Producer: Alright, will come back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. I appear again with our host, Sucheta Kamath.

Good morning, my friend. Today is your second conversation with Dr. Tim Pychyl. Going to be, I suspect yet another really important conversation with him.

Well, leading off today, there is a children’s book called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, so what does that have to do with today’s conversation?

Sucheta: Well, apparently, Todd, you had never heard of it until now, right?

Producer: Well, never heard of the book, no, I haven’t.

Sucheta: It’s one of my favorite books and my children also loved it. It is written by Laura Joffe Numeroff – I think I’m saying it right, I hope. She’s an award-winning author of children’s books, and in this book, it talks about a little boy who gives a mouse a cookie and just as anyone would, the mouse asked for a glass of milk, and that he asked for a straw to drink that milk, then he says, “Well, you need a mirror to check and see if I have any milk mustache,” then he proceeds to ask the boy for nail scissors so that he can trim the hair in the mirror, and then he says, “I need a broom so I can sweep the hair trimmings,” and so on and so forth. So, what is so funny about this book is this boy who is at the beck and call of this mouse, and does everything and anything this mouse asked him. He runs around ragged serving the mouse, and as I think about my conversation with Dr. Pychyl that I’m about to have who’s going to give us an actual strategy, and I was reflecting on last week’s conversation about procrastination when somebody asked this author how did she come up with this idea, and she said, “Well, I went to the closet to look for something, and then I saw these consoles, and then I began to sharpen those pencils, and then I needed to empty that into the trash, and then – so, so on and so forth, so there are two things from executive function point of view that come to mind that when we are in the midst were about to start a task, or get things done, we have a lot of interruptions, a lot of roadblocks, and some roadblocks are outside us, but some roadblocks are within us, and procrastination is one such thing that great a roadblock in execution. So, executive function is nothing but doing what you say you will do in a timely manner, and something that yields outcomes that you desire and with your future self in mind, and procrastination blocks all of that, and that’s why this is such an important topic.

So, that brings me to our guest who we had last week, but I’m going to introduce him again. Dr. Tim Pychyl is the director of the Center for Initiatives in Education and associate professor of Psychology at Carleton University, Ottawa in Canada, and Tim has developed an international reputation of his research on procrastination. In addition to journal articles summarizing his research with his students, Tim has co-edited two books. The most recent one being Procrastination: Health and Well-Being, and I highly recommend both his books. He is also an author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide for Strategies for Change. It’s a small handbook worth keeping next to your bed and using this as a how-to guide for everything in life. You can learn more about his research and access his Psychology Today a lot, or his iProcrastinate podcast at procrastination.ca.

Tim’s research is complemented by his passion for teaching for which he has won numerous awards, including the 3M National Teaching Fellowship, Ontario Federation of University Association Teaching Award, and University Medal for Distinguished Teaching. Tim has been an invited speaker across the country working with professors of universities and colleges to enhance teaching and learning, and he is a prolific podcaster, and I will have all those links on my website, and I highly recommend people to do what I do which is, I’m addicted to his podcasts. So, I can’t wait to start my discussion.

Todd, now you know everything you need to know about If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Producer: Even though I’m a 49-year-old child, it sounds like a great book, so I may have to track it down, it sounds like it symbolizes how I live my life, going from task to task, trying to avoid the hard stuff. So, it sounds perfect for me.

Alright, well, like you, Sucheta, I too am excited about this follow-up conversation with Dr. Pychyl. So, let us get to it. So, here is Sucheta’s second conversation with Dr. Tim Pychyl.

Sucheta: Welcome back, Dr. Pychyl. I’m so delighted to have you, so we get to talk about how to manage procrastination. So, my first question is, can we stop procrastinating? And, is this tied with willpower or is this more than that? Can you please walk us through that?

Dr. Tim Pychyl: Yes, the good news is that we can stop procrastinating if procrastination is a problem for us, but it’s not just an instance of willpower because in fact, framing it that way makes it sound like we are under regulating ourselves and we just have to put more muscle behind our intentions and they will happen. That’s to misunderstand the whole process. In fact, Roy Baumeister and Dan Tyson, Alan [0:06:00], to name three prominent American psychologist loved and research in this area say that it’s not an under regulation, particularly of emotion, but the mis-regulation. We’re doing is we think we are going to make ourselves feel better by avoiding, and so we avoid it, and that is the mis-regulation, and it’s not an under regulation in the sense that we just have to put more effort behind it. What we have to come to understand is that we are making the wrong choice. We are misunderstanding, Ms. regulating our emotional state by using a really problematic avoidance strategy, so the first point of change is awareness, awareness of what procrastination really is. It is not a time management problem – it’s an emotion management problem because procrastination is an emotion-focused coping strategy. I placed a task that makes me just want to scream, or I just resent or I am bored by it, but basically, what it comes down to is this and everybody gets this: we see the task and we think, I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it, and there is the six-year-old alive and well in us, because we hear that from our kids all the time: “I don’t want it, I don’t feel like it,” but we’ve got it in our book that will. It’s not just a matter then of exercising more willpower; it’s understanding that well, you know, our motivational state doesn’t have to match the task at hand. That is a really powerful statement for me, and motivational state does not have commenced the task at hand, and I don’t know where I ever had that believe that most of us seem to have it. I have to be in the mood, sort of speak, but that’s not true. Most things in life, and just as social psychologists have shown is that attitudes often follow behaviors, not behaviors following attitudes, and I would argue the same thing that motivation follows action, not exactly the other way around. Once we get started, things start to change. So again, it’s not really a matter of will power. Willpower can make a difference, of course. If I have some resources I can put to the task, that is great, but you got to use them strategically. If you think it’s all about just exercising will, sooner or later, you can say, but I got none left. It’s not really just a matter of willpower.

Sucheta: I think that’s really powerful. I don’t think people understand this. Can you go a little bit deeper into this idea of I don’t need to be in the new, and I don’t need to have a perfect reason for perfect timing, it’s just that right now is the time and I just need to do it, and you are also saying something which is the difference between the mis-regulation versus assumption, that is under regulating means that I’m actually not doing enough versus IM misdirecting the resources to do something else, instead of doing the right thing, correct?

Dr. Pychyl: Yes, that’s a great summary, and what I will add to that, and it’s to say that we all have goals and intentions, and some of them are not very – they are half-date, they can be were articulated because that helps us; it puts a little bit more motivation behind a plan if it is a bit more articulated, but even though I have a vague notion of what I need to dictate, my immediate reaction is I don’t feel like it, I don’t want to, well, I have to do something with that. The Buddhists are so insightful in terms of this notion of monkey mind, that our minds are busy places. Our minds, our brains basically do two things: think and feel, think and feel, and the possibly think and feel, you don’t have to take it also seriously because my brain is busy doing that. So, just because I have a thought or a feeling, doesn’t mean I have to act on it , and anybody who ever examines their thoughts will know that because our thoughts, I often joke with the audiences when I speak to them, imagine I had a technology that may be Google or Apple, or some other company will invent it where I can have a bubble appear above your head, and in that bubble would appear all your thoughts and feelings, but the only control you have was to turn it off or leave it on. I can guarantee everyone would shut it off because we are so squarely. We have all these thoughts and feelings, and in fact, that is what this notion of monkey mind is.

The reason I’m emphasizing this is because I once heard a monk because about it so directly and he said, unfortunately, it’s the word monk because [0:10:10] interaction is the word monkey, but this Buddhist monk said, “We have to give them monkey something to do,” and I thought, that’s brilliant. That’s what it’s all about, that I can’t, and researchers in psychology know this, like James Gross and others who do research on emotion, you can’t suppress your emotions. You can’t deny your emotions. It’s not a very effective strategy. Instead, you got to give the monkey something to do. So, this may go to strategy and I have to use it daily what I think to myself, I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it which is frequently, and I say, what is the next action, Tim? What would be the next action you’d have to take if you were going to do this, and I add this little extra piece just a trick myself, but I’m not going to. I don’t set myself up right away. I don’t push myself too hard. I say, what’s the next action I would need to do if I was going to do this task but I’m not going to? I say, oh, I have to open my laptop and look at the email, and see what that student needs, and I think oh, I can do that, and now, now, I’m on my way because I broken that task down to an action, and we do these little actions, and of course, we bootstrap or we primed the pump for actually being engaged, so I’m giving the monkey something to do. I’m saying, “Monkey, don’t think about the task,” I’m not saying that, actually. I’m saying, “Monkey, what is the next action?” And now, the monkey has got something to do and Tim gets moving. It’s tremendously powerful because now, I’m not focused on my emotions and the mis-regulation of my emotions or feeling good. Now, and focused on the action, and I’ve made it small enough that I can take that action.

Sucheta: So, I love what I’m hearing. You are saying that it’s very critical that we concretize our goals into smaller attainable steps. Whether we actually take that step or not, but at least make that mine. It’s really like, sounds to me that when you are sitting at the edge of the pool and the water is very cold and you are really not sure I want to jump into the water because you are imagining how cold and freezing it’s going to be, then you put that so, and then put your foot, and the but your leg. It’s kind of immersing yourself in the task one step at a time. Now, is this something one can do for themselves, or do we do better when somebody else facilitates that for us?

Dr. Pychyl: That’s a great question and it’s going to take me back to your first question about willpower. A good friend of mine and colleague by the name of Joel Anderson. He’s at [0:12:37] University in the Netherlands, and he in a philosopher from the University of Toronto by the name of Joe Heath wrote a chapter in a book in 2011, the book was called The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination. It’s a great collection of chapters. Joel and Joel wrote about extended well, and I need to explain just a little bit about this to answer your question. So, extended will borrows from the notion of extended cognition. So, if I said to you, what is 3×3, you would say tonight. If I said, what is 387×1462, you would say, I can’t do that, and I’d say, well, you can’t do it in your head, but here is a paper and a pen still, and that is extended condition. You are extending your ability to think by using this tool, and I think it’s brilliant, what their basic premise is, is that the kind of think of willpower always just as this resource within a, and this answers your question. It’s better if I can rely on the world around me. What some psychologists call ecological affordances. I try to set up the environment in such a way that it actually helps me, just like a paper and pencil helps someone think, and so we can use the world around us. So, for example, let us say someone says, when I’m procrastinating, I’m just getting fit. I same go to go to the gym, but I never do. Well, what you learn about yourself and what you know about yourself is that you would never let someone else down like you do yourself. So, I say, all right then, I’m going to make a promise to Todd that he and I will always go and work out together, and I would never let Todd down, and so comes at the time to go to gym and I go, I don’t want to go to the gym. Oh, but Todd is waiting for me and off I go, and I have used that to help me get along, and we can see that with students in terms of study groups and other kinds of relationships, and also, ecological affordances comes in the way we set up our environment. If I tried to study, and we tell this to children all the time, in front of a television set with our phone next to us and some other device open, well, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Some of the ecological affordances there are to preempt that which tempts, reduce the distractions so that you are not setting yourself up for failure. So, on the one hand, you are setting up chutes, easier ways to slide into the stuff that you want to do and ladders making it more difficult to get to the stuff that you typically do by habit, and that is the brilliance of Anderson and Heath’s notion of extended will.

Sucheta: So, this is a very interesting concept about making environmental modifications to support your failure to adhere to a plan that you have were kind of avoidance this that make you not achieve your plans. Is there anything else we can do to pursue the goals, not just in one domain though, but many multiple, multiple domains?

Dr. Pychyl: Yes. In fact, I thought of it when we first started to talk together, would you use the word goal because we think we are saying the same thing when we say goal. I get this broad goal intention, I can have a goal intention of finished my degree or become fit, but those are very vaguely defined things, and they might have some motivational properties, but they won’t necessarily precipitate action. They will necessarily lead me to an immediate action. Instead, Peter Galwitzer and his colleagues have defined the notion called implementation intentions. Not just goal intentions, but your implementation intentions it sounds like the word itself, how are you going to implement it, and Peter and his colleagues’ research shows that certain forms of implementation intentions are more powerful. They are kind of when, then, when this happens, then I will do that, and the form that they used often is if this, then that to achieve this. So, for example, when a finish of this interview, then I will take my two dogs for a walk, and so my habit might be that I’m just going to kick back and maybe check my email, not even necessarily entertain myself, but do something else that is quite a habit in my life which is do some more work, but what I needed my life is probably some more exercise, and my dogs certainly want, so when I say when the interview ends, then I will take my dogs for a walk, now, I’ve put the stimulus for the action in the environment, and so that when something happens in the environment, triggers me to think, oh, yeah, I’m taking the dogs for a walk. This is very powerful because it helps us break habits which don’t rely on the environment. Well, they rely on the environment but they already have that habitual response in there. If this happens, then I do that and consciously, but instead now, I’m setting up an alternative response, but quite explicitly. So, again, another key thing that we can use across any kind of task are these notions of implementation intentions. If I have a commitment to the task, I that basically say, okay, when this happens, then I’m going to do that, and we find – well, the research shows over and over again, even specific research related to procrastination that we are more likely to act when we make an implementation intention.

Sucheta: Wonderful, so is there anyway you can explain to us that procrastination is more prevalent and gets exaggerated in certain circumstances for people, and is there a way that they can think about it going into that situation? Is there any way to protect that I’m likely to procrastinate because this is the nature of the task?

Dr. Pychyl: Well, that’s a good question and in terms of someone’s awareness of themselves that I’d have to have a certain amount of awareness to recognize that in situations where I’m uncertain or where I feel afraid, this notion of fear failure has been studied a great deal in relation to procrastination and is moderated by other person variables like how competent I feel, but notwithstanding that, certainly, things that we are fearful of and that causes uncertainty and anxiety, we’re more likely to want to avoid. That’s an emotional response, so I figure we have to recognize that in ourselves, but it can be even more Monday, I noticed yesterday, both my daughter and my wife, we were swimming in our pool, I was thinking about you talking about putting your foot in the cold water. I do that a lot. We did it yesterday, and my wife said, “You know what, I’m going to get up really early tomorrow, go for a run and go for a swim,” and I’m thinking to myself, that’s unlikely. It didn’t happen because Dan Gilbert from Harvard University has taught us a lot about how we predict our future moods. He calls it affective forecasting, predicting how we are going to feel in the future, and the gist of it is that we rely in the present to predict the future, and my daughter and my wife are posted during the fact that we had cycled yesterday and went for a swim, and the physical activity was wonderful, and that it makes you feel really good so you make this noble intention for tomorrow, and when you try to think how I’m going to feel about tomorrow, you’ll use of the present. Oh, how are they feeling right then? They were feeling great so they thought yeah, I feel like doing it tomorrow, but I think there’s another example of how we can really set ourselves up in that way of being predictably irrational. We are using the present but we have to kind of step back a little bit and have a sober second thought and say, okay I’m a little pumped up now because I’m feeling so good. How realistic is it that I’m setting this intention to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning when I don’t typically get up at five? So, I think that’s really important that we are able to know somebody’s ecological principles, and then evaluate our own lives and intentions in relation to those, and that’s why I think your work is so important. You teach people volitional skills, he gives some insight about how we think, you give them insight in terms of the tensions, in terms of processing in the brain, and those are fundamental to successful change.

Sucheta: Wonderful explanation there. I was going to share with you some of the strategies that I have used. One is, I do something called glitch list, so I have people write down things that didn’t go per plan were things that did not get done. So, I have a very elaborate planning system that I teach and this glitch list is a list of things that did not work out, and then you count how many, many things, so once that list comes to me which may have five or six items in it, I have clients categorize them into things that you had no plan for, you had an intention but not a plan, something that you had a plan, but no motivation or you didn’t stick with it, or you kind of gave up the last minute, or last category is you got interrupted and you couldn’t do it because the interruption was larger than the time he allocated for the task, and there are many ways to do it, but one of the things that I find very amusing about it is that this unreasonable expectation people have for themselves. They have things like plan a family reunion in one day. I mean, I don’t know how that’s possible. You’re just not going to do it. You need a plan, you need a plan to make a plan, how am I going to plan a family reunion? So, I find a lot of times, particularly in those with executive dysfunction are stuck into not having a good appraisal system. They don’t have the awareness of themselves and they are not the best judge of their true capacities, and so any methods that you have found that will make people more aware of their own skill set or their approach to managing their tasks?

Dr. Pychyl: Nothing comes from our research that speaks to that, and I think you have articulated better than most. I would probably just lay on top of that. The simple question of how do you feel when you list these various tasks? So much of my emphasis bill is on the emotional response. I do think that it’s absolutely imperative that people have the volitional skills and executive functioning skills that you are speaking of, but in some ways, would always argue that the plan is necessary but not sufficient because many of us, even after making these elaborate plans, and even realistic ones. We’ll get to that point in time when that’s supposed to be enacted, and what they say is or think, I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it. So, I think the two have the dance hand-in-hand, anything that’s why it’s an interesting conversation between the two of us today because your emphasis is more cognitive than mine, and mine is more effective than yours, but the two are always working together within the human being, and anything together, I think people gain a feel for the fact that yeah, I need to develop more planning skills, but I can’t ignore the fact that later on, I could still say, I don’t want to, and then giving the monkey something to do or recognizing I don’t have to be in the new, that’s kind of a myth. So, I don’t have any specific things cognitively to add to your perspective.

Sucheta: Got it. So, do you recommend any therapeutic processes in the area of psychological treatment or have they shown to be effective, such as CBT or DBT, or anything like that?

Dr. Pychyl: Well, I’m not a clinician, but I have colleagues that are in the certainly speak highly of CBT, and I’m trying to think of another form of therapy that we have published a paper on. What I did was Affective [0:23:44] Therapy.

Sucheta: Oh, yes, [0:23:46], yes.

Dr. Pychyl: Yes, so I met a therapist and researcher from Québec, another province in Canada for those of you who don’t know, French speaking and have been working in this area and we collaborated, they taught me a whole new area because they are clinicians and we did see quite a bit of evidence that this is a good approach, and I understand why in terms of developing commitment is essential, and a sense of acceptance of oneself and task at hand, those sorts of processes, but I’m not a clinician at heart, but certainly those who are have written extensively, but like Wendy Dryden in the UK will talk about cognitive behavioral therapy, and that’s very important. From our own research, I would argue that something that is new and overlooked, I think, or can be emphasized more, at least, it’s a little bit of time travel. By that I mean thinking about future self and bringing future self closer. As I’ve mentioned in passing, we tend to think about future self like a stranger – Hal Hershel demonstrated this in his research and one of my students [0:24:51] Marie [0:24:53] did some excellent search translating that into student academic procrastination, and she had students to a guided meditation to think about future self more concretely, both from the first person and that person, and when they did that, they developed more empathy for future self, and that seem to be related to greater decreases in procrastination. So, I think that to the extent that we can integrate our present self with our future self is getting jerked around with procrastination, present self can help make different decisions, so that’s another area that I think could be emphasized in any of these therapies that you mentioned.

Sucheta: Thank you for sharing that. I’m feeling with Hal Hershel’s work that I’ve had him as a guest on this podcast, but I’m not really familiar with this time travel techniques that you mentioned which sounds fascinating, and also, I think as I understand from the future self research, and I think you have mentioned this earlier as well, that we consider that the more time gap there is between current self and future self, our perception, our emotional relationship to that yourself is as good or as bad with a stranger, and we have left compassion and less empathy for a stranger than we have for ourselves, so there is a certain body is to take decisions in favor of someone which is me that my future self which appears to be a stranger, and I will share quick techniques that I have used in my practice where when I start the cognitive retraining process, I made do goal assessment and goal planning, and then re-create a roadmap of what is it that I’m going to be doing for myself? And then, I have a banner that I put out that says, “Dear future self,” and then the student stands under it, and then a video record them reading this letter that is addressed from the future self to the current self, and in the future self is thanking the current self for all the hard work that went into making the future self better, and so we take those goals and processes, and habits that the student is planning to commit himself to, but the future self thanks, and then the part of training is on a regular basis to watch that video.

Dr. Pychyl: I think that’s wonderful.

Sucheta: So, as the person travels through time, they begin to understand, wait a minute, that person is talking to me. Wait, that’s me? And so, I have a date stamped there and I have all these little prompts that remind the person that this is the future you talking to you.

Dr. Pychyl: Yeah, so I think – I mean, all these things are foundational to making change, but I even add another layer to that and it’s something we haven’t talked about at all. There is a number of existential therapies, people like Nick Cooper or Bo Jacobson, Schneider, others that have written about existential therapies, and the reason I bring that up is that I think at heart, procrastination is a deeply existential issue. It’s about, in a profound way, not getting on with life itself. Sometimes, we treat like as like it’s limitless, especially when we’re younger, but anyone can do it, as if there will be a tomorrow and I can do it tomorrow, and of course that’s that notion of carpe diem, it cuts both ways, make hay where the sun shines, or eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you might be here, so to speak. So, there is that tension between the two, but what I find it a lot of people, and I would think you see this in your own clients is that they lack a deep sense of agency. In terms of this is my life and these are my goals, and I want to act on them, and I think without the sense of agency and this existential notion of a commitment to self, not just commitment of a task of a commitment to one’s self that can be profoundly life giving and really, we will get to the heart of beating a procrastination habit very quickly because it changes the frame which I use as a point of reference for your decision-making, and I’ve seen that happen and I get emails from people from all over the world that talk about how that’s a really made a change in their lives, but I often talk to students about the notion of agency. Even Victor Frankel, the Viennese psychiatrist, in his own autobiography wrote about basically, procrastination and how he learned to do the difficult things first thing in the morning and how he learned not to waste time so he had tied for the important things in life and what he was speaking of that is typically time with family and friends. So, I think that we all have to learn these things as well. It’s not just about our thinking and our feelings, but a deep sense of the I live in this world who has goals and can act on those goals.

Sucheta: I love the way you are ending this. I think this is a profound way to shift one’s own thinking. I think this life, not only is a gift but it’s also a life to be lived with purpose, and if I have a purpose, then I have a commitment to see that purpose be fulfilled, and I love, love this idea.

Thank you so much, Dr. Pychyl, for coming on the podcast and sharing your wisdom. You are a wealth of knowledge and you are brilliant, and your insights are going to make a huge difference in our listeners, not just understanding of procrastination but you give them a lot of hope, so I thank you for that.

Dr. Pychyl: Oh, Sucheta, it’s been my pleasure and it’s so very kind of you to say those things.

Producer: All right, wow, as I suspected, yet another great conversation with Dr. Tim Pychyl, Sucheta. Goodness, I don’t know where to start. So, I’ll ask you, any initial thoughts?

Sucheta: Oh, absolutely, Todd. Wasn’t he great? He is so wonderful in explaining things, as well as his vast knowledge. We wish we had a lot more time with him, but for starters, what comes to mind is procrastination is a tantrum thrown by the emotional brain not wanting to do something that we ourselves have identified as an important and worthy pursuit. So, to summarize from last session, the signature characteristics of procrastination is that it is a deliberate or intentional delay, and on top of that, it is an unnecessary one. So, obviously, a fact comes to mind that is a procrastinator lacking motivation and is there a delay because of missing thrust that propels the person, your willpower, into action? But as Tim was saying, he was very emphatic about that, that is not just a matter of willpower. Even though it is quite tempting to assume procrastinators’ procrastination is failure of putting will behind a choice to pursue a worthy goal but it’s not, so procrastination is very much connected to mis-regulation rather than the under regulation. The act of putting off to feel good now is completely misguided by this believe that by putting off, going to feel good in that feeling good will make me better or make me more prepared to do purpose to it next time when I try it, and that never happened. So, the truth is that we need to recognize that this is an avoidance that we are engaging in and it’s a problematic behavior. So, that’s kind of the initial overview of what I thought was [0:32:05] conversation.

Producer: Yeah, yeah. Well, when I think of myself, Sucheta, I mean, I have ambitious goals. I have things I want to accomplish, but despite that, I still procrastinate, so it appears that having a goal isn’t enough, yeah?

Sucheta: Yeah, that’s a great thought, Todd. Psychology of action, I think Tim mentioned in this, that researcher Brian Little proposes that fulfilling intentions has four parts. First is inception, second is planning, third is action, and for it is completion, and what’s inception, inception is conceding goals, so on any given day, goals can be categorized into two groups. One is called approach goals. For example, you are exercising to lose weight, so you are approaching your intention to achieve something, and the second is, those that I call avoidance goals. That means exercising to avoid osteoporosis. So, planning involves task management and sequencing, and creating a map of execution, and then execution is twofold which is taking action and staying committed till the end. So, that is the composite of that psychology of action, so to speak, so conceding goals and desiring to meet them is not so hard, but staying committed to them and accomplishing them is particularly much more difficult and it’s even so when there is a large time. So, that’s the idea that one needs to focus when working with people who are procrastinating. And, another thought that comes to my mind is just having goals is not enough that there are a lot of reasons that there is a breakdown in goal pursuit. So, Tim has a big blog, he is a contributor to Psychology Today, and in one of his blogs, he talks about that there are four ways a breakdown can happen when you are pursuing goals. So, the first one for example is when we struggle to get started. A second may be that one may have problems in staying the course, you get started and as I talked about earlier, if you give a mouse a cookie, that you started with your goal, for example, to eat the cookie, but then that leads to the next action, then that leads to the next action, so you are veered away from the original path that you made them considered as part of your plan. The third part is that one may be reluctant to disengage from an ineffective strategy, that one is using to achieve goals, and in some cases, there’s a lot of rigidity or feeling that your perfectionist attitude may step in, and then you may want to do it that way and that we only, and then you make it stuck and not change your ways, and the fourth part is, the fourth way that breakdown may occur is that when they have genuine problems with their willpower. So, for example, if you have done some resisting, then you may suffer from ego depletion, and I think in that previous podcast when I had Baumeister, we talked about this that not being able to stay the track because of exhaustion, and having resisted previous temptations, then you don’t have enough resistance left in you to resist the interruptions in your path. So, bottom line is, assessing the goals and taking them to the original reason why you even conceived the goal is really an important part of strategizing.

Producer: So, Sucheta, and the other important factors that you think we should be aware of that are important to bring various strategies into view or into focus?

Sucheta: You know, that’s a great question, Todd. As Tim was talking about procrastination, my head was churning out ideas as to how can I help my clients and how can people will listen to this and who have children and who are educators who are working with procrastinators, how can they think? So, the most important thing that I find is that how do you frame with the strategic thinking process? That is the first part to read, and so Tim’s message is that we can learn to handle procrastination by recognizing that it is self-defeating, and we don’t need to be a victim of our own self-defeating behaviors, and he’s very optimistic that we can change our ways which makes me very happy, and what I feel, that we remind ourselves that procrastination is a form of delay used as a coping mechanism to handle the uncomfortable feelings regarding the task or intended actions which is invoking us and that can also help us become very strategic about having a different coping mechanism them rather than avoidance. So, if we pause and think about the source of these negative and aversive thoughts and feelings that we have, one can realize very clearly that the mind, it is the monkey mind that is the root cause. So, the monkey mind excels at being the monkey mind. So, what is it doing? It’s busy, busy, busy turning out thoughts and excuses, and flashbacks, so deriving strategies by no longer focusing on that mind will be a great prospect, and so there’s a lot of examples of that in mindfulness as well, but instead of saying I don’t like this, this is not a good idea, I don’t feel like it, you can say, “I think I’m feeling that I don’t want to do it,” so there is a way to kind of self-distance and take a better perspective on yourself and have a different approach to cope with this aversion or uncomfortable feeling you are struggling with.

Producer: So, now, thinking about self-regulation, so share some thoughts if you can about how we can use that to rein in procrastination through self-regulation.

Sucheta: And, this was the most powerful point for me. I was thinking about procrastination in my life and of course, I am now struggling with it on an everyday basis, so I would love this idea that he was talking about, that goal pursuit is great on paper, but it’s a great challenge to go through the goal pursuit, and we need to really pay attention to something that we are good at. So, let’s say you are thumbing through a magazine and you come across a couple romantically leaning into each other while looking at the Sunset and you look closely and read the caption, and you realize they are on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. So, discreetly inspires you to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with your honey, and so you sure this desire and that becomes an intention. So then, you go and persuade somehow your husband or wife that why don’t we take this on ourselves? And, you are quite excited, and then you kind of even look through some dates, and then when you start looking at the flights, then you look at the altitude, then you realize that oh, you have altitude sickness, then do I need to do a lot of preparations? Do I need to take medicine? And then, your effort, as you move away from this wonderful big picture idea into the finer, granular executionary process, you start getting cold feet, and it’s easy to either give up the goal completely or to procrastinate having to do it. Now, this might not be the best example because nothing is a hinging upon me climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, so it is easy to give that goal up, but imagine doing taxes, the same predicament may happen that I really, really, really need to get the taxes in because I have not filed it for two years and this is such a critical time. Otherwise, I’m going to incur a penalty. So, what happens is we failed to conceive the journey through time and that failure to conceive journey through time is also explained through something called temporal self-regulation theory, and that is when I think a lot of people start kind of having cold feet, and for me, what was really – that spoke to me was with Tim said that we can use self-control for one area of life where we have successfully applied ourselves to our own benefit or we can transfer that and we can apply that to the area of life where we are procrastinating, and that has been a wonderful message for me because I have been thinking about a lot of self-control, I demonstrated so many parts of my life, I very committed, I followed through, and particularly, I do that when I am committed to other people, and so I have recognized that if I shift my mindset and use this as a strategy, then I can really become even more successful and less of a procrastinator. There is a wonderful article written by this Dutch researcher Wendel Van [0:41:01] – I hope of seeing it right – and I’m quoting her, she says that it’s also possible to train competencies relevant to self-regulation in general such as self-knowledge, self-monitoring, feedback seeking, and awareness of the effects on one’s own behavior. This may lead to setting more realistic goals and knowing whether procrastination will lead to dysfunctional aspects, and I thought this particular research findings are also very meaningful to me, and in one of Tim’s podcasts, he discussed this at length which was very helpful for me to understand his perspective on this, but what I’m seeing here is, self-regulation is all about developing greater self-knowledge, and also, using the knowledge to monitor yourself through passage of time, and then seeking feedback and it using the awareness of that you keep gathering about your actions or in actions to feed into. So, imagine the car that gives you information from a side window – I mean, the side mirrors, and then the windshield through which we look, and the rearview mirror. All those things are feeding into your ability to judge how close you are to the other cars and how far you are from other cars, whether it is safe to turn right, turn left, so that is the way I feel we need to activate these mirrors as a feedback system, and honestly, this is what I’m really good at in terms of my work. My therapy, cognitive retraining and executive function training is extremely centered or founded in these principles of self-regulation, so I feel very confident about that.

Producer: Yeah, no doubt about it. Any thoughts on ACT therapy? Should we be thinking about that more?

Sucheta: Yeah, I think we did and have adequate time to go into the depth of it, so I’m just going to give a little more summary for our listeners that the acceptance commitment therapy model believes that feelings are normal part of being human and thoughts cannot be avoided. Hence, instead of contesting them, arguing with them, one must make allowances to have them emerge, show up, and then disappear. It’s a very Zen or Buddhist thing, it’s very much Vedantic principles, I’m familiar with spiritual practices or self-directed attention practices that Hinduism recommends, that I’m familiar with also has a great – there are a lot of tips as to how to do that. The way our mind works is that it’s really hard to avoid feelings and thoughts, so acceptance therapy says, acceptance and commitment therapy says that thoughts and feelings are fine, but there’s no need to be confused with the thoughts, there’s no need to kind of marry them. So, the [0:43:52] elements to ACT therapy and the first element is to build psychological flexibility so that you can learn to not allow that fusion to occur between the thoughts, and then thoughts become binding to your whole sense of reality in that moment, and so in order to do that, one must develop the ability to pause and reflect, and then one must really – well, kind of learned the knack of identifying and labeling your thoughts, then becoming mindful and to really practice non-judgmental awareness. So, for example, how can you witness your own minds creations which are these negative thoughts and feelings and saying, “I see anxiety coming up. I see I am anxious, I see that I am no longer anxious.” So, it’s almost like, I like to describe to my clients that imagine you are sitting in a train, and that is not something very common in America, but I’m from India and I have also traveled in Europe, so when you are sitting in a fast train, the surroundings pass by very fast, and all you are left to do is, you can’t study them; you just witnessed them. You watch them – oh, that was a beautiful yellow – oh, it’s gone. Oh, are those – oh, it’s gone, so we really don’t get a chance to study and become very intrigued by those things that you witness because you are in a moving train. Similarly, you can become that missed mindset, person with missed mindset. So, the danger in our non-mindfulness is it that we become quite convinced that these thoughts are real and they have married, and we begin to [0:45:38] them, and we consider those thoughts to be the guiding principle, and that is when the situation becomes sticky. So, what do we need to do is we need to reverse engineer that, and I explained that earlier, it’s like saying, I’m having a thought that I am not in a good mood, and I’m having a thought to want to eat a cookie. I’m having a thought to not call my mother back, so instead of saying, I don’t want to, mother back, you can reengineer those thought processes and become more in charge of your thinking, and so using reflection to heightened self-awareness and reassessing your thoughts and feelings is really the important step here, and I’m so glad that people study this and they have a technique that is kind of well laid out and there are experts who are ACT therapists, and I will put a link in the show notes so that people can look up how to find a therapist who can do this in their area.

So, in conclusion about this particular part is that once the mindful practices become ingrained and second nature, we can become very good at not listening to the aversion or the discomfort we are feeling and we can to step over the discomfort and say, “Yup, I think I’m not feeling very comfortable about this, but what is the next action I can take?” And, that was another left message about this that I think was very powerful, that do not forget to take action. The best remedy to procrastination is taking an action, so we must, must take actions.

Producer: Well, no doubt about it. The lesson I’ve learned in my life is that things that I procrastinate because I’m fearing something, but once you take that first step in action, all of a sudden, that fear melts away. That’s been the biggest thing that I’ve learned dealing with this problem. It’s a big problem for me. So, goodness, now that you mention cookies, now, that’s all I can think about.

So, any closing thoughts, Sucheta, before we wrap this episode?

Sucheta: Yeah, thank you for asking that, Todd. For starters, I want people to know that procrastination is not just a run-of-the-mill everyday challenge and all one has to do is to get over it, that is just a myth though. We can’t get over destination. So, this misconceived notion we may have the that all I have to do is make a little screensaver on my computer that’s saving it for the last minute or whatever, or maybe we put a little message on Facebook saying that I’ve been procrastinating, and that becomes, we all laugh at this because we can relate to it, but we need to take a little bit more serious look. It runs deep in it needs intentional reprogramming. People need to excavate the feelings and thoughts about the task or the goal in hand that brings these negative feelings to the surface, and one needs to take a serious look at the nature of these feelings and what is the monkey mind saying to me at this point? So, the thoughts may be that I have to commit to one choice over the other and that makes me feel that this is final and I do want to do it. It could be that it’s hard to pick out what the task is, and I don’t know what to do. It could be a thought such as it’s annoying because it’s going to require dealing with people and I can’t stand people, or a thought may be generated that says that this is hard work and it’s tiring, and my legs hurt and I’m out of breath so I don’t want to exercise. It could be things like I’m lost, I’m not sure what the steps are, and so these are the kinds of even concretize in what is it that you are feeling uncomfortable about can be very helpful, and what was the most powerful thing for me is that Tim kind of shed a light on this perspective that there are cognitive and affective strategies to manage procrastination. My career has been helping clients develop cognitive strategies related to planning, organization, task adherence, minimizing interference, etc., and the very little time I had devoted to helping them deal with the affective side, ever since I came across Tim’s work, mainly Tim’s podcast about six years ago, I have brought that perspective of an affective strategies associated in helping clients manage their fears and aversions into my practice, and helping them craft a message so that they can work on that monkey mind.

This has been a shift in my mindset and practice and I hope that is a big takeaway for all those who help young children, students, and young adults, and those who are interested in self-help, even. That is the combination of the two can really bring a substantial impact.

So, finally, it won’t hurt to start with the self, whether you are helping people are not, think the best places to start helping yourself. I think we might be underestimating our own procrastination and how it hinders our productivity and goal-directedness. Maybe as soon as this episode ends, make a list of all the things that you have been putting off while listening to the podcast and see what strikes for yourself and begin to address your own emotions, yeah, that’s what I think would be lovely if all of us are able to do that.

Producer: No doubt about it. All right, well, that’s all the time we have for today. I did want to take a quick second, Sucheta, you and I have been both so busy publishing this great show that I failed to mention a couple of episodes ago, to congratulate you on your 50th episode. So, I can’t believe we have already published over 50 episodes, so I wanted to congratulate you on that and also tell you it’s been a great pleasure to partner with you on this great show. So, thank you for letting me be a part of it.

Sucheta: Thank you, Todd. Actually, Dr. Tim Pychyl is my 50th episode, so thank you so much. A shout out to him for kind of helping me achieve such a big landmark episode. So, we are celebrating, three of us are celebrating right now.

Producer: Absolutely. All right, well, on behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening today and we look forward to seeing you again next week as we kick off our next 50 episodes. We will see you next time on Full PreFrontal.