Rejoice, all ye who are always running late: Psychologists are defending your honor and letting us all know that your lack of punctuality is not a sign that you’re rude, disorganized, or inconsiderate — your mind might just be malfunctioning. Sure, Cairo traffic throws us all curveballs that guarantee we’ll be late to the most important meetings and appointments, but there are certain people out there who are consistently late — and it’s not entirely their fault, Laura Clarke writes for BBC.

“The punctually-challenged often share personality characteristics such as optimism, low levels of self-control, anxiety, or a penchant for thrill seeking, experts say,” all of which are characteristics that affect how they experience and perceive the passing of time. Optimism, for example, pushes the “punctually-challenged” to be overestimate how much time they have and underestimate how much time they need to get a certain task done (known among psychologists as the planning fallacy). If your punctuality issue has more to do with procrastinating tasks than with budgeting your time poorly, psychologist Linda Spadin says the key is to adjust how you mentally process the task ahead of you: “Rather than figuring out how to get beyond the fear, the fear becomes the excuse — usually expressed with a ‘but’ statement.”

Whatever the case may be, the bottom line seems to be that being “punctually-challenged” is not a fatal diagnosis — as long as the underlying issues are identified and addressed.