How Dog Training Ended My Lifelong Procrastination
By: Actualization Hub
Tags: Dog Training, Productivity, Psychology, Self Help, Procrastination

For the past 8 months I’ve been dating this girl. And she’s pretty neat-o. Her dog on the other hand is a huge pain in the ass. He won’t come near pretty much anyone other than her, especially men, and took months to come anywhere near me or follow my commands despite seeing him several hours a week. At first, I thought he was just disobedient or poorly trained, but eventually after significant research and learning more about his history (rigorous training as a puppy, no trauma, etc) it became clear that he was just temperamentally anxious despite her providing above average dog mothering.

As someone with obsessive tendencies (to put it lightly), and an unhealthy fixation on controlling my environment and being liked (apparently, even by non human creatures) I turned my research oriented brain towards the world of dog training.

Through my at least a few dozen hours of study, I’ve learned that modifying dog behavior can have hundreds of books written about it and take years to successfully implement and refine, but that ultimately the entire field more or less boils down to one thing: Conditioning.

As you may recall from your high school psychology text book: Conditioning is simply the idea that behaviors which elicit good feelings are reproduced and behaviors which elicit bad feelings are avoided. Further, in Classical Conditioning, a neutral stimuli paired repeatedly with a positive or negative one will eventually adopt that positive or negative feeling. In its most famous example, Pavlov would ring a bell whenever he fed a dog and eventually just the ringing of the bell would cause the dog to salivate, associating it with the impending food.

On the flip side, one can just as easily accidentally associate negative behavior with a positive reward. For example, dogs pull on their leash because they naturally walk much faster than humans and want to explore all the stimulating new sights, sounds, and smells around them. Humans often foolishly “follow” them in this endeavor, and the dog learns that tight leash = gets where he wants to go. Eventually, most people get frustrated by the constant pulling, and then yank the leash and scold their dog in an effort to get him to stop. But the dog doesn’t understand. All he knows is that he feels pain and fear, which he now associates with his owner (often causing him to want to escape, furthering his pulling of the leash) and even worse: the slack of the leash that occurs before the yank teaches him that slack = pain. As a result, a novice dog owner is actually most likely to train their dog to pull more, not less.

An experienced dog owner on the other hand knows the way to correct this behavior is to gently stop the walk whenever the dog pulls, wait for the leash to slacken and for his attention to be on them, and then to continue the walk, repeating this every time he pulls. Eventually he learns that slack leash = gets to continue enjoying his walk, and thus he stops the habit of pulling.

Now you might be asking: Matt, what does dog training have to do with procrastination? Well my dear reader: despite human’s big nifty prefrontal cortex’s — the “newest” part of the brain that makes us distinct from other animals in our ability to abstract, plan, and defer gratification — we really aren’t all that much different from dogs, at least when it comes to our limbic brain — the part responsible for emotion, fight or flight, pleasure seeking, and pain avoidance. The problem of procrastination (and, inversely, impulsiveness, but that is for another article) occurs when the PFC struggles to override the limbic desire.

You see: just like a dog, your limbic brain seeks reward and runs from pain. If it weren’t for the general successful control by your PFC, you’d eat every sugary thing you could get your hands on, sexually assault every pretty girl in your vicinity, punch in the face every person that annoys you, and never once go to the gym or study for a test.

Thankfully though, our PFC understands that dying of a heart attack would make us not alive, that assaulting people will get us sent to jail, and that we must do conscientious things we don’t necessarily enjoy so that we can have money for food and shelter and buying air guns to murder the bunny rabbits that eat all the vegetables in our garden (or maybe that is my limbic desire… let’s moves on) . However sometimes our PFC doesn’t override as effectively as he could, and thus results: procrastination.

Procrastination is the state of being where your PFC says “hey stop doing that pleasurable thing that has no long term benefit, and start doing this painful thing that does” to which our limbic brain responds “kick rocks, nerd” and goes back to binge watching the entire third season of Stranger Things.

To overcome procrastination, we must understand how our limbic brain works, and devise strategies to coral it in to doing what is in our long term best interest.

Coming back to the dog training: think of your limbic brain as a dog … a brain dog— mostly a dumb, pleasure seeking, pain avoiding brain dog — and your PFC as the human owner — capable of complex reasoning and abstraction (but also seemingly too stupid to realize that not everything operates in the same way it does). Just like with walking our real dog, the PFC’s complex reasoning and abstraction capabilities can, when managed correctly, train the brain dog to behave well, but when managed incorrectly, it can train the brain dog to behave poorly.

If you struggle with procrastination, it is because you are using the equivalent of the “yank and scold” method.

Often it is via setting unbelievably unrealistic expectations, tying the entirety of your worth as a human in to meeting them, and then berating yourself in to complete self contempt when you inevitably fail to do so… and I’m sure you’ve managed to find and expertly implement dozens of other ingenious and creative ways to condition your brain dog to run screaming from that thing you know you should be doing.

So how do you fix it? Well, clearly, forcing your brain dog to do the painful thing is not efficient, and further, berating him and ruminating about how he “should” do this thing just creates even more negative association with the activity, causing even more resistance.

Instead, you must make doing the thing your brain dog sees as painful and thus avoids, into something pleasurable that he will instead seek out (or at least put up with).

Now the specifics of what works for you in any given situation will be unique, but basically it comes down to having a conversation with yourself, determining why you associate the thing with pain, devising how to mitigate or reframe the pain, and then finally formulating how to instead make it a rewarding experience.

For example: I have dozens of outlines for articles like these; the first 80% done, but getting them from 80% to published I have been procrastinating for weeks. The first thing I tried was to decide that I should write whichever article was easiest. At first, it was the article that was already a video, so it was an “easy win” (published here), but the second article that was closest to done — How To Improve Yourself 10X Faster — I avoided working on, so I checked in with myself again and concluded that I should write about the topic I was most interested in at the moment (procrastination). This almost got me there but still: avoidance. After further thinking and writing about it I realized that I was fixated on numerous unrealistic expectations like “I need to write amazing articles ASAP so I can escape the 9–5 I hate and get financial freedom” and “Finally ‘prove to everyone’ that I am ‘actually good at something’ by ‘wowing them with my writing’”. And then to make it worse I of course had this “hell” on the other side that if I didn’t write perfect articles everyone would love and be so amazed by that I could live of them, then that must mean I am a total failure who will never be worth anything, stuck at a 9–5 forever, and never be able to use my skills in a way that is meaningful to me.

When you really dig down, and see that you have constructed this giant elaborate fiction in your head, you start to realize that it’s like being frustrated that your newly acquired puppy can’t do backflips off of a high dive on command. Just like with your puppy: you need to give your brain dog something challenging enough to be stimulating but not so challenging that he will fail, reward him when he succeeds, and only once he masters what you’ve set out introduce new challenges.

So what finally got me to write the article? Well I decided that 1. I just have to “journal” about the topic of procrastination. No format. No structure. No goal. Just write like I already enjoy, but with the slight tweak of sticking to one topic. 2. That I have to work on it at least once a day, but am only allowed to work on it until I don’t want to anymore — depending on my mood at the time, that was sometimes 5 minutes, others almost 2 hours. And 3. that after I had put in my block, I could reward myself with whatever I wanted without any guilt or self attack. Maybe that was that I get to eat out for dinner, or have a piece of chocolate, or scroll through twitter for an hour, whatever I needed to do to associate writing with dopamine release.

What ended up happening is that I wrote a crappy incoherent article at first but it began the process of organizing the thoughts in my mind, and that felt good. So then I rewrote it and it was better, and that felt good, and so I rewrote it again, and then finally some clean up here and there and now you have this somewhat coherent potentially useful piece that I feel proud of and am motivated by to write another.

The key was making sure that I had reasonable expectations with reasonable goals and doing everything I could to associate the act of writing with positive feelings. This process is natural and you do it for most things, but sometimes — for long convoluted reason I won’t get in to — the process needs a little conscious help.

So, to sum it all up, if you want to stop procrastinating you need to:

Figure out what pain you are trying to avoid. Examine that pain and figure out ways to reframe or mitigate it. Set a challenging but enjoyable goal and then reward the heck out of yourself after you do your task, ensuring you associate it with as much positive emotion as possible. Be conscious of when you start feeling negative or avoidant and re examine and re build your plan to keep it in the Goldilocks Zone of “challenging but enjoyable”.

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If you found this article helpful, please help keep me from procrastinating the rest by giving it a clap or sharing it and please comment below your favorite technique for overcoming your own procrastination, as I’m sure there are plenty more that we could all benefit from!