It took me forever to write this.

Months, picking away at shreds of ideas, spitting out the bits I found unsavory not unlike like a vulture that fancies itself a fairer creature. Procrastination nipped at the heels of every sentence like a lethargic cattle dog. Hesitation, at it would seem, is the bane of accomplishment. We undulate our thoughts like polished river stones in a restless palm, yet grapple with the commitment to release one skipping across the rippling surface of reality. And the longer we hesitate, the more those smooth stones seem to distort into chunks of broken glass.

For anyone who has ever had work to get done, even in the most pressing of circumstances, hesitation tends to rear its ugly head when most expected and least desired. Anticipated, unsurprising, and yet universally despised, it often slows our ability to execute to a grinding halt. Paradoxically, the higher the stakes, the harder it is to build the mental inertia we need to dive in. But what causes it?

Perhaps this isn’t so much an exploration of hesitation as a mental state, but rather the factors that go into perpetuating its existence. And much to the chagrin of anyone with anything to do, there are many.

Hesitation as a discrete topic of research appears to be nothing but a small blip on the vast radar of scientific exploration. Most published biomedical and psychological literature refers to hesitation as an aspect of stuttering and speech pathology, or as simply a rhetorical device to be used in a manuscript title. After all, if “Our Hesitation Waltz” sweeps up so elegantly across the ballroom of peer-review approval, why would we ever want to stop dancing?

Indeed, most research about hesitation can’t be found by searching the simple term itself. Rather, the components that go into hesitation as a state of being must be inferred and then disassembled. Attention span, fear, procrastination, and the inherent cognitive struggle between them are all at play.

Sustained attention, or rather the lack thereof, seems to be a key culprit. Modern society and digital obsession are practically engineered to capitalize on our cognitive weaknesses in ability to concentrate. For every nascent inkling of a concept that might be acted upon, there is an equal and opposite reaction of distraction. The well-meaning foray into the depths of Wikipedia to confirm a simple fact about common gourd cultivars leads to a depraved intellectual binge that lands you reading about phallic architecture and explaining a very strange browsing history to your employer. It happens to the best of us. It also happens to me.

But distraction is very much a real and perplexing ill of the human condition, one that we all struggle with and bemoan ever more loudly in the progression of the digital age. Like your brain’s version of wrestling with a circus bear, it’s a highly entertaining venture which inevitably leads to the mauling of any productive pursuits. Or does it?

Its ubiquity would suggest that distraction, at its very core, offers an evolutionary benefit to those that can balance the awareness of surroundings that it proffers with the ability to filter out the non-important elements. It’s a fine balance, to say the least. Distraction is the reason that we find sudden motion more salient and easier to detect in a landscape than, say, the gradual change in hue of the afternoon sky. It’s adaptive because noticing a snake move on the ground in front of you – and immediately directing your attention to it — is much more beneficial than ignoring it and stepping on it. Recent research has even suggested that a gene associated with ADHD and reduced dopamine function is also associated with longevity. Distraction saved the lives of our evolving forebearers, and may even help us live longer today. But try telling that to your boss.

Today, the world is filled with more available distraction than ever before, most of which offers no immediate threat or relevance to our physical existence. The internet has built a towering empire built on the industry of distracted clicks. Much like many other first world ailments such as poor diets and sedentary lifestyles, our mental immersion in little screens and distracting pleasantries reflect the defeat and contortion of the environment in which our bodies originally evolved to function. Many have even likened our current obsession with checking emails, social media alerts, texts, etc. to variable ratio reinforcement, in which a certain behavior sometimes results in a certain reward… but what changes is HOW MANY times that behavior may have to occur before the reward is received. Sometimes you win after one pull at the slot machine, other times it may take 100 to pay out the exact same sum. Guessing games allow us to delude ourselves into thinking the next pull/click/press will be “the one.” There’s little wonder that variable ratio reinforcement is so highly associated with addictive behavior.

So the little spurt of dopamine we get from anticipating a potential reward keeps us clicking at those little red notifications, like a rat pressing a lever in hope of cocaine. And just like our junkie rodent friend, the unpredictable rate of success doesn’t deter us, but rather keeps us coming back aggressively for more. Sure, distractions may not be the entirety of hesitation. They do, however, play a significant and arguably more relevant role in today’s life.

Fear, of course, also plays a role. One can hardly argue that it’s not adaptive: anyone who has frozen in pause before bungee jumping or plunging into a cold swimming pool knows that the amygdala raises hell when confronted with situations that would guarantee harm if not for recent technology. Sometimes, it’s still clear-cut. Even today, this primal fear continues to be a major factor in the rise of medication non-compliance, with patients hesitant to take their prescribed drugs due to fear of adverse side effects. But in general, modern society dictates that the cold waters of the pool are muddier, our possible fears more esoteric. The fear of falling to death is more immediate and tangible than the fear of falling short on an exam, which may not have demonstrable impact until several multi-faceted steps down the road. In a world where the average person must look at an entire forest of potential outcomes rather than the single trees of action, this hesitation to act is all too often manifested in procrastination. After all, we don’t have to face negative results of a decision so long as we can put that decision off.

Fear of failure is an unbroken steed we ride cantering aimlessly though the fields of procrastination. The inability to tame it takes us places we don’t necessarily want to be, and far from where we wanted to end up. Fear and the urge to postpone action are often well-meaning, and driven by the desire to perform our best; though tragically, it often has the opposite effect. In a Western world where young generations have oft been sheltered from disappointment and coached that success is the only acceptable outcome, we neglect to accept failure as a valuable part of learning. Students that face difficult tasks without the reassurance of failure’s role in improvement tend to perform worse on subsequent tasks of working memory… convinced that their poor performance was an infallible marker of incompetence. And those who perceive themselves to have low competence to begin with procrastinate even more. Perceived incompetence begets actual incompetence, so instead of finishing that problem set, we decide that we “really should check our email” and then promptly direct our browser to Reddit.

Long story short, hesitation is a funny thing to pin down. It’s complicated. Dictionary definitions do little to distill its inherent complexity, and maybe that’s because we have but a tenuous grasp of the hard-wired factors that prompt and perpetuate it to begin with.

Will we ever fully understand hesitation? Not so easily, it seems. But personally, I’ll try.

…well, maybe tomorrow.