Time Management, Procrastination and Addiction

Using time wisely, but not obsessively and beating destructive patterns

Hey everyone! This week’s deep dive focuses on overcoming procrastination and addiction. The science is beautifully simple and practically helpful.

By the end, you’ll know how to respond to cravings and mood drops, how to get yourself motivated, how to overcome addictive tendencies and how to maintain a healthy baseline of dopamine. I hope you find it helpful!

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Time Management

This week I want to share a couple of my recent articles on time management. I think both topics are equally important amidst constant activity and distraction:

If you’re languishing, check out how to use your time wisely.

If you’re feeling overloaded, check out how to cure our ‘hurry sickness’.

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Proverb to Chew On – Proverbs 16:24

“Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.”

How might we apply this wisdom to our daily lives?

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Overcoming Procrastination (and Addiction)

In many ways, we are all trying to navigate a new world.

When I started school, phones were communication devices. When I finished, they were communication devices, televisions, video game consoles, supermarkets, books, clothing stores, town halls, notebooks, conferences and so much else that had never existed before.

Unsurprisingly, we struggle to regulate our use of these sudden superpowers. Any time we want we can socialise, work, shop, write, read and be entertained. Two symptoms of this struggle, with which we all struggle to varying degrees, are procrastination and addiction.

One of my favourite public intellectuals is determined to help people face the complexities of modern life with the help of modern neuroscience. Andrew Huberman, associate professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at Stanford University, is a hugely popular media presence, explaining how observations in neurobiology can improve things like sleep, training and procrastination. Huberman is brilliantly simple and practical. Seriously, if I can understand the science, anyone can.

Huberman recently released a podcast episode entitled, ‘Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination & Optimize Effort’, providing anyone the basic tools to overcome procrastination and addiction

Dopamine, among others things, regulates movement and motivation. Understanding the dynamics of this system will enable us to overcome procrastination and addiction, despite the constant threat of technology to distract and addict us.

The Dopamine Wave-Pool

In the first fifteen minutes, Huberman provides a non-essential summary of the neurocircuitry that underlies dopamine. The essential points are that 1) the pre-frontal cortex, which influences motivation/demotivation through dopamine, is also crucial in context interpretation and 2) the dopamine system functions like a wave-pool. There are a number of important observations to make as we explore these points.

1. Peaks and Troughs

   Desire for something produces a peak in dopamine. That is, when you want something, you feel motivated and excited to get it. But this peak is followed by an immediate trough, like how a wave drops after it crests. This trough is experienced as the lack of the desired object or activity.

2. Clues

   Because the pre-frontal cortex interprets context, it experiences this trough as the lack of the desired object or activity. As we progress towards satisfaction of this desire, it picks up clues that we are progressing, which increase dopamine in anticipation, keeping us on that path.

3. Reward Minus Expectation

   But satisfying the desire does not necessarily produce a dopamine peak. If you crave a bagel, you will get a boost in dopamine when you see bagels at the store and when you hear the toaster pop. But if you bite into the bagel and it is cold, ‘satisfaction’ of your desire will actually produce a dopamine trough. In other words, desire satisfaction produces a peak or a trough depending on this equation: reward minus expectation.

4. Paradoxical Pleasure

   Intense feelings of desire satisfaction (e.g. cocaine, video games, TikTok) produce high peaks, but also low troughs. Even worse, they lower your dopamine baseline. These waves are so big that they splash some water out of the pool. Along with this lower baseline, intense peaks increase cravings for the desired object. But when these cravings are satisfied, they produce a lower peak than the first and a lower trough.

5. Addiction

   From this point, it’s easy to see these as the dynamics of addiction. The addict, desperate to get out of this rut, can turn only to what got him or her into it in the first place: the desired object or activity.

6. Dopamine-Stacking

   Or they can try to dopamine-stack by adding in another desired object or activity. I did this as a teenager when I got bored playing FIFA and put YouTube on in the background, or starting eating a bag of chips. I have seen young high schoolers playing Fortnite spend the twenty seconds while the game loads on TikTok, with YouTube on in the background.

Overcoming Procrastination and Addiction

With the (relatively interesting!) science out of the way, let’s explore the implications through a series of obvious questions.

1. How should I respond to troughs in dopamine, especially those experienced as cravings?

What we should not do is return to the initially desired object, which will produce a lower peak and a lower trough, lower our dopamine baseline, increase our cravings and enter us into the dynamics of addiction. In time, dopamine levels will return to baseline. The waiting period is painful, but natural.

Nor should we dopamine-stack by adding in another desired object or activity. This will have the same effect of producing an unsustainably high peak in dopamine.

A subtle way we dopamine-stack is by artificially enhancing an activity towards which we already have some intrinsic motivation. For example, I love writing about ideas like these. When I begin to focus more on social media promotion and reach than writing these ideas for the sake of communicating them, I initially get more excited - daydreaming about a larger impact creates a rush of dopamine. But after an hour, I feel terrible. After a few days, I’m far less excited about writing than I would be if I focused on the ideas themselves and the people I’m writing for. Huberman details studies demonstrating that rewarding both kids and adults for a hobby they already enjoy (e.g. drawing) increases their dopamine initially. But, especially after the reward has been removed, motivation for the hobby drops below the initial level.

Stacking dopamine-releasing behaviours is a great way to ruin your favourite hobbies. So rather than enhancing pleasure with new or stacked sources, in the long run we are better off preserving our intrinsic enjoyment and motivation, despite the challenges.

2. How can I get myself motivated when I’m in a trough?

How does procrastination fit into this picture? Procrastination is a form of waiting in which the dissatisfaction of not reaching the desired state is put off by making oneself busy and perhaps trying to "generate momentum" for motivation. Often we procrastinate until anxiety kicks in as a motivating factor.

Instead of pushing through until we feel motivated, we find a task (e.g. folding the laundry) that seems more challenging and/or productive than waiting. But, Huberman suggests, in reality this is easier, or else we wouldn't choose it as a natural result of our demotivated state.

Instead he interestingly suggests doing something effortful or ‘painful’ (in a non-harmful sense), such as having a cold shower, to steepen the dopamine trough, and so shorten its duration and speed up the return to, or even above, baseline.

3. How can I reject my cravings and overcome my addictions?

It is important to start by saying that addiction is complicated and some addictions are more complicated than others. I am not saying, nor did Huberman, that this will cure addictions like alcoholism. But these are the exact dynamics that emerge from the scientific literature on addiction, including conditions like alcoholism.

Just knowing the dynamics described above has already helped me significantly to overcome addictive tendencies around technology. As these ideas sink in and you start to make connections to your daily life, you’ll start to see methods by which you might reject cravings and overcome addictions.

One such method is “binding”. Since the pre-frontal cortex is involved with context interpretation, it is great at binding activities to contexts. You might choose to only ever go on your phone in a certain area of the house (e.g. the living room). You might choose to never go on your phone in a certain area of the house (e.g. the bedroom). There is a good chance you’ve already observed this dynamic in your own life. For example, when I walk into my parents house I instantly get hungry (sorry Mum and Dad).

A helpful observation is that it takes about thirty days of abstinence to reset context interpretation. It gives hope knowing that rejecting your cravings actually reduces your cravings - the more you find ways to overcome addictive behaviours, the less addicted you will be.

Tip: I suspect this will be much easier in community and accountability than trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

4. How can I maintain or increase a healthy dopamine baseline?

A healthier dopamine baseline will lead to increased motivation and movement, and perhaps less desire to artificially inflate it. Genetics and circumstances dictate baseline level to some extent. But Huberman asserts that a handful of common-sense practices are proven to enhance baseline dopamine:

i) Sufficient quality sleep and/or non-sleep deep rest (NSDR)

ii) Nutrition, particularly intake of tyrosine)

iii) Exposure to sunlight, especially in the morning. Huberman advocates 5-10 mins minimum on a sunny day, facing East.

iv) Physical movement is often associated with a peak in dopamine but also increases dopamine baseline for hours after exercise.

v) Cold water immersion (uncomfortably cold but safe) up to at least the neck, preferably early in the day.

Warning: after strength training, cold water immersion can suppress adaptation, especially hypertrophy.