Why we procrastinate on joy — and how to stop
During the pandemic, researchers found the perfect moment to study when people would find the perfect moment to restart enjoyable events.
Usually, when we think about procrastination, we think about delaying the hard, boring, or unpleasant things in life — paying bills, doing laundry, or meeting work deadlines. The bulk of scientific research focuses on why we delay pain, not pleasure.
But we can also put off things we enjoy — catching up with a friend we haven’t seen in a while, visiting a nearby attraction, or opening that expensive bottle of wine.
A recent study published in the journal PNAS Nexus explored this hidden side of procrastination. And it found a surprising pattern — the longer we put off doing something we enjoy, the more likely we are to continue putting it off.
This may be because of the “psychological drama” we build up around the experience, suggested Ed O’Brien, the study’s author and an associate professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
It’s as if we believe that our first time back to, say, a favorite restaurant or reconnecting with a friend “shouldn’t be wasted. It should be kind of momentous and important and really matter to me,” he said.
We procrastinate not because of the cost or difficulty of doing something, but because we want to maximize the pleasure and specialness when it arrives.
But by doing so, we risk waiting in vain for a moment that may never come.
The research suggests that it’s a cognitive “trap” we can fall into where “people are missing out on lots of immediate happiness and lots of immediate enjoyment,” O’Brien said.
Waiting on joy
Ironically, the researchers had been putting off this project on procrastination — until the Coronavirus pandemic provided an unexpected natural experiment.
With many enjoyable activities — going to restaurants, theaters, and parties; travel; and visiting family — on pause, the researchers could see how long it took people to jump back in once they deemed it safe to do so.
O’Brien and a colleague asked 500 adults: How long was it since you got to enjoy each of these activities?
Then they asked: Did you return to that activity as soon as you thought it was safe, available, and attractive? Or did you delay?
Surprisingly, the longer participants reported not being able to do something, the more likely they were to wait even more.
“Once restaurants were back open and they felt safe and comfortable … they actually waited even longer because they didn’t want their first time back to a restaurant to just be on a random Tuesday without a good crowd,” O’Brien said. “They were waiting for the perfect time to celebrate that coming back moment. So, ironically, they waited even longer.”
A long gap seems to precede an even longer gap.
The same pattern held for something more ordinary: reaching out to a friend.
In one experiment, the researchers asked 200 participants to think about a close friend they had communicated with recently (a short gap) or one they had communicated with some time back (a long gap).
Then, the participants were asked to choose what they wanted to do with their time in the laboratory: text that close friend or transcribe nonsense text — a purposefully mundane task.
In theory, texting a friend should have been both easier and more fun.
But the longer the gap, the more people hesitated and opted to do the boring task instead.
There appeared to be immediate negative consequences: After the experiment, participants who chose not to text the friend reported being less happy, probably because they did something boring instead.
Even when the researchers controlled for different confounding factors in another experiment, involving 1,000 participants — making sure that the friends were equally close and that there was no social anxiety or fear of social rejection — people persisted in procrastinating when there was a long gap, even when it would have been enjoyable.
Why do we procrastinate doing things we enjoy?
The new research suggests that people delay enjoyable experiences to maximize the benefits and avoid “spoiling the moment,” O’Brien said.
“‘Right now’ always feels insufficiently special compared to any better moment in the future,” he said.
This mindset may be shaped by what behavior psychologists call “occasion-matching,” a phenomenon in which people really care about when and where they enjoy things. We might wait to open an expensive bottle of wine for the perfect celebration even if it would taste just as good right now.
“Ironically, the thing that really builds dust is the really fine wine,” O’Brien said
At the same time, we tend to believe we will have more time and energy in the future to do the things we like, which may be why people who live near landmarks and attractions often put off going to see them, as one 2010 study found.
(Research also suggests that we tend to believe difficult tasks will somehow get easier to do in the future.)
However, while this general tendency is “important and interesting,” there may be more than one explanation for why different people procrastinate, said Akira Miyake, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “I think things are much more complex, and we need to start paying attention to idiosyncrasies or adopting more person-specific ways of looking at why this is happening,” he said.
For example, returning to a fun activity after a long break might require more effort to reacclimate, which is aversive. Or seeking out specialness might relate to perfectionism, which is associated with procrastination tendencies in general, said Miyake, who was not involved in the study.
Plus, other goals we have may take more precedence, he said. “In everyday settings, you always pursue multiple goals,” Miyake said.
How to stop putting off enjoyable experiences
We may not always be aware that we are procrastinating doing things that make us happy even when it comes at a cost, but there are strategies to help us, experts said.
Notice the trap. If we are more aware of the tendency to continue delaying positive things, we can catch ourselves and subvert it, O’Brien said.
Change the friction level. Borrowing from research on habit formation: If you want to do something positive, make it easier to do it. Come up with ways to remind yourself of what you want to do so you don’t forget it, Miyake said.
Schedule fun. Making a rule to do something enjoyable at a set time could make it easier to follow through than simply relying on willpower alone, Miyake said.
Change your mindset about what’s special. Trying to get over the trap of specialness may be key.
In one last set of experiments, O’Brien and his colleagues tested different strategies to get people to return to their long-delayed enjoyable activities sooner.
A strategy that surprisingly did not work was having participants reframe how much time had elapsed as not being that long in the grand scheme of things; they were still not more likely to jump back in compared with the control group, which received no such instruction.
Instead, what worked was reframing what could count as a special occasion.
“Think about how any moment can be made to feel extra special from the right perspective,” O’Brien said. “You can make any random Tuesday feel extra special if you really think about it.”