I have to laugh whenever "hedonic pleasure" is brought into the discussion.

If avoiding your thesis by emptying the dishwasher is "giving into pleasure," why is there so little pleasure involved, and is it hedonism again when the next day you feel inspired and give into the pleasure of writing your thesis? At the same time, the very fact that your levels of motivation, courage, and anxiety fluctuate all the time invalidates the advice, "You're never going to feel like doing it (so just do it)." This is a form of motivational advice where you take a truth and wrap it in a lie. Another example is, "Nobody enjoys their job." Plenty of people enjoy their jobs, so what is really being said? Basically that the current discomforts are to be expected and should not cause distress. It's emotional invalidation in a digestible pill, though it may trigger an adverse reaction.

We are emotional animals with many emotional needs and colorful emotional states. We should learn to be aware of our own needs, and practice recognizing and tolerating our emotional states. For example, acting with courage involves being able to tolerate the fear state, which is a skill that takes practice. With awareness of your emotions, you can absolutely increase happiness and pleasure in your life, by doing activities you enjoy and hopefully going into a line of work you take some pleasure in. Arrange your life to make your inner animal happy. Acknowledge when your needs are not being met.

Whenever I see the term "hedonic pleasure" used, it is surrounded by a useless caricature of the human emotional life. In this caricature, all positive emotions are equivalent; all negative emotions are equivalent; and avoiding a negative emotion is equivalent to seeking a positive emotion. Never mind what's causing the emotions in the first place!

Hedonism is about the morality of sensual pleasure. Imagine you have enough money in the bank that you never have to work again, and in fact you can live a life of some luxury. What should you devote your life to now? Maximizing your personal pleasure? Or should you invest in your personal relationships, or try to make the world a better place? What's the most good or "moral" path? Obviously, the society we live in frowns on the hedonistic choice. All of this has nothing to do with procrastination, except by a very strained analogy. If in procrastination, we feel that our "voice of reason" is being drowned out by other voices representing baser drives, we can smear these other voices by portraying them as mindless pleasure-seekers — supporters of the Pleasure Party — and make our opposition to this party into a moral or philosophical issue. Meanwhile, the truth could be that the "voice of reason" is an echo of your parents insisting you need a PhD using tactics of shame and fear, while among your "baser drives" is the desire to feel a sense of your own worth as a person.

Humans don't "seek" emotions, anyway, we feel them. When you think about your homework, that thought triggers an emotional cascade. The trick is altering that emotional response over time. When you play a video game level, you aren't "seeking" the hit of completing the level; you are actually feeling a positive emotion throughout the whole level of being engaged with making progress towards a goal. When you even think about going to play video games, you get some of that feeling. This feeling is a hugely positive thing, but like all emotions, you need to be on decent terms with it so you can reason with it, so hear it out; feel it; and then recruit some other voices to the conversation.