The One You Feed - Re-Release: Tim Pychyl on Being a Procrastinator

Episode Date: December 29, 2019

Are you ready to make some changes in your life in 2020? Click Here to book your Free Strategy Session with Eric!Tim Pychyl is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Carlton University and hosts a podcast called I Procrastinate. We discuss how to go from being a procrastinator to someone who gets things done. His book that we discuss in this episode is on that very topic – it’s called Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for ChangeIn This Interview, Tim Pychyl and I Discuss Being a Procrastinator and…His book, Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for ChangeHow it’s in the getting on in life that makes a lifeBeing a procrastinator can be an existential matterWhat he tells his children: I didn’t ask what you want to do or how you feel, I told you it’s time to make your bed.When we are procrastinators we delay getting on with our livesBeing an active member or your own lifeThe two ways being a procrastinator compromises our healthStressFewer wellness behaviorsTreatment delay “I’ll look after that later”Being a Procrastinator is a problem of self-regulated behaviorI won’t give in to feel goodGoal Intentions and Implementation intentionsWhen….then…Giving the monkey something to doWhat’s the next action?Keeping it smallHacks to work around our irrational thinkingMotivation and then Action or Action and then MotivationThe meaning behind our goalsMeaning and ManageabilityAsking what will this cost me if I put it off?Being a ProcrastinatorPrefer tomorrow over todayThinking “I’ll feel like doing it tomorrow”Affect forecastingThinking of your future self as a strangerDeveloping empathy for future selfSelf-handicap to preserve self-esteemTim Pychyl Procrastinator Episode LinksHomepageTwitterTim’s Psychology Today PageSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, happy almost new year. This is the next in our series of behavior and habit related re-releases to ring in the beginning of 2020, a new year and a new decade. Today's is with Tim Pitchell, who is a professor who studies procrastination. In this interview, I've really thought about a lot of things that was said in this interview. And I think it's a really good one. But one of the things that he said in the interview is that he thinks procrastination is a problem of emotional regulation. And that really made a lot of sense to me. And emotional regulation is something that I've been thinking a lot about this year and working with my clients a lot this year on. Because really, it's kind of the whole ball of wax in some ways, right?

It's about, can I decide what's important? And then when my emotions come up, can I stay with what I've decided is important in my life? Not what my emotions are pushing or pulling me to do right now. Can I allow the emotions to be there, process them, and then act according to my values? And that's really procrastination, eating well, stopping drinking, all the different things that a lot of us want to do in life, keeping up a meditation practice. It really takes that emotional regulation piece. It's not the only piece of behavior change, but it is an important piece. So this interview from Tim is really great. If you'd like to get some more help with emotional regulation, as well as all the other aspects of behavior change, then sign up to talk to me for a 30-minute call and I'll tell you a little bit more about the program. I'll learn what's going on with you. I'll give you an actionable piece of information.

And if the program makes sense, we'll talk about moving forward. And if it doesn't, we will be friends after talking for 30 minutes and I'll have gotten to know you a little bit better. You can go to ericzimmer.coach slash application for that. And here is the interview with Tim Pitchell. I hope you enjoy it. It is in the getting on with life that makes our lives and that procrastination in a very real sense is an existential issue of not getting on with life itself. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,

ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Tim Sitchell. Tim is an associate professor

of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa and has garnered an international reputation for his scholarship and a global audience for his I Procrastinate podcast. He also writes a popular Don't Delay blog with Psychology Today. His new book is Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, a concise guide to strategies for change. Hi, Tim. Welcome to strategies for change. for the interview, and I know procrastination runs rampant everywhere, and I know our listeners, it's something they also are interested in. So I'm really looking forward to getting into that.

But let's start like we normally do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and looks up at her grandfather. She says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I've been looking forward to joining you on the podcast simply because I like the parable so much.

I read it and I've enjoyed parables since I was a young man, especially Zen koans and things like that. And I see the same sort of wisdom in that parable. And it fits my research so much in the sense that even the most recent research we've seen come out of Germany, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, on the difference in brains between those who procrastinate and those who don't, we see that the amygdala is larger, and it's about fear. It's very true in terms of understanding procrastination. So it fits with my research well. And in my own life, of course, I recognize the habits that I develop, the things that I feed, the things that I think make me happy but don't, when I feed those, they become habits and difficult to break. So I resonate to that both personally and professionally. That's wonderful. So do you

have any parables of your own that are particularly important to you besides the wolf parable that come to mind that might speak to procrastination? Yes, for sure. In fact, it's a Zen story, and it's the young novice who was the master and he said master i've been doing my meditation and i've been working hard how do i achieve enlightenment and the master looks at him and says have you finished your rice and he said yes then then wash your bowl and that's the end of the story and it's so powerful for me because you know that's what life is in so many ways that it is in the getting on with life that makes makes our lives and that procrastination in a very real sense is an existential issue of not getting on with life

itself and so i find that to be a very powerful thing that we can make more of many tasks in our lives in fact I teach my children that all the time. I'll say to my son, for example, when he was six, I said to him, you know, Alex, it's time that you started making your own bed. And of course he said, I don't want to, I don't feel like it. And my children know what I say to that all the time is this. I didn't ask you what you want or how you feel. I said, it's time for you to make your bed. And that's, you know, so much in that parable or that Zen koan of what makes enlightenment in life. Right. Just taking the next right action. Actually, you just touched on something that I was going to read that you wrote, because I love

the way you say this. And I just think it puts this in perspective. And you say, when we procrastinate on our goals, we are basically putting off our lives. And you said, you became more convinced of the importance of dealing with procrastination as a symptom of an existential malaise, and a malaise that can only be addressed by our deep commitment to authoring the stories of our lives. To author our own lives, we have to be an active agent in our lives, not a passive participant, making excuses for what we are not doing. Yeah, it's nice to hear my words right back to me. It's been a while since I wrote that book. And I stand by that. It's good that I don't kind of cringe and go, I wrote that? No, it is a succinct summary of what keeps me interested in procrastination. Like there's so many layers to my understanding. You know, I started briefly with thinking about the latest German study that

was neurophysiological, you know, based on understanding brain differences. But like all explanations, we can take it at different levels of analysis. And for me, the most profound one is this notion of getting on with our own lives, because the one non-renewable resource we have in our lives is time. You and I don't know how much we're going to have, but we know we can't make any more of it. And I think that's probably why in every great world religion, there's some notion of the sin of sloth, because you can't waste this thing called life. And with procrastination, for me, it's not a matter of becoming some uber productive earning machine, but a person who lives the life he or

she wants to, achieves the goals that he or she wants to achieve, and doesn't kind of stew on his own juices in the guilt and shame that so commonly defines procrastination. Yeah, I think that's such a big piece of it. I often talk with people about when we know there's things that we want to slash need to do and we don't do them, it feels awful. And I think one of the most important skills we can build in life is to sort of make promises to ourselves and then keep those promises. And procrastination stands kind of right in the middle of that. And you actually say that there's some research that shows that procrastination actually compromises our health in two different ways. Could you share a little bit about that? Yes, I'm working on another paper with my colleague at the University of Sheffield right now.

We're reanalyzing some of our data. And the first path is a direct path with stress. Procrastination causes more stress. And of course, we know there are many mechanisms in terms of our physical health, how that undermines our immune system and creates less resistance to all sorts of illness. So procrastination, stress route to an effect on our health, but there's also an effect in terms of fewer wellness behaviors and treatment delay, more treatment delay. So procrastination has indirect effects. So we have this direct route through stress, but there are two interesting indirect routes that procrastination has an effect on our health. And that's from fewer wellness behaviors. So we don't sleep when we think we should be sleeping,

don't exercise, don't eat well. These are typical wellness behaviors. And sleep is interesting on its own. I have colleagues at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who've been studying sleep procrastination, in fact. And the other indirect route is treatment delay. Oh, I'll look after that later. And that has significant effects. And I'm interested in studying that, especially in older adults, when things are more fragile

in terms of you need to have things looked in sooner than later. So we have all these routes to the connection between procrastination and our health. The one we have the most research evidence on is the direct effects of stress, but then there's the indirect effects of fewer wellness behaviors and treatment delay. Yeah, actually makes me think of a story, and I'm not sure that I can blame this on having better control of procrastination or just pure terror. But this week, I got a call from my dentist I'd been in last week to get some work done. And they called and said, we see something in your x-rays, and we think it might be cancer. And I thought, oh my God. So I called oral surgeons till I could find one that would see me like now, and went over and got it looked at, and it was absolutely

nothing. But again, I think that was more driven by fear than not being a procrastinator. But it just made me think of that when you were telling that story about delaying going to the doctor. That was one time I was not delaying. But you know, there are people who get news like that and do put it off. It's quite incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Now I just was like, I don't, I don't want to live for two weeks worrying about this. Like, cause I know I will. Anyway, so there's lots of things that cause procrastination, but at the heart of it, you say that one of the biggest things is that it's a form of self-regulation failure. Can you explain that? Sure. So many people think procrastination is a time management issue.

And although time management is a necessary skill in our lives, it's not sufficient because you'll come to the point in time where you say, okay, this is the project I said I'm going to work on, but your whole body screams, I don't want to, I don't feel like it. You have an emotional response to the task at hand. We typically call that task aversiveness. We find it aversive in that we're anxious about it, we're bored, we resent it, we're frustrated by it. Any one of those emotions or pick some of your favorites. So how do you get rid of those negative emotions? Because we don't want them. Well, we use avoidance as an emotion focused coping strategy. The problem is it's a misregulation of emotion because we're not really going to feel better in the long run. We're not regulating ourselves in a healthy way, but it gets reinforced because the moment you get rid of the task, for that moment you feel better.

So you get this negative reinforcement that creates a habit. So procrastination is an emotion-focused coping habit, and it's a problem of self-regulation in the same way that eating the second row of cookies in the bag isn't going to make you feel better. Putting off these things isn't going to make you feel better. We have the naive belief is this is what we need right now. Present self believes he or she will benefit. Future self pays the price. Right.

And I think what's so tricky about procrastination or cookies or drugs or all these different things is if they didn't work at all, it'd be easy to see through them, but they work for like a minute or five minutes or 10 minutes. They've got an initial, okay, that feels better. And then it fades and we, we pay more later. And you've got a phrase that you use related to this um that that people can use and you say it's i won't give in to feel good and recognizing that feeling good now comes at a cost you're right it does have this immediate fix albeit really specious because even well especially with procrastination and eating uh more so than the other alcohol and drugs work a bit longer because

they can actually do a bit of mood altering right but the food and the procrastination a part of you is quite aware that the guilt almost surfaces immediately especially for some of us yeah one of my favorite ways to think about this and i don't i would imagine being as involved as you are in procrastination you have seen um the posts he did in the TED Talk, but Tim Urban with the blog Wait But Why. It's just so many brilliant things in there. But the one that struck me probably the most was this idea of the dark playground. And the dark playground was, all right, we've decided that we're going to procrastinate. Again, it's not usually that conscious of a thought, I'm going to procrastinate, but we've

decided we're going to do something else, right? But we don't really enjoy it. He calls it the dark playground, because we're playing, we might be on Facebook, or YouTube, or playing solitaire, or whatever it is. But it doesn't fully feel good, because there's this nagging sense of, ugh, I should be doing something different. And that term, dark playground, really, really helped me because I could notice when I was in it. I could notice that like, oh, okay, I'm not doing what I should do. I'm doing this thing, and you know what?

I'm not even really enjoying it that much. Not as much as I would enjoy it if I finished what I had to do and then went and did it. Yeah, that's crucial. That self-understanding is the impetus for true change. It doesn't make it easy, especially if you have a habit, because habits draw us back to it. But without that recognition, there's no real commitment to the change. It's when you recognize that, yeah, this doesn't work. I've had a belief for a long time this makes me feel better but it's not going to and then what you need to put into place are just a few strategies to extract you from that kind of mental loop or that downward spiral you can get into that eventually leads into that

negative spot this would be a good time to introduce this topic it shows up in a lot of areas of the book and i'm a big fan of it also, and it's the idea of implementation intentions. And you actually, at different places in the book, talk how we can use these to deal with kind of that part of procrastination. Can you explain what an implementation intention is, and then maybe talk about how we can use them in relation to this self-regulation? Sure. This is the work of Peter Galwitzer at New York University, and he and his colleagues have done a great deal of work differentiating between goal intentions. We all

have goal intentions. I want to write this, or I want to lose some weight, or I want to achieve that. Or we can have avoidance goals. I don't want to end up here. And then you contrast that with implementation intentions, which is the how. How are you going to actually implement this goal? Because goal intentions don't have a lot of motivational force. But an implementation intention, which they've shown over and over again in their research, makes it more likely that I'm going to act. And the classic implementation intention in terms of what they've found in research is most effective is a conditional statement. If, then, or as I like to say, when, then. When this happens, then I do that. And when we set things up like that,

what happens is we put the cue for action in the environment. So for example, I wanted to, speaking of dentists, as you did a few moments ago, I wasn't flossing my teeth enough. And it was leading to some gum disease or the beginning of it, at least. And my dentist would say, you really have to floss. And for the life of me, I just couldn't develop that habit. A little boy inside of me was resentful about it. And then the rest of me wouldn't remember. But an implementation intention really saved me. And it was simply that I leveraged a habit I already had. I did brush my teeth quite regularly, really regularly, every day, twice a day. And so I just made the intention, when I pick up my toothbrush, I'll put the floss on the counter. And when I put my toothbrush down,

I will pick up the floss. The when then. And the most important one was really just getting the floss onto the counter. Because sometimes I wouldn't even remember it. This prospect of memory is a big part of not being able to self-regulate because you don't even remember what you're supposed to do. But the implementation intention puts that cue in the environment. Oh, I'm picking up my toothbrush. I'm putting the floss on the counter. And so I'm leveraging a habit I already have.

That's a really important part of this. And by putting the cue for the action into the environment, it helps me create a new habit. Now, what's interesting about all that is there's so many days where I thought, oh, I don't feel like I don't want to. I'd act like a little boy because we have a six-year-old alive well in us or a little girl, as the case may be. And I look at myself and say wow you know

where are you going with this you know how long it takes to floss your teeth it takes like 30 seconds and it feels great and then i get on with it so there's layers of of work in there but the implementation intention was the foundation Thank you. This is a testimonial you're about to hear from one of my coaching clients named Kate, and she tells you what her experience of the program has been. And I hope you find it interesting. It's pretty quick. And then if you want to talk to me and learn more about the program and get some input on what you're dealing with, go to ericzimmer.coach application and sign up for a 30-minute call. Here's the testimonial with Kate. My name's Kate and I'm from New Hampshire. And I would love to say a word about working with Eric Zimmer. So I have been working with Eric this year on goals around health and health

practices. And specifically, I was really trying to lose weight. I just have had a tough time with that for about the last decade. And I have reached goals working with Eric that I have not otherwise been able to do, even working with nutritionists and health coaches and fitness experts. So Eric's work in behavior with me has been profound. I love his style and his mannerism. And I really do think that what I'm figuring out how to do is make lasting change for myself. If I had to recommend Eric, I'd say, heck yeah, he's great. You should work with him.

Again, if you're interested in the program, go to ericzimmer.coach application. We'll have a 30-minute no-pressure call where I will get to know you a little bit better, tell you about the program, and if we both decide it sounds like it's a good thing, we'll move forward. If not, I will leave you with something useful in your life, and we will have gotten to talk and know each other, which is always a good thing from my perspective. ericzimmer.coach application. I've mostly looked at implementation intentions really in, you know, using the if-then statement, but also a lot about, you know, the studies that show if you decide how and when and where you're going to do something, you're way more likely to

do it. So it's one thing to say, I need to work out tomorrow. It's a different thing to say, So it's one thing to say, I need to work out tomorrow. It's a different thing to say, okay, I'm going to run for two miles at the park by the lake tomorrow at 6 p.m., right? Like you've got a way better chance of doing it if you've got that second statement versus the first, I'm going to work out tomorrow. What interests me about implementation intentions, I did speak a great deal about it in the book, but since writing that book, I've focused a lot more on an even finer-tuned statement around this that I find is a real game-changer for most people.

And that really draws on the work of David Allen, who's written books like Getting Stuff Done and Ready for Anything. He argues really clearly we don't do projects, we do actions. Because I would say to people, as you saw in the book, a key thing is just get started and people would say to me tim if i could just get started i wouldn't have a procrastination problem that's not very helpful and so as i thought through that and looked at how we think about uh getting started the question then becomes what's the next action if we go back to you when you asked me earlier about the parables or stories in our lives and i went immediately to a zen buddhist cone or a zen buddhist story well the buddhists will often also say that we have monkey mind busy places you

know we think and we feel and we think and we feel and you can't get rid of the monkey it's just part of the human condition but as one monk i heard say so clearly and so eloquently, you got to give the monkey something to do. And it's the same for psychologists will tell us, you know, you can have all these emotions, but you can't suppress them and you can't ignore them. They're real. But we can direct our attention somewhere else. So now not only do I think about implementation intentions as a really important

tool, but I also use this simple statement of what's the next action. And I keep that action as small as possible. So it's a very low threshold for engagement so that I look at it and go, well, who couldn't do that? And that primes the pump for going. And I thought of that really when you were talking about the implementation intention to go for the run. Yep. The when or the how you're going to do it and when, for what distance. But as soon as you said two miles, I thought, Oh, for many people that just sets up the barrier. Oh, two miles, that's too much. And so instead I'd be looking at, at when I get home from work, the moment I get home, I'm going to put on my running shoes and walk back outside the door that might be as much as I have to say to myself to get me started now the interesting thing about how predictably irrational human

beings are is that as much as some of us almost fight with ourselves to get started ten minutes later we're on the run and we think we could be in the next Olympics we're just it's just so crazy you know we think now I could. It feels so good. So we go from not being able to run at all to thinking that we're an Olympic athlete. And of course, that's just the way the mind is working. And we have to understand that we have these predictably irrational aspects of our human thinking, and we have to have these hacks to work around them. Yeah. You brought up in that statement there, I think at least three different important points. The first is the ambiguity of a lot of the things that we have on our task list. I might have on my task list, I actually have had on my task list, record video. I've got a video I've got to record

for something I'm doing. Well, the problem with that is that that is about eight or nine tasks. You know, first, I have to write the script for the video, then I have to get somebody to review it. Then I have to practice it, then I have to set up the video equipment and set up the lighting, then I have to record it, then I have to edit it. I mean, and so when I have a task on my list like get video done I'll procrastinate it forever because it's not clear what the next action is and so as you were saying deconstructing that down to the very simplest next action I can I often say that you know ambiguity is really a huge cause of procrastination for people when they look at

their task list, because we tend to have projects on our task list, not tasks. The second thing that you talked about there is just that idea of getting started. And, you know, you use the analogy of I'll just put on my shoes. I mean, I use that one all the time for the gym, like just get into your gym clothes or just get to the gym. Or with cleaning, you know, all right, all you have to do is clean for three minutes. I set myself a timer and I get going for three minutes and I'm usually off. And then the last thing that was embedded in what you said is a really important idea that you talk about. It is that we often think that the order of operation is motivation and then action. But it is just as common the other way around. If we can take the action, the motivation tends

to follow after it. Yeah, I think this is a really important point that when I was writing that book, one of the things I focused on is that I don't know where we get this belief as adults, but we seem to have this belief that we have to be in the mood to do something, that motivation precedes action. But as you're noting, it's often the other way around. In fact, social psychologists showed us years ago that attitudes can actually follow behaviors, not behaviors following attitudes. And it's so true of motivation. In fact, there's some very interesting research that shows even a little progress on a goal fuels our well-being, which is a great thing, considering what the procrastination is typically that downward spiral.

So it's really the antidote in some ways to how do I get out of this trap? Well, a little bit of progress fuels our motivation. We don't wait for the mood or the muse. We'll be waiting there a long time. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, that idea of I have to feel like something to do it is so fundamental to this whole issue of procrastination. And, you know, the phrase I use is, you know, that I don't want to let my moods drive my action. And I usually make a joke out of that, like if you had a mood system like mine, right, if you let your moods drive your actions, And I usually make a joke out of that. Like if you had a mood system like

mine, right, if you let your moods drive your actions, it would be a disaster. And my past is littered with disasters of allowing my moods to determine what I do. Because, you know, people have some, you know, some people wake up, you know, peppy and happy and ready to take on the world every day. And then there's the rest of us who, you know, often don't feel that way. And it's learning to get started even when we may not feel like it that is so critical. But I want to bring up another point. This leads us into motivation. And we talked about how, you know, if we can just get started, motivation or our attitude changes, just getting started makes us feel better about the task. It makes us feel better about ourselves. But let's talk about the role of remembering our

motivation as a way to help us with self-regulation and as a way to deal with potentially depleted willpower. In what regard, Eric, remembering our motivation, like remembering our commitment to what it is we're trying to achieve? Yeah, or you've got a chart in the book where you show this idea of it's worthwhile to look at your goal and look at the costs associated with procrastination as well as the benefits of acting in a timely manner. For me, I sort of think of that as like remembering my why, like, why is this important? Oh, definitely, for sure. In fact, everything's found, the foundation for all of this is in commitment. And even Peter Galwitzer, who's written extensively on implementation intentions is acknowledged in quite a few papers, and book chapters that without commitment, it won't happen. There's no technique that's going to save you you do have to be able to look at your own life and understand why it is that you're even going to use a strategy like what's the next action or when then and so we have to have a

clear idea of the meaning behind our goals in fact another way that I often think of it, and I learned this from my past own dissertation advisor who worked with an area called personal projects analysis, the balance between meaning and manageability. It's always a balance between those two. It has to be meaningful for us to want to do it, but it also has to be manageable. It goes back to your notion of ambiguity. I've certainly found in our research that uncertainty is a very high correlate of procrastination. And uncertainty can be there when you have ambiguous goals. But if you focus only on manageability, the next steps, then you go, oh, like a monkey could do this. I'm not interested anymore. But if you work only on

meaning, then you don't know how to manage it. So it's this interesting balance. And at any given time, some days I have to emphasize more the why, which is your original question about, you know, why would I engage in this? Why is this important to me? And other times I know exactly why I want to do it. And then the question becomes more of, yeah, but how am I going to manage this? And then I go back to, okay, what's the next action? Or do I need to call a friend? That sort of strategy. But it is this balance between meaning and

manageability. And then there's other times where, as I said in the book, sometimes you simply have to look at the cost. Like, what is this going to cost me if I put it off? Yeah, exactly. And so one of the things that you talk about is that sometimes when we do stop to think about it for a second, we will say something to ourselves like, it's just not important, or, you know, a variety of other things. So there are common biases that get in the way of us looking at this clearly. And one of those is, you know, saying to ourselves, for whatever reason, it's not important, right? And, and being able to recognize that if it's something that we thought was important before, when we weren't faced with the task, it's probably important. And you use an implementation

intention here, actually, you say, if we say it's not important, then we stop and remind ourselves that this is self deception. Or if I say it's not important, then I will just get started. But there's some other biases I thought would be useful in talking about. One is prefer tomorrow over today, because this is such a classic one. I'll do it tomorrow. And I think inherent in I'll do it tomorrow is I will feel like doing it tomorrow, which is obviously a fallacy. So let's talk about that bias, about how we prefer tomorrow over today and how we think we'll actually want to do it tomorrow and why that's so easy to do. Well, there's two things that happen there,

and they're both grounded really very well in research. On the one hand, Dan Gilbert at Harvard University, who studied a great deal about affective forecasting. We know what weather forecasting is, trying to predict what the weather is going to be like tomorrow. Affective forecasting is how are we going to feel tomorrow? And what he's learned through his research is that we rely on the present to predict the future. So we all know what it's like to go grocery shopping when you're hungry versus when you're full. Your cart looks distinctly different. You're hungry, you're pulling a second cart full of your favorite snacks. And when you're just finished a big meal, when you're going shopping, you go, oh, I don't need so much milk this week. And again, we're predictably irrational.

So how that applies to procrastination is that that moment when you decide, no, I'm not going to do this today. How do you feel? Well, when I give talks to students or general audiences, the first word that comes to mind is relief. And then many other people just say, I feel good. Exactly. So then when you use that momentary feeling to predict how you're going to feel tomorrow, you say, oh, yeah, I'm going to feel like it tomorrow. So there's one cognitive bias that leads us to believe I'm going to want to do this tomorrow. But more importantly, and this is something that I didn't write back in 2010, 2011, was some work by Hal Hirschfield at

UCLA, who's used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at the brains of people while they were thinking about either their present self, their future self, or a stranger. And to make a long story short, what he learned was that the areas of the brain that are active when we think about present self are different than when we think about future self. In fact that the areas of the brain that are active when we think about present self are different than when we think about future self in fact the areas of the brain that are active when we think about a stranger are the same areas that's processing information about the future self so we seem to think about future self like a stranger and that leads us again to think ah that that's that person will handle that. And so tomorrow that person will

feel like a present self is processing information much differently. So these are biases in the way that we think about the future. In fact, we've done some research on that too, where we had people imagine their future self, in this case students, because that's a population we're working with. And when they thought more about future self present self made different choices and in fact Hal Hirschfeld did some of this research too before we did but he did it with digital avatars so you'd see a picture of yourself either as you look now or yourself digitally aged into your 60s and lo and behold if you're sitting in an experimental situation looking at your older self and the experimental task is to allocate funds, you allocate more funds to retirement

savings because you got future self in mind. Without that, you spend money differently. And we found the same thing with students. If they could think about themselves at the end of the term, they made different choices now. And one of the mechanisms that seems to be at work there is you develop more empathy for future self. And you think, yeah, that's really jerking future self around.

And in fact, when I give public talks, I draw on Richard Taylor, the Nobel Prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, who won his Nobel Prize for showing how we're predictably irrational. And as he summarizes it, he says, you know, we're more like Homer Simpson than we are homo economicus. And it makes me smile because I love Homer. And I'll put up a picture of Homer and Marge. And Marge says to Homer, you know, homie, someday these kids are going to be grown and you're going to regret not spending more time with them. And Homer goes, yeah, that's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy. He just gets it, right? And so this future self-present self dichotomy is really important. And we've seen it in all sorts of studies that to the extent that we're biased towards present self and we want that immediate mood repair, if we don't think about

future self, present self always dominates. And we see that in cartoons and other things as well. Everyone knows that future self hates present self because future self's always getting jerked around. So if we can remember that these are some of the biases that are operating, it helps us develop more empathy for future self and we make different choices now. A lot of what we do on the show is we read books and listen to authors and falls kind of into the self-help category. But there are times that we need more than ourselves to help us. Today's show is sponsored by Talkspace, the online therapy company that lets you message a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time. All you need is a computer with an internet connection or the Talkspace mobile app. That means you can improve your mental health even if you've had trouble making time for it

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over 2,000 licensed therapists who are experienced in addressing life's challenges we all face. To match with a perfect therapist for a fraction of the price of traditional therapy, go to Talkspace.com slash wolf and use the code wolf to get $45 off your first month. Again, that's Talkspace.com slash wolf and use the promo code wolf. Talkspace.com slash wolf promo code wolf. Let's talk about one other bias that you mention in the book. And I thought this one was really interesting. And you refer to it as self handicap to preserve self esteem. My colleague at the University of Sheffield who started her graduate studies with us here at Carleton University in Ottawa, she did some research looking at how people make upward and downward counterfactuals. we're very familiar with them. They happen all the time. They have, they start in school. So you get a C grade and it's not what you're hoping for. You're shooting for an A, let's say,

but your downward counterfactual is at least I didn't fail. It's counterfactual to what happened, but you say, at least I didn't fail. So what's the purpose of that? Well, it makes you feel better. You weren't happy about getting the C, but when you put it against failing, you feel better. You weren't happy about getting the C, but when you put it against failing, you feel better. The upward counterfactual is just the opposite, of course, and that is, whoa, if I'd studied harder, if I hadn't gone out last night, maybe I would have gotten an A. Same thing you could imagine getting a little fender bender. Oh, at least no one was killed. The downward counterfactual, the upward counterfactual, maybe I shouldn't look at my phone when I'm trying to park the car. So you learn from upward counterfactuals. And lo and behold, when Fuchsia

looked at the difference between procrastinators and non-procrastinators, not surprisingly, they made more downward counterfactuals. Again, kind of underscoring this notion of it's about feeling good. The same strategy is being used, but's learned and so it's interesting for us to stand back and listen to the self-talk am i making downward counterfactuals because if i am again it's all about making myself feel better rather than learning from the situation and if you look at any of the popular self-help around motivation and productivity it's how do we effectively learn from our mistakes because there's that's the only way we learn. And the downward and upward counterfactuals that you hear as inner talk can be a real clue to the habits you've created in your own life around them.

And so essentially, part of what you're saying is that we might procrastinate to give us a way to have an excuse for why we didn't do better later? Well, that self-handicapping thing, it's a little dicey that I've got colleagues, and I happen to be in that camp, who would argue that procrastination isn't a self-handicapping technique. Because if I delay on purpose to protect my self-esteem, then it's really a different form of delay because I'm doing it quite knowingly. I do think that there's secondary gain in procrastination. You can use it to protect yourself. Not a bad grade for, you know, working one night, but that's quite purposeful. I don't believe that we procrastinate to self-handicap. We can delay to self-handicap, but I want to, there's a fine line I would argue between that sort of delay and procrastination.

Assuming that that's all happening at a conscious level, right? So, yes, if I consciously say, oh, well, I just won't study so much, so I don't feel bad if I don't do well. That's very much a conscious decision. And that's not procrastination. And that's actually a point you make very early in the book is not all delay is procrastination. There are valid reasons to delay. So, you know, but but on a on a more subconscious level, perhaps there might be some of that. It's always interesting, because I hear people use a term a lot, self-sabotage, and I never quite know what I think of that term. I don't know whether that's just like sort of a woo-woo word that sort of, you know, brings up a lot of different things, or whether there's really something to that, and it might be similar to what we're talking about

here. I am self-sabotaging by unconsciously putting something off because i will feel better about it later yeah i think there's some truth in that it's become a habit in your life you're you're working very hard to protect your self-esteem i know that my colleague joseph ferrari at depaul university in chicago and some of his earlier research showed that procrastinators generally didn't want to get feedback that would reflect on them in a way that could affect their self-esteem. So you could see that sort of protective factor coming up so that you delay needlessly and in a way that's going to be self-defeating.

But part of the motivation for that is that you feel you're going to fail anyhow. But part of the motivation for that is that you feel you're going to fail anyhow. And in fact, when we listen to procrastinators in either therapy sessions or in research, I'm thinking of Bill McCowan, Louisiana State, has done some interesting research where he had students, when they were procrastinating, go online and talk about what they were thinking and feeling. And he captured a lot of the irrational thoughts. And there were things like, well, what's the point of me trying i'm not any good anyhow so sure we get that sort of thing uh happening inside of ourselves all this negative self-talk and then procrastination could become a mechanism

which was self-protective and in that sense you we might be talking about this elusive notion of self-sabotage well tim we are at the end of our time, and this has been enormously helpful and a fun conversation for me because I'm so interested in this. You and I are going to continue the conversation in our post-show conversation, and a couple of things we're going to talk about are that procrastination is not only an inability to get started. Sometimes we get started, and then we get off track from a variety of ways. And we're going to talk about how to bounce back from that type of

procrastination in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you're interested in that, you can join us and be a member of the One You Feed Patreon community and you can get access to all the post-show conversations, One You Feed Patreon community, and you can get access to all the post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, and mini-episodes by going to oneyoufeed.net slash support. Again, Tim, thank you so much. We'll have links in the show notes for where people can see you and see your book. I just thought it was a great book, and this has been such a fun conversation for me.

Me too, Eric. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.