This is true for me as well. Procrastinating happens when I feel shitty (which is essentially every morning). It's my brain requesting easy dopamine hits like YouTube or CS:GO so that it can feel better. But those things only help your brain feel better in the very short term (ie. while they are occurring). After you're done and you close YouTube or the video game, you still feel shitty so you need another easy dopamine source to stimulate your brain again. This continues the cycle and it's very hard to break out of because each source of easy dopamine leaves you feeling crappy after engaging with it, so you find another one which does the same thing. Once you've started that cycle for any given day it's extremely difficult to break because your brain was built to be addicted to dopamine. This worked when we only got hits of dopamine for following animal tracks to hunt or when we saw the smoke from the sticks we were rubbing together and were about to start fire, but today it just doesn't work.

To solve this the steps listed in the article are pretty good actually, but for me it is unrealistic to just remove all the apps on my phone/computer. It doesn't solve the underlying problem and is pretty simple to just download whatever app again or use my tv instead in a moment of boredom/sadness/frustration. The real key is to make each task that you have to do for work so incredibly simple (ie break them down to the smallest units possible) that avoiding the task becomes an absolute joke. I basically start with super specific tasks to get me started, and then ramp up once I'm engaged. Sometimes the first few tasks are literally "Open the codebase", "Change the header text to something better", "make element x have a border radius". One thing I've noticed is that I always try to think of every edge case and what the best way to code something would be before even typing anything. Planning is good, but eventually it hits a point where I get annoyed or stressed because I can't find the most optimal way to do something and then....I procrastinate. So what I've started doing is if I feel this starting to happen I implement the feature or whatever I'm working on in the EASIEST way I can think of at that moment. If I have even a tiny idea of how it could be done, I start working on it that way, and then later as I get further along I can clean it up or reimplement it a different way. That's been pretty useful to me, it kind of goes back to breaking problems down but it's slightly different.

The last thing is exercise in the morning. Starting my day with something difficult sets the tone for the whole day. Sure, I could still go watch YouTube after working out but usually I feel good about the workout and my body that I don't need the easy dopamine hits after that and it's easier for me to get started on work.

I do wish there was an inherent way to make productive work the source of easy dopamine hits but I haven't quite figured that one out, yet. Depression is momentum. If you're feeling bad, it's a spiral down (wasting time watching TV, then your brain is so fried from that that you don't cook dinner and instead just eat an unhealthy meal, then dessert because you're still sad, etc). If you're feeling good it's a spiral up. Keep trying, keep working at it. Harder things (like work and exercise) will help you feel better in the long term. The things we try to avoid; YouTube, tv, video games, will make your brain stimulated in the moment but you fall further and further into depression (or I do at least).

Hopefully any of that was helpful but it may not even apply to you at all