifelong procrastinators often struggle internally with facing reality, continuously deferring it to some future date. They appear constantly busy yet achieve little, mainly because they aim to divert attention from the mounting issues that they have sidelined
And here’s a good video by Andrew Huberman on dopamine regulation and optimization - he’s big on lifestyle changes before medicating (as am I). But it’s really hard unless you’re committed to doing the work on yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-TW2Chpz4k
But the inverse is definitely true: procrastination is just one form of anxiety. There is no deep meaning behind it, though diving into the root of this anxiety can be quite tricky. In my case, it was both because of brain structure (I have ADHD) but also because I felt I should be doing things that I really, really do not give a damn about, but society told me I should. Medication and stopping trying to be who I am not were crucial for me.
Anxiety is very, very sneaky and it’s common to have it without noticing it. Stress is about something : there’s a danger, a fear, a deadline, whatever.
Anxiety is more about inconscient thoughts, it’s more distant, barely observable, it’s about how you feel about yourself, your history and moreover your future.
In the case of procrastination they have basically opposite effects : a good amount of stress will make you progress and achieve before a deadline. Anxiety, on the contrary, looks like a mechanism which removes this useful stress and instead just add a coin in the uncertainty of the future. You don’t stress anymore about today so you procrastinate / avoid the task but now you have more anxiety : you have added uncertainty and insecurity in your brain : another undone task and you’ll probably never know if and how much it will cost you.
My pet theory is that this happens when your brain got somehow too much stress for low reward in the past and now learned to avoid stress by avoiding doing things with uncertain rewards. Instead you build up anxiety which is basically taking stressful things and hiding them under a carpet because well, not doing $thing will not kill you and you learned the hard way that doing things isn’t worth it.
You have to do something, the brain gives a quick look under the carpet, sees all the hidden shit mountain of all the past failures and says "oh we’d better check what’s new on YouTube".