Thread by @anishmoonka

Scientists shut off the dopamine in some rats and they stopped eating. Food everywhere. They starved in a full cage, not because they hated it. Put sugar on their tongue and they licked their lips. They still liked it. They just lost the drive to go get it.

This is one of the strangest things we know about the brain, and it traces back to a researcher named Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan. Your head runs two different systems. One is wanting, the push that gets you off the couch and moving. The other is liking, the good feeling once you are in it. Dopamine runs the wanting. The enjoyment runs on separate wiring. So you can be sure you will love something and still feel almost no pull to start it.

That is the man in the cartoon, swinging at rock with diamonds all around him. He could see the good stuff. He just could not make himself dig toward it.

Once you see why, the usual story about procrastination stops making sense. We say lazy, or bad with time. Mostly, it is neither. Two psychologists, Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl, argued back in 2013 that it runs on emotion. A task makes you feel something you would rather not feel, even just the small dread of starting, and putting it off makes that feeling vanish on the spot. So you scroll, or you suddenly need to clean the kitchen. Dodging the task is a quick hit of relief, and your brain grabs it. The bill goes straight to future-you, who is left holding the guilt and the deadline.

You can even see it on a brain scan. In 2018, a team in Germany scanned 264 people and matched the scans against how much each person put things off. The big procrastinators had a larger amygdala, the little alarm bell deep in the brain that flags anything risky. They also had a weaker link to the part meant to quiet that alarm and get you moving, a region called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Loud alarm, weak off-switch.

And if this is you, you have plenty of company. A big 2007 review found that 80 to 95 percent of college students procrastinate, that roughly one in five adults does it long-term, and that more than 95 percent of them wish they could quit. Students alone burn about a third of their day on it.

The fix falls out of that same split. If wanting and liking are two different systems, then waiting to "feel like it" is waiting for a bus that may never come. The main treatment for the severe version, called behavioral activation, flips the order. You start first, as small as you can stand, before any motivation shows up. The wanting tends to arrive a few minutes after you begin. The diamonds were there the whole time. You just have to swing the pick before you feel ready.

Thanks for going down this rabbit hole ❤️

Follow @anishmoonka for daily stories across science, history, psychology, culture & AI.

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Sources:

Berridge dopamine wanting versus liking, incentive salience review sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/w…

Dopamine-deficient animals stop eating and starve unless fed by hand, yet still prefer sucrose pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Dopamine signaling and motivated behavior, dopamine-deficient mice starve by four weeks pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18591467/

Separate brain systems for liking versus wanting a sweet reward pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Sirois and Pychyl 2013, procrastination as short-term mood regulation compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

Steel 2007 meta-analysis, prevalence and predictors of procrastination researchgate.net/publication/65…

Procrastination prevalence among students and adults, APA summary apa.org/gradpsych/2010…

Schluter and Genc 2018 Psychological Science, larger amygdala and weaker dorsal ACC connection in procrastinators news.rub.de/english/press-…

Behavioral activation, action precedes motivation foothillscbt.com/blog/what-is-b…

Part 2. Brain scanners caught something strange about the word "later." When you picture future-you, the one who will finally read the book or take the trip, your brain treats that person like a stranger it has never met. So you hand the good stuff to them, and they never show up.

Hal Hershfield slid people into a scanner and had them think about who they are now, about a stranger, and about who they will be years down the line. The future version lit up the way a stranger does. And the wider that gap ran, the more a person grabbed a small reward now over a much bigger one later. In a follow-up, just showing people an aged photo of their own face, wrinkles and all, nudged them into setting aside more money for that distant self. To your brain, later belongs to someone else.

There is a second trap on top of that. In one set of studies, people chose between a task with a tight deadline and a task worth far more with a looser one, and they kept grabbing the urgent one, even when it paid less. The researchers called it the mere urgency effect. Anything with a ticking clock jumps the line, however little it is worth. And fun almost never comes with a deadline. The book on the shelf, the trip you keep putting off, they make no noise at all, so they lose to whatever is beeping.

That is the whole cartoon. The man hammers at the urgent rock in front of him while the diamonds sit there, worth a fortune, going nowhere, waiting on a version of him who keeps not showing up.

The fix is almost stupidly small. Vague plans lose to urgency and to the stranger. Specific ones hold. Across more than 90 studies and 8,000 people, the ones who pinned down an exact when and where followed through far more often than the ones who just meant to get to it. As in: if it is Saturday at 9, then I open the book. Give the fun a slot, the way you would a dentist appointment. Future-you needs a calendar invite, because future-you is a stranger, and strangers do not show up unless you book them.

Sources for Part 2:

Mere urgency effect, Zhu Yang and Hsee 2018, Journal of Consumer Research, five experiments academic.oup.com/jcr/article-ab…

Mere urgency effect, Johns Hopkins summary, people lose sight of outcomes when chasing deadlines hub.jhu.edu/2018/05/31/mee…

Future self as stranger, Ersner-Hershfield Wimmer and Knutson 2009, neural measures of future self-continuity predict temporal discounting semanticscholar.org/paper/Saving-f…

Future self resembles another person in the medial prefrontal cortex journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/27…

Hershfield, age-progressed images of the future self increase saving behavior halhershfield.com/considering-th…

Implementation intentions meta-analysis, Gollwitzer and Sheeran 2006, 94 studies, medium-to-large effect d equals 0.65 cancercontrol.cancer.gov/sites/default/…

Implementation intentions, 94 tests across more than 8,000 people, if-then plans uxpsychology.substack.com/p/from-intenti…

Part 3. A fancy grocery store set out 24 jams to taste. Crowds stopped to try them. Almost nobody bought a jar. Another day the same store put out just 6 jams instead, and sales jumped about tenfold. Same jams, same shop. The only thing that changed was how many choices people had.

The jam study is famous, and it is shakier than its fame. When other researchers tried to repeat it, the effect often vanished. But in 2015 a team pooled about 100 of these experiments and pinned down exactly when it bites. Too much choice freezes you when the options are many and look alike and you are not sure what you want in the first place. Add in that you mostly just want the decision made, and you get paralysis. Which is a fair description of opening a streaming app at 9pm.

Money on the line does the same thing. When researchers looked at the retirement savings of nearly 800,000 workers, the plans that offered more fund options had fewer people signing up at all. People walked away from free money their employer would have matched, thousands of dollars of it, because picking felt like too much. Sign-ups were highest when there were only about three funds to weigh.

Psychologists call the freeze choice deferral. Faced with a pile of good options, you make the easiest move available, which is no move, and you reach for the one thing that asks nothing of you. The feed. It gets worse if you are the type who hunts for the best option rather than a good one. Across seven studies, the people who chase the single best choice tend to end up less happy and more prone to regret than the ones who grab the first thing that is good enough.

That is the cartoon, one more way. The guy stands in a field of diamonds, every one worth grabbing, and he freezes trying to find the very best one. So he picks none and stays put. The fix is to shrink the menu and lower the bar on purpose. Pick three things you would enjoy tonight, not thirty. Then start the first one that clears the bar, instead of holding out for the perfect one. Chasing the best possible evening is the exact thing that eats the evening.

Sources for part 3:

Iyengar and Lepper 2000, When Choice is Demotivating, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the jam study with 24 versus 6 options courses.lumenlearning.com/waymaker-psych…

Choice overload meta-analysis, Chernev Bockenholt and Goodman 2015, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 99 observations, the four conditions that trigger overload chernev.com/wp-content/upl…

Iyengar Huberman and Jiang 2004, How Much Choice is Too Much, 401k participation across nearly 800,000 employees falls as fund options rise repository.upenn.edu/items/cdc2d4cd…

Schwartz and colleagues 2002, Maximizing versus Satisficing, maximizers report more regret and less satisfaction than satisficers pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12416921/

Part 4. Researchers put people in a bare room for 15 minutes with nothing to do but think. First they had everyone try a mild electric shock, and most said they would pay money to never feel it again. Then they left them alone with the shock button. Two thirds of the men pressed it. One man pressed it 190 times. A quarter of the women did it too, choosing a jolt of pain over sitting quietly with their own minds.

The team, led by Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, ran eleven versions and kept landing in the same place. Sitting still and fully unplugged is one of the most uncomfortable things a person can do. The quiet itself is what stings. People rated reading or listening to music about twice as enjoyable as just thinking.

Now look at the things you keep meaning to enjoy: reading a novel, a long walk, picking up an instrument, an hour of doing nothing in particular. Every one of them opens with a flat, quiet stretch where not much is happening and it is only you and the thing. The phone offers the exact opposite, instantly and for free. So you grab the bright, frictionless thing and bounce right off the calm one you said you wanted.

Boredom is what you feel in that flat stretch. It is the restless itch to engage when nothing around you will hold your attention, a hungry hunting state in which you grab the nearest handhold. The phone is always in reach. That itch usually breaks fast if you let it. In one study, people made to copy numbers out of a phone book, about as dull as it gets, came out more creative on the next task than people who skipped the boring part. The boredom was the on-ramp to the good part.

So the move is almost the opposite of trying harder. When the urge to grab the phone hits, do nothing for a beat and let the flat feeling sit there. It passes in a couple of minutes, and the calmer thing becomes reachable. Then take away the easy exit. Put the phone in another room, far enough that you would have to get up to reach it. In the cartoon, the diamonds wrap all the way around a dark, silent tunnel. The quiet is the door to them. You just have to be willing to stand in it for a minute.

Sources for part 4:

Wilson and colleagues 2014, Just think, the challenges of the disengaged mind, Science, the electric-shock study across 11 experiments dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/WILSON%20ET%20…

Wilson 2014 shock study, Science news summary, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women shocked themselves, reading and music rated about twice as enjoyable as thinking science.org/content/articl…

Eastwood and colleagues 2012, The Unengaged Mind, boredom as the aversive experience of wanting but being unable to engage, Perspectives on Psychological Science pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26168505/

Mann and Cadman 2014, Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative, boring tasks raised creativity on the next task, Creativity Research Journal tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

Part 5. Researchers asked a group of students when they would finish their thesis. Each gave a date. Then they gave a second date, the worst case, if everything that could go wrong did. On average, the students finished later than their own worst-case guess. Only about a third hit the date they first predicted.

This is the planning fallacy, and it runs deeper than simple ignorance. The same students, asked how long their past projects had taken, gave longer, more honest numbers. They knew their own history. They just believed this time would be different. People can see the past clearly and still walk straight back into it.

Now zoom out from one task to your whole life. You would never look at your bank balance and assume that next month, for no reason, more money will appear. But almost everyone looks at the month ahead and quietly assumes it will be lighter than this one. In seven experiments, people expected far more spare time in the future than spare money. Money stays steady and you know it. Time feels different, because each day’s chaos wears a different outfit, so you never notice that the total barely moves.

Which is why the good stuff keeps getting parked in a future that never pulls in. The trip you keep not booking, the friend you keep meaning to see, all of it waits for a calmer stretch that the data says is a mirage. The miner in the cartoon is sure he will grab the diamonds during the next lull. The lull never comes.

The fix is almost mechanical, and it has held up in the lab. Stop predicting from the week you are imagining, which is always sunny and wide open. Look instead at the last four weeks you just lived through. They were full. Next week will be full in its own way too. So take the thing you keep deferring and put it on a specific day this week, not in the soft fog of soon. When researchers had people tie their plans to how things had truly gone before, the rosy forecasts collapsed into accurate ones.

The calm you are waiting for is not in the mail. The only week you are ever handed is this one.

Sources for part 5:

Buehler, Griffin and Ross 1994, Exploring the planning fallacy, why people underestimate their task completion times, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the thesis-prediction study and Study 4 outside-view fix
<bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar758…>

Planning fallacy summary, the thesis numbers (33.9 days predicted, 48.6 worst case, 55.5 actual, about 30 percent on time) and the inside view versus outside view
<thedecisionlab.com/biases/plannin…>

Zauberman and Lynch 2005, Resource Slack and Propensity to Discount Delayed Investments of Time Versus Money, people expect more time slack in the future than money slack, Journal of Experimental Psychology General
<pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15702961/>

Why we overcommit, plain-language summary of Zauberman and Lynch, we assume more time ahead because daily demands vary while money needs stay predictable
<sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/…>

Part 6. Researchers had people log what they were doing, hour by hour, for days. Then they sorted it. Close to half of everything people did was habit, the same action in the same place, with no decision behind it. While they did it, their minds were off somewhere else entirely.

A habit is an action your brain has handed to autopilot. A cue shows up, you sit down on the couch, you reach for your phone, and the behavior runs itself from start to finish while you think about something unrelated. These scripts are hard to shake. They keep you doing what you have always done, even on the days you fully meant to do otherwise.

The enjoyable things are almost never on autopilot. Reading the book, calling the friend, getting the guitar down off the shelf, none of it is a grooved script. Each one asks you to stop, decide, and break the routine already running. So every day the good thing goes up against your autopilot, and autopilot never gets tired and never needs convincing. The fun thing loses by default, every single day, just by never making it onto the automatic list.

Look at the miner in the cartoon. His swing is pure rote, the same arc into the same rock, and the diamonds sit just off the path his autopilot keeps carving. Turning would mean breaking stride, and breaking stride is the one thing a groove will not do on its own.

So the way out is to stop treating the enjoyable thing as a fresh decision every time and turn it into a script of its own. Pick one slot, the same time and the same place, and run it there again and again until your brain quietly takes it over. It is slower than it sounds. People who tried this with a new daily behavior took about two months on average before it felt automatic, and some took far longer. The engine was plain repetition. Motivation hardly mattered. Missing a single day did not undo the progress.

You did not decide your way into the routine you have now. You will not decide your way into a better one either. You groove it in, one repeat at a time, until the book starts running itself the way the phone already does.

Sources for part 6:

Wood, Quinn and Kashy 2002, Habits in everyday life, two hourly-diary studies found 35 percent then 43 percent of behavior was habitual, between a third and a half, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology researchgate.net/publication/10…

Neal, Wood and Quinn 2006, Habits a repeat performance, habits fire automatically from context cues and run to completion with minimal conscious control, Current Directions in Psychological Science journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.111…

Lally and colleagues 2010, How are habits formed, median 66 days to reach automaticity, range 18 to 254, repetition in a consistent context, missing one day did not derail it, European Journal of Social Psychology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…

Plain-language summary of the Lally habit-formation study, the 66-day average and that one missed day does not undo the progress bps.org.uk/research-diges…

Part 7. Researchers had people listen to a song they liked. First they got half of them to work out what an hour of their time was worth in money. That half enjoyed the song less, and spent most of it impatient for it to end. In another version of the study, the researchers paid people for the time they spent listening, and the enjoyment came back.

The song never changed. What changed was how the time felt. Once an hour got tagged as unpaid, unproductive time, the pleasure quietly drained out of it. Pay people for that same hour and the guilt lifts, because now the time is earning its keep.

Most of us run a faint version of that meter all day long. Some part of you treats a free hour as time you ought to be spending on something more useful. So the enjoyable thing, the book, the slow morning, the afternoon with nothing in it, sits under a low hum of guilt, as if you have not earned it yet. And the pile of things you are supposed to finish first never clears.

The culture leans on the scale, too. Being slammed has turned into a brag. Telling people you have no time, that the week is insane, now reads as proof that you matter and are in demand. A hundred years ago the flex was the exact opposite, endless leisure and nowhere you had to be. Against that backdrop, resting can feel like admitting you are not important enough to be busy.

So people reach for the obvious workaround. They make the fun productive. Read to improve yourself, take up a hobby that might pay off one day, file the rest under recovery so you can work harder later. When researchers tested that move, it did not work. Calling the leisure productive did nothing to bring the enjoyment back. The only kind of leisure that took the hit in the first place was the kind done purely for its own sake.

Look at the miner again. He is standing in a wall of diamonds, telling himself he will stop and pick one up once the shift is done. The shift is never done. So he keeps swinging at the plain rock, surrounded by the exact thing he is too busy to reach.

The way out is closer to a permission slip than a plan. There is no version of the list where you finally clear it and earn the afternoon, so the enjoyable thing has to happen inside an unfinished life or it does not happen at all. Stop pricing your own free hours. And do not dress the fun up as useful to make it feel allowed. Let it be pointless. You were never meant to earn it.

Sources for part 7:

DeVoe and House 2012, Time money and happiness, pricing time as an hourly wage made people more impatient and less able to enjoy a song, and paying them for the listening time restored the enjoyment, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/D…

Tonietto, Malkoc, Reczek and Norton 2021, Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment, the belief lowers enjoyment of leisure and tracks with more depression, anxiety and stress, and framing leisure as productive does not restore it, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Bellezza, Paharia and Keinan 2017, Conspicuous consumption of time, a busy and overworked life has become an aspirational status symbol where leisure once was, Journal of Consumer Research academic.oup.com/jcr/article-ab…

Plain-language summary of the leisure-as-wasteful research, including that fun done purely for its own sake takes the biggest hit sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/…