文章转自我最最最最喜欢的Blog: Wait But Why 

https://waitbutwhy.com/
每篇文章都有中英文两个版本
人为什么会拖延
中文版本
拖延症
 pro-cras-ti-na-tion 
|prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-|
名词释义：指的是非必要、有害的推迟行为。

例句：建议你不要患上拖延症。
我说字典你是和我开玩笑对吧？人类和拖延症抗争这么多年，你给出的第一个例句就是：建议你不要患上拖延症。
不要患上拖延症，多么简洁明快，高贵冷艳。
要是这样子有用的话，我们可以直接告诉肥胖症患者克制住食欲，告诉抑郁症患者生活乐观，告诉搁浅在沙滩上的鲸鱼，它们不应该离开海洋的。
真是胡扯。“不要患上拖延症”只对于那些没有拖延症的人有效，或者说是那些假性拖延症患者。所谓假性拖延症患者，就是那些天天嘟囔：“我每天上班的时候水好几次微博，我真是一个超级拖延症患者！”他们也会煞有介事地对那些真正有拖延症的人说：“不要拖延你就没事了！”
假性拖延症患者和字典作者有所不知，对于真正地拖延症患者，拖延与否不是一件有选择的事情，他们面对拖延，根本不知道如何反抗。
在我上大学的时候，突然给予我的自由让我猝不及防。我就像脱缰的野马一样不受控制，每天逛来逛去每天什么都完不成。唯一的例外就是，有时候我需要为某一门课程交一篇论文，于是我会Deadline之前的一天晚上开始写论文。但是事实上，我经常发现我Deadline那一天早上开始写也可以，所以我后来就索性Dealline那一天早晨疯狂地写论文。这种拖延症愈演愈烈。我毕业的时候需要写90页的毕业论文，我依然是Deadline之前的72小时才开始动笔。这样子的突击冲锋导致我手指痉挛不听使唤，最后我被送到校医院，医生的诊断是我因为疲劳过度血糖低才这样子的。（我最后还是完成了我的毕业论文，别问了，很糟糕。）
即使到了现在，这个问题依然很严重。比如你正在阅读的这个帖子，就花了我很长的时间才完成。我大部分时间都在网上看一些无聊的图片，比如这个大猩猩。心里一直想着，要是我和这个大猩猩打一架的话，它能够多么容易地把我揍扁，然后想着要是这个大猩猩和狮子打架的话谁会赢，然后就跳跃到了狮子和老虎打架谁会赢，然后就Google了到底谁会赢，最后发现是老虎。我真是病的不轻。
为了了解为什么拖延症患者拖延地这么厉害，首先让我们从“非拖延症人”的脑袋开始：
事实上，即时奖励猴子是最不应该当家做主的。他永远只想着当下，完全忽视未来计划。他关心的事情就是如何让现在这个时刻更加快乐和容易。猴子和理智互相都不怎么了解对方。猴子心里想的总是：练钢琴要是不好玩，我们为什么要练钢琴？电脑可以上网，为什么我们要用电脑去工作？猴子觉得理智真是丧心病狂。
在猴子的世界里面，事情没这么复杂——————如果你饿了就吃，困了就睡，也不做什么困难的事情，你完全就是一只成功的猴子。但是可惜我们生活在人类世界，在这个世界里猴子完全没有资格做我们的领航员。而理智呢？他只知道如何如何做出理智的决定，而不是如何和无理取闹的猴子打交道，更不知道如何才能控制这只猴子。和猴子斗争的结果就是理智越来越有挫败感，他越是失败，我们就越拖延，我们越拖延，就越斥责自己的理智为什么没有做好他的工作。
这一团糟真是纠结。如果猴子掌权，那么拖延症患者会发现自己经常在一个地方浪费时间，这个地方叫做“黑暗游乐场”。
每个拖延症患者对于黑暗游乐场都心知肚明。在这个地方，不应该享受的娱乐活动一次又一次地发生。你在黑暗游乐场得到的快乐不是快乐，因为你知道自己没有完成任务，也没有开始玩的资格，所以玩的不尽兴。黑暗游乐场的气氛充满了负罪感，焦虑，自我憎恨，还有担惊受怕。有时候理智一气之下断绝了你所有的娱乐方式，但是“即时奖励猴子”表示抗议，最后把你放在了一个玩没法玩，工作没法工作的不伦不类之地。
平时固守岗位的即时奖励猴子，现在直接被慌乱怪吓得连滚带爬地逃走了。要不是这样子，同样平时拖延成性的人，是怎么在考试之前突然变得勇猛无比，战胜熬夜的疲倦，连续写成一篇八页的论文？要不是这样子，平时懒散不锻炼的人，怎么会突然在体育考试之前开始天天跑步？
但是，以上所述的都是幸运的拖延症患者。因为无论工作质量如何，他们至少还能够在Deadline之前把事情完成。有些晚期拖延症患者，对慌乱怪完全没有反应，在Deadline接近的最后那一刹那，选择和猴子一样逃回丛林，进入一种因为自我挫败导致的完全封锁中。
我们的人性啊！
当然了，这些都不是好的生活方式。就算是那些一般性拖延症患者，虽然能够在Deadline之前把事情完成，坚持在人类社会中存活下去，他们的生活也需要改观。以下是几个主要的原因：
  1. 这会让你非常不爽
    拖延症患者把太多时间都浪费在黑暗游乐场了。要是你按时完成了任务，就完全可以用这些时间来享受那些毫无压力的闲适时光。难道这让你很开心么？
  2. 拖延最终是出卖了自己
    他们最后都不能发挥自己的潜能，这样子的感受煎熬着他的内心，让他变得自卑，充满悔恨。
  3. 需要做的也许可以完成，但是想要做的却永远都做不到
    也许拖延症患者的职业充满了Deadline，这能让他不被开除。但是生活中其他的事情呢？比如健身，做一顿美餐，学着弹吉他，读一本书，写书，甚至大胆的跳槽到更好的公司。这是事情都不会发生，因为没有deadline，没有慌乱怪，拖延症患者永远都做不到。这些事情拓展我们的经历，让我们的生活更加丰富，更重要的是给我们带来幸福感，这些事情对于大多数拖延症患者来说，最后都成了从未开始的压箱底的陈年旧事。
    所以，拖延症患者如何才能战胜拖延，获得更高的幸福感呢？
请看明天帖子，如何击败拖延症
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英文版本
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
pro-cras-ti-na-tion|prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-|
noun

the action of delaying or postponing something:
 your first tip is to avoid procrastination
.
Who would have thought that after decades of struggle with procrastination, the dictionary, of all places, would hold the solution.
Avoid procrastination. So elegant in its simplicity.
While we’re here, let’s make sure obese people avoid overeating, depressed people avoid apathy, and someone please tell beached whales that they should avoid being out of the ocean.
No, “avoid procrastination” is only good advice for fake procrastinators—those people that are like, “I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I’m such a procrastinator!” The same people that will say to a real procrastinator something like, “Just don’t procrastinate and you’ll be fine.”
The thing that neither the dictionary nor fake procrastinators understand is that for a real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional—it’s something they don’t know how to not do.
In college, the sudden unbridled personal freedom was a disaster for me—I did nothing, ever, for any reason. The one exception was that I had to hand in papers from time to time. I would do those the night before, until I realized I could just do them through the night, and I did that until I realized I could actually start them in the early morning on the day they were due. This behavior reached caricature levels when I was unable to start writing my 90-page senior thesis until 72 hours before it was due, an experience that ended with me in the campus doctor’s office learning that lack of blood sugar was the reason my hands had gone numb and curled up against my will. (I did get the thesis in—no, it was not good.)
Even this post took much longer than it should have, because I spent a bunch of hours doing things like seeing this picture sitting on my desktop from a previous post, opening it, looking at it for a long time thinking about how easily he could beat me in a fight, then wondering if he could beat a tiger in a fight, then wondering who would win between a lion and a tiger, and then googling that and reading about it for a while (the tiger would win). I have problems.
To understand why procrastinators procrastinate so much, let’s start by understanding a non-procrastinator’s brain:
The fact is, the Instant Gratification Monkey is the last creature who should be in charge of decisions—he thinks only about the present, ignoring lessons from the past and disregarding the future altogether, and he concerns himself entirely with maximizing the ease and pleasure of the current moment. He doesn’t understand the Rational Decision-Maker any better than the Rational Decision-Maker understands him—why would we continue doing this jog, he thinks, when we could stop, which would feel better. Why would we practice that instrument when it’s not fun? Why would we ever use a computer for work when the internet is sitting right there waiting to be played with? He thinks humans are insane.
In the monkey world, he’s got it all figured out—if you eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, and don’t do anything difficult, you’re a pretty successful monkey. The problem for the procrastinator is that he happens to live in the human world, making the Instant Gratification Monkey a highly unqualified navigator. Meanwhile, the Rational Decision-Maker, who was trained to make rational decisions, not to deal with competition over the controls, doesn’t know how to put up an effective fight—he just feels worse and worse about himself the more he fails and the more the suffering procrastinator whose head he’s in berates him.
It’s a mess. And with the monkey in charge, the procrastinator finds himself spending a lot of time in a place called the Dark Playground.1
The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It’s a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn’t actually fun because it’s completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread. Sometimes the Rational Decision-Maker puts his foot down and refuses to let you waste time doing normal leisure things, and since the Instant Gratification Monkey sure as hell isn’t gonna let you work, you find yourself in a bizarre purgatory of weird activities where everyone loses.2
The Instant Gratification Monkey, normally unshakable, is terrified of the Panic Monster. How else could you explain the same person who can’t write a paper’s introductory sentence over a two-week span suddenly having the ability to stay up all night, fighting exhaustion, and write eight pages? Why else would an extraordinarily lazy person begin a rigorous workout routine other than a Panic Monster freakout about becoming less attractive?
And these are the lucky procrastinators—there are some who don’t even respond to the Panic Monster, and in the most desperate moments they end up running up the tree with the monkey, entering a state of self-annihilating shutdown.
Quite a crowd we are.
Of course, this is no way to live. Even for the procrastinator who does manage to eventually get things done and remain a competent member of society, something has to change. Here are the main reasons why:
1) It’s unpleasant. Far too much of the procrastinator’s precious time is spent toiling in the Dark Playground, time that could have been spent enjoying satisfying, well-earned leisure if things had been done on a more logical schedule. And panic isn’t fun for anyone.
2) The procrastinator ultimately sells himself short. He ends up underachieving and fails to reach his potential, which eats away at him over time and fills him with regret and self-loathing.
3) The Have-To-Dos may happen, but not the Want-To-Dos. Even if the procrastinator is in the type of career where the Panic Monster is regularly present and he’s able to be fulfilled at work, the other things in life that are important to him—getting in shape, cooking elaborate meals, learning to play the guitar, writing a book, reading, or even making a bold career switch—never happen because the Panic Monster doesn’t usually get involved with those things. Undertakings like those expand our experiences, make our lives richer, and bring us a lot of happiness—and for most procrastinators, they get left in the dust.
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