Procrastination is often dismissed as laziness, lack of discipline, or a bad habit. But for many trauma survivors, it’s one of the most chronic, shame-filled, and debilitating struggles they face every day.

It can feel irrational, self-defeating, even humiliating. Clinicians sometimes minimize it too, treating it as a simple behavioral issue rather than a complex, protective, and adaptive strategy rooted in the past.

The word itself comes from the Latin procrastinare, meaning “to postpone until tomorrow.” Popular self-help literature from the 1970s and 1980s framed procrastination as a moral failure, a sign of laziness or lack of productivity. But what if we understood it through a trauma-informed lens?