Latest / The Mastery Project Podcast / Why You Procrastinate (It's Not Laziness) | The Neuroscience of Discipline
Transcript
- Dr. T-Michael Dougherty, Ed.D.: Welcome back to the Mastery Project Podcast. I'm Dr. T-Michael Dougherty and today we're going to take a hard look at how people actually get things accomplished in their lives, especially difficult things. So whether you're a first year college student who is staring down a mountain of work and not really sure how to get started with it all, Or you're a clinician who is trying to juggle what seems like an overwhelming caseload. Or you are a single mother who's trying to keep their family on track during a busy holiday season. Today, we're going to unpack the architecture of action. For a long time, the dominant narrative around productivity and success has often been centered on one word, and that is willpower. The idea was that discipline is a finite resource, like a tank of gas or a bank account. And if you use it resisting, say, a donut at breakfast time, then you won't have enough left if you wanted to study at 8 p.m. that night. Now, that's a compelling idea, it's known in the research as something called the ego depletion model. But there is a problem with the ego depletion model, and that's when researchers recently tried to replicate that effect across 23 different laboratories with over 2,000 participants, they couldn't do it. The depletion model just sort of fell apart on them. So if success isn't about having an iron will and just gritting your teeth. throughout the day and forcing yourself to try to stay on track with everything, what is it? And when researchers look at people who seem to exhibit high levels of self-control, these are people who get really good grades consistently, who seem to manage their health and exercise regularly, or they advance in their careers. What we find is something very surprising that Those people who we consider to be highly successful in accomplishing hard things are actually reporting experiencing less effortful restraint in their everyday lives. They aren't constantly fighting against temptation. They're relying on deeply ingrained habits and very structured routines that they've created for themselves. So, in that sense, discipline isn't about resisting hard things, it's about Engineering your environment so that hard things become almost automatic. Now, before we can build on those habits, we have to talk about why people hesitate in the first place, why we delay things, why we procrastinate difficult things. And we often tend to, I guess, moralize procrastination. We call it laziness or a lack of determination or drive. But the research on this paints a very different picture. In a massive meta-analysis by Dr. Pierre Steele, who looked at hundreds of studies on why we delay, the strongest predictors that emerged from this weren't often a lack of motivation, they were features of the tasks themselves. We delay getting started on difficult tasks when they're highly unpleasant, things that we just don't want to do. Researchers call this task aversion. we delay when rewards for doing things are too far into the future, at least the way we perceive them. And we delay when we lack confidence in our ability to accomplish something. Procrastination is often just our brain's ability at short-term mood repair. So when you are looking at a massive complex project, it generates stress in your brain. and as neuroscientist Dr. Amy Arnstein has shown, uncontrollable stress impairs the prefrontal cortex, the exact part of our brains that are responsible for planning and focus. So when we encounter these situations where things seem overwhelming or they seem too far in the future to see the reward, our brains do the logical thing. They seek an exit ramp for this. They find a distraction to relieve that immediate level of stress that's felt. Even though it leaves us worse off in the long run. So that hesitation that we feel to try to get started on things isn't a character flaw at all. It's actually a neurological response to the way your tasks are designed. So, how do we redesign the task then? How do we bypass that stress response that starts? How do we bypass that stress response and start to actually build momentum? Well, It starts with how we set our targets. And as we're about to talk about, the way most of us were taught to set goals is actually working against us. if you've read any self-help book recently or sat through a course on how to improve your productivity or effectiveness with task performance, you've probably heard the standard advice related to goals, which is to make them big. Make them specific and make them hard. And there's some truth to that, of course, but decades of research, largely driven by two researchers, Dr. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, confirm that specific, difficult goals lead to higher performance than just telling yourself to do your best. Specificity removes ambiguity. It directs your attention and it energizes your effort. But here's where the standard advice seems to fall apart, especially for students and professionals who are trying to engage in very difficult tasks. Those big specific targets, which are what researchers often call performance goals, like I want to score a 95 on my kinesiology exam, or I want to increase clinic revenue Now, those work really well for tasks that you already know how to do to some extent. They work for simple, repetitive execution tasks. But when a task is highly complex, or when you're trying to learn something that entirely new, for example, those same performance goals can actually hinder your performance or your ability or willingness to get started. So imagine that you're a first-year student who's trying to map the nervous system for the first time. It seems extremely overwhelming. But setting a rigid performance goal can often create so much anxiety that it interferes with your ability to actually acquire the knowledge that you need. And it triggers that stress response that we talked about earlier and it impairs the prefrontal cortex. So what's the alternative? When the conditions around the task that you're trying to accomplish are complex, the research shows that we need to shift from a performance goal to a learning goal. So instead of focusing on outcomes, the goal becomes the acquisition of a specific strategy or a piece of knowledge that can be used immediately. So instead of I need to pass this exam, which is the performance goal, the learning goal would become I need to be able to explain. The origin, insertion, and action of the rotator cuff muscles without looking at my notes. The focus shifts from the ultimate outcome to the immediate understanding of the task at hand, or the knowledge that it takes to accomplish the task at hand. But even a good learning goal can sometimes feel too big and overwhelming. And this brings us to one of the most powerful tools in the research literature, and that is the proximal subgoal. Proximal just means near or close, close in time, really. And if you have a distant goal, say passing a board exam that occurs in six months or a year away, a distant goal is practically useless for changing your behavior today. It's way too far away to provide any immediate feedback for your brain. And so the reward is too delayed. To help you overcome procrastination. The research is really clear on this, and studies going all the way back to the 1980s have shown that when individuals working on complex tasks focus only on a distant goal, their performance often drops. But when that distant goal is broken down into a proximal sub-goal, tasks that you can accomplish in the very near term, everything changes. Breaking the work down increases your self-efficacy, which is basically your belief in your ability to accomplish the task. It forces you to use better strategies and it provides you immediate tangible feedback. This leads to a practical strategy that we often use in our programs, which I call the inverse sizing rule. It's an inference based on the research regarding stress and cognitive load, and it works like this. The size of your immediate goal should be inversely proportional to the amount of stress you're experiencing. if you're trying to perform a complicated task or what appears to be an overwhelming task on a calm day in the middle of the week, for example, your proximal goal might be to read an entire chapter and outline it. And that's fine, but if it's a Sunday night, you're exhausted after a long work or school week, and you're kind of overwhelmed and your brain is just begging you for a distraction. You've got to shrink the target. And you shrink it until resistance to it disappears entirely. Your goal becomes open the textbook to page 42, or read just the first paragraph, or even format this Word document for my essay. So you bypass the amygdala's stress response by making the task so small it requires almost zero effort to start. Once you take that first micro step towards accomplishing it, you break that inertia. But getting started is only half the battle to task accomplishment. Once you're moving, what should you actually be focusing on? Because where you focus your attention while you're moving can make the difference between mastery and choking under pressure or giving up too soon, for example. So we've shrunk our task down from something that seems overwhelming to something that is almost impossible to argue with in our brains. Just opening a book is not overwhelming for most people. Reading a single paragraph should not be overwhelming. If it is, make it smaller. Read one word. I actually spent A lot of time over the last three or four years accomplishing what I consider to be one of the more difficult tasks that I've accomplished in my life, which is to complete a doctoral degree. and as part of that, I had to start and finish a dissertation. And for those of you who have completed a dissertation, you understand that it's kind of like a marathon within a marathon. and it can be very difficult in that process sometimes to overcome those feelings of inertia and read another peer reviewed study, for example. And so I would often find myself sort of re examining my goals and saying, instead of all right, I need to read those four articles. to substantiate a particular claim in my dissertation research, I would often need to shrink it down to, okay, you need to go sit down at your desk, or you need to just turn your computer on, or you need to read just the abstract of one article. And if that was too big, I would make it even smaller. And there were a number of times where I did this with great success. Sometimes it would be to just open the page. that I wanted to read. the goal is to shrink it down as small as possible so that your brain really perceives no friction to accomplishing that task. And in so doing, you bypass the stress response and hopefully get started working. That's what worked for me in a lot of situations. So the question now is: where should your attention be focused? We hear a lot about something called trusting the process. And it's become sort of a sports cliche and famously tied to former Alabama coach Nick Sabin's coaching philosophy. And the idea behind this is simple. Don't look at a scoreboard. Don't consider a championship at the end of the season. Don't even look at the next quarter. Focus on what is occurring right now, in this exact moment. Forget about the outcome. Forget about accomplishing it to perfection. Perform your task to the best of your ability and focus all of your energy, all of your attention, all of your discipline on focusing this one specific proximal task. Forget about the outcome and focus on what is right in front of you. Now, what does the research actually say about process thinking? Does it hold up in the lab? The answer is that it does, but with a really important caveat. It depends on your level of expertise. In the late 1990s, researchers looked at college students studying for midterm exams. They had one group mentally rehearse the outcome. Of getting a good grade, for example. And they had another group mentally rehearse the process by which they would study when they would open their books, how they would review the material, and how they would quiz themselves before their exam. The group that focused on the process studied more. They had much less anxiety about the test itself, and they got significantly better grades. We see the same thing in sports psychology. When novices to a particular sport Or learning a new skill, like throwing a dart, for example, or swinging a club. Focusing on the step-by-step process is highly effective. It builds competence and it builds confidence. If you're a student or if you're stepping into a new professional role, or you're taking on a project that you've never done before, your attention should be anchored to the process of accomplishing that goal. The immediate step that's in front of you, the mechanics of the task that are right in front of you. But here's where the research gets fascinating, in my opinion. If you take an expert golfer, someone who has hit that putt 10,000 times before, and you ask them to focus on the step-by-step mechanics of their swing, often they'll choke. Their performance actually drops. When a skill becomes automatic, sometimes focusing on the tiny steps that it takes to accomplish it seems to get in the way of performing. For experts, it's better sometimes to focus on the outcome itself. So the rule is this when you're learning or when you are highly anxious, focus on the process of what you're trying to accomplish. Put your head down and look only at the next step in front of you. As you begin to gain mastery and the skill becomes automatic, you can start to lift your head and focus somewhat on the outcome. Now this brings us to a critical distinction that can trip up a lot of high achievers. And it's the difference between planning and executing. If you try to plan and execute both at the same time, you will often paralyze yourself into inertia. and recent research by two psychologists, Peter Gallowitzer and Heinz Heckhausen, shows that planning and acting require two entirely different States of mind. When you're planning, you need to look at the bigger picture for sure. You need to look at distant goals and set distant goals. You need to weigh options and you need to map out the terrain that it's going to take to get there. You have to think in the abstract. But once the plan is made and it's time to execute the steps that it takes to accomplish those tasks, you have to mentally close your map book. You have to stop evaluating the bigger picture. And your attention has to narrow to the execution of the very next step that's in front of you. Now, during the performance of these high hard goals, you have to alternate between these two states of planning and execution. You look at the map to chart the course, and then you put the map away and drive the car. You don't try to read the map while you're navigating through traffic. This process of alternation, planning with the whole picture in full view and then executing with the attention strictly on the immediate task in front of you is how you sustain complex long-term work without burning out or becoming unmotivated. But even with perfect focus, relying on conscious effort every single day can be exhausting. If you have to decide to study or decide to execute your process every morning when you wake up, eventually you're going to fail. We don't want to rely on decisions. We want to rely on design. And that means we have to talk about how habits actually form and the single most effective tool for building them. And this is the fundamental basis of this episode. Now, I want to debunk the popular myths like 21 days, never miss two days in a row, and hopefully replace them with the most robust tool in the behavioral science literature that I've found, and that's implementation intentions. We've talked about how to shrink the target and we've talked about where to focus our attention, but if you have to consciously go through this process every single day, you're going to get tired. The ultimate goal isn't constant effort. The goal is automaticity. We want the hard things like studying or consistently exercising or deep work on a project that we have to accomplish professionally. We want those to become the default setting for our brain. We want them to become habits. Now, if you search the internet for how to build a habit, you're going to run into a lot of bad information. The most stubborn myth out there I've found is that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. That number didn't come from rigorous psychological study. It came from a plastic surgeon in the 1960s who noticed that it took his patients about 21 days to get used to the look of their new face. It was an observation about psychological adjustment, not behavior change. But the self-help industry has kind of grabbed onto that number and they've run with it over the years. So, how long does it actually take to build a habit? A landmark study out of University College London tracked people trying to build simple health habits. The reality was that it took an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. And the range was all over the map. For some people, it took 18 days. For others, it took over 250 days. That's almost a full year. So if you're trying to build a new study routine and it still feels like a grind on day 30, You aren't failing at this. You're just in the middle of a normal neurologic process of adjustment. Now, there's another piece of good news from that same study, and that missing a single day did not derail the habit formation process at all. The idea that you can never miss two days in a row is a catchy motivational slogan, but it isn't actually a hard neurobiological rule. If you miss a day, the most important thing that you can do is simply to resume the behavior as soon as you can. your brain will pick right back up where you left off. So how do we actually wire these behaviors in to make them become more automatic? How do we build a habit that sticks? The single most effective tool in the research literature, and this is not hyperbole, that has been validated across nearly a hundred studies and thousands of participants is a concept called implementation intentions. I prefer to call it if-then planning. And here is why most goals fail. We say, I'm going to study more this week. It's a vague intention, it's broad, and it requires you to make a decision in the future about when and where to study. And as we've discussed, when you're stressed or you're tired, your brain is going to avoid hard work and it's going to find the easiest possible solution for you. If-then planning removes the decision entirely. It delegates the control of your behavior to a specific cue in your environment. You define the exact situation, the if, and then you define the exact behavior, the then. If it's 6 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, then I will sit at my kitchen table and review 20 anatomy flashcards, for example. If I've just finished my morning coffee, then I will write the first paragraph of my report. When you write this down, you are mentally linking a specific trigger to a specific action. You are preloading the decision for your brain. And research by Dr. Peter Goldwitzer shows that this simple strategy has a medium to large effect on goal attainment. In one study of high school students preparing for a high-stakes exam, students who use this exact type of planning completed over 60% more practice questions than the control group did. You can anchor the if to a specific time on the clock, or you can anchor it to something you already do every day, what's often called habit stacking. Both can be effective. The critical factor is consistency. You have to be able to repeat the exact same behavior in response to the exact same cue over and over again. That repetition is what slowly changes the circuits in your basal ganglia of your brain, and it turns A conscious effort into an automatic routine. But repetition alone isn't always enough to keep us going. That repetition is what slowly changes the circuitry in your basal ganglia of your brain, turning conscious effort into an automatic routine. But repetition alone isn't always enough to keep us going, especially during a long, difficult project. We need fuel, and that fuel comes from how we measure our own progress. So we've shrunk our target or our goal. We've chosen to focus on the process of the proximal goal that's right in front of us, and we've built the if-then plan. our system is now running effectively. But if you're in a demanding academic program, for example, like physical therapy or medical school or nursing school. Or you're taking on a massive professional project. You aren't sprinting in these situations. You are running a marathon. And halfway through a marathon, things can often get difficult. Motivation does not stay flat. Research shows that motivation naturally dips in the middle of a project. You have that initial excitement at the beginning, and you get a burst of energy near the finish line, but the middle is the grind. How do you sustain momentum when the finish line is still months or even years away? The answer is found in what Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile calls the progress principle. Amabile and her team analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries from professionals working on Complex long-term projects. And they wanted to know what specific events triggered a great day for these people, a day where they felt highly motivated, engaged, and positive about their work. And what they found was that all of the things that can happen in a workday, the single strongest predictor of motivation is simply making progress in meaningful work. And it didn't always have to be a massive breakthrough. Small wins, like tiny incremental steps forward, were present on 76% of the best days that people reported. This is why those proximal sub goals we talked about earlier are so vital to success. When you break a massive goal into a daily micro goal, you are engineering a daily small win for yourself. You're manufacturing a sense of progress. But the research also adds a critical detail. you have to make that progress visible. A meta-analysis of over 130 studies found that when people actively monitor and physically record their progress, their goal attainment goes up significantly. You can't just keep it in your head. You have to write it down. You have to cross it off a list physically. And that physical act of tracking. Creates a short feedback loop in your brain that can help sustain you between major milestones. But what happens at the end of the day when your work isn't finished? Because in the real world, the work is almost never entirely done, as you all know. If you leave your desk with a dozen half-finished tasks bouncing around in your head, you're going to carry that stress with you. And there's a psychological phenomenon often referred to as the zigarnik effect, which suggests that unfinished goals cause intrusive thoughts. they occupy our mental bandwidth and they degrade our performance on other tasks. Your brain hates open loops. But two researchers, EJ Massacampo And Roy Baumeister found a brilliant hack for this. You don't actually have to finish the task in front of you to stop intrusive thoughts. You just have to make a specific plan for when and how you're going to finish it. When participants in this study simply wrote down a concrete plan for how they would handle their unfinished goals, the cognitive interference disappeared entirely. The open loop was closed, not by doing the work, but by planning the work. So as you wrap up your day, don't just walk away from your desk. Take two minutes, look at what's unfinished, and write down any if-then plan for exactly what you will tackle when you come in tomorrow. You're giving your brain permission to let it go. Now let's try to pull all of this together. Stop trying to manufacture willpower. Discipline is a product of design, not desire. when you feel the resistance of trying to perform a massive task or goal, don't try to force your way through it. Shrink the target. Set a proximal sub goal that's so small. It doesn't trigger your stress response. Separate your planning from your execution. Look at the big picture to set your course. But when it's time to get down to work, put the map away and focus entirely on the process, the next immediate step in front of you. Remove the burden of daily decision making by writing down clear, specific if-then plans for each task. Anchor your work to a specific time or to an existing routine that you already use. And finally, track those small wins, make your progress visible, and close your open loops at the end of the day by planning your next move in advance. The architecture of action isn't about being tougher than everybody else or having an ironclad will to succeed. It's about being strategic. It's about working with your neurology instead of fighting against it. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Mastery Project podcast. If you found this work helpful, please share it with a colleague who you think might benefit from it as well. If you found this information useful, drop a comment down below and let me know how you plan to use it in your everyday life.