Research Recap with Skye: Procrastination

0:04All right. Welcome to Hacking your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD Brain. Today I'm joined by Sky Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways that we can give you. In this episode, we're gonna be discussing a paper called Brain potentials reveal reduced attention and error processing during a monetary go, no go task in procrastination.

0:35And this is a study that's looking at how procrastinators handle mistakes and try to stay focused, especially when tasks get harder. And how those differences in rewards and punishment affects those outcomes. So a lot there. And, uh, I'm gonna tell you, this paper has a ton of acronyms and so, uh, let's get into Yeah, a ton of acronyms. But we love our neuroscience papers because they show us how the brain is working differently, and I got asked a question about that on a podcast yesterday, and it's nice to be able to say.

1:02Yes, this is happening. This is different. Okay, so what they were looking at is they basically said, you know, procrastination, which we all know, but just to give you a reminder, is a phenomenon which people voluntarily. delay intended and necessary and or personally important tasks despite knowing that delaying will have more negative than positive consequences. We've all done that many times probably today. And so this is a huge thing people talk about all the time, so it's really important to get a sense of what's going on.

1:33Yeah, there's, and especially going what are the outcomes of these procrastination things like what causes, what's the outcome of procrastination beyond the task not getting done? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So they were looking at, um, they basically had 179 students. Only 48 of those were male, which is quite. Unusual, usually more males. Um, but they weren't specifically looking at ADHD, they were looking at procrastination. And I thought that was maybe an interesting difference in how they usually, they're like, we, this is how we figured out if these people have ADHD.

2:14They didn't do that in this study. They were looking for, they were working in, looking at people who. Just struggled. They, actually excluded participants with psychiatric or neurological illnesses. It was really a study where they were going, Hey, this is a like mental profile of what happens with ADHD and we're just gonna look at that. What did you think about that, by the way? So yeah, it was a very interesting study design being going, yeah, we're going to have this aspect of not taking ADHD into account and just using that profile.

2:53And there are some great ways to like that. opens up a lot of Pathways to like, oh, we're not just looking specifically ADHD, we're looking at what people with ADHD do, which is procrastinate. and I think that is why I have that problem with this design is where I'm like, this is what they're saying exists. And I'm like, Because often like looking at the why behind procrastination is a bigger issue than just saying procrastination happens. And with executive dysfunction, that changes why procrastination is happening.

3:27yeah, exactly. Exactly. So basically what they did was this was a combination of an activity and brain scans. So people were doing a modified version of a go no go task, which is basically. Looking at, um, yeah, how they are responding to things that say like, you've gotta start, you've gotta stop all of those different, things for monetary rewards specifically. And there was conversation about that, and then they were looking at, um, yeah, F MRIs and, um, and making sure that, uh, trying to scan their brain, which I don't know how, how helpful did you feel like the brain scan?

4:09it was interesting. Yeah, it was certainly interesting, but it, I don't know. I felt like it was a step that they didn't need with just looking at, it does give a lot of oh, this is how the brain is interacting during these tasks. Great. But the more important takeaways for this study all came from the results of the No go. No the go. No go. Part of it. And while they did relate the brain studies aspects of it, I was like, that's just a additional piece of data there.

4:43That's interesting, but not actually giving me meaningful information. yeah, exactly. It was nice to see, but it wasn't, it wasn't necessary, which is, which is not always the case. Like usually, um, usually it's the opposite. Um, when you're doing these kind of brain scans. And I do think it's important here to be like, Hey, we're not neuroscience Oh yeah. so that, that might be why we're like playing like, yeah, this isn't that important. This isn't what is interesting to us.

5:09We're interested in the actual results. And the neuroscientists might be going like, yeah, but Yeah, very true. Very look at how the brain is lighting up. And I'm like, yeah, I don't have enough background information to make that relevant to me. I haven't done, and yeah, I've done post-grad neuroscience, but. It still didn't hit. So if someone else has something that really mattered, like definitely let us know. That would be amazing. Maybe we'll have you on.

5:32but yeah, so basically they were looking at post era slowing. So they found that, post era slowing was increased in people who were high academic procrastinators. what, which was really interesting. It's the, now I've got another acronym that I forgot, the ERN, the error related negativity. Like that they, yeah, they were seeing this at as a, maybe related to problems and how they're allocating those brain resources. And this is why they were like really wanting to look at those brain scans.

6:10It's oh, how are we, how are they allocating these resources? these people that are, Academic procrastinators are doing this thing where they are having more problems, allocating resources and based on how they did the study, they're like, oh, this is, you know, like reduced motivational engagement. And I'm like, it's really hard to accurately measure in a study that is money was involved, you have the financial motivation there, but it's not, you know, it's like the difference between getting.

6:39$5 or $10 or something, Mm-hmm. when you're talking about this, then what they found was that they discussed Yeah. Procrastinators had problems with executive control. That's what they theorized. Um, and that they needed time to reorient their attention from committing a mistake to response execution in the following trial. Now I highlighted that 'cause I thought that was a really. Solid, you know, suggestion in terms of just the way that it describes how people work, you know, the way that people, um, with, you know, more of this, which they then discussed as potentially having ADHD, they need time to reorientate it reminded me of that bleed effect, that transition time conversation as well.

7:23Yeah. And it was also then really interesting too with the, differences between the, regular go no go versus the like higher intensity one. which, they had that like twist where it's oh yeah, the hard level. You now have procrastinators had a, significant dip in their performance because. Which is, this is where I find it very interesting 'cause this is where you see that executive function, if you are. So lemme describe what the hard level was first.

7:58So in the regular No go, go, no go. It's like you have, you know, a series of digits that are put on the screen, like, and then, you're like one through two, you push go and then. The rest of the digits you just don't, or something, you know? So there's like two things and you, and they're measuring how quickly you are pushing the button. But with the hard mode, you have to like really think about it because it's now, you have, a specific digit you're not supposed to push anything on.

8:27And then also if a digit is repeated, even if it's a go. So it's one was the go and you had one. Okay, go first. Then it repeats the one. Don't push it for the second time, so it's really amping up that oh, I have to think about what's on the screen and what previously happened, and so I can actually see being like, I basically be like pounding the key and forgetting it all the time, being like, I'm trying to get fast, but I'm not doing it right.

8:53It's also a funny one, because it does remind me of there is a relationship between ADHD, and these kinds of things and dyspraxia, and I feel like there is a conversation here about just general ability to move your body. Fast enough and all of those kinds of things coming into play as well. Like how good are your reaction times? I don't know if that's specifically related to ADHD, but, but it is a conversation. Like I, I think I would struggle to do that just because my body and my brain are not working at the same speed, generally speaking.

9:31Yeah. And it would also be interesting to see this with like frustration tolerance going in, Hmm. to do it in the beginning and then being like, I'm not getting it 'cause I'm going, trying to go too fast. And now I'm trying to the other way and I'm going too slow now. And it's, Yeah. Like for example, if they, and okay, we're, we're getting a little bit away from it. Um, but, you know, if they had, had somebody who was a procrast, an academic procrastinator who was also played a sport, whether that would've had a difference.

10:04It just, it, feels like it's a lot of. And I, these are always the cases. I'm not saying this isn't, this is, you know, a really good study. They tried to, think of everything, but it's just a curiosity. Yeah. And really if we're like just looking at this paper overall, yeah, there are some great things that we can take away. it's like just looking at this, procrastination as like this fundamentally linked to our like attentional fluctuations and the.

10:35Very much implies that, if we're just focusing on something like time management, that isn't going to help with procrastination because that's not the problem that's we're dealing with. Yeah, that's a really, really good point. Can you give me an example of, what this would look like in real life? I think for specifically like this is like being like, I have a deadline coming up and. In a month and being like, oh, I'm going to, trying to manage your time there beforehand is really hard.

11:07If we're looking at this purely from a procrastination, time management, oh, I'm gonna work at these times, all that stuff. This is oh, I need to have a bunch of other strategies in place so that I'm not procrastinating on this. Just having that month deadline is not enough for me to. Do that. That's, and it doesn't matter how well I'm putting together my calendar, if I don't have other things put in place, like accountability, like specific times I'm working with someone for the accountability and like working out the steps that need to happen.

11:41Yeah, exactly. It's funny actually, 'cause this is an academic example, and I always think of my clients, I've had clients in academia who write papers for a living, found that they almost entirely had to write papers with a team for that reason. Like the deadline, the single deadline was not. Doable and they procrastinated, a lot. And, in fact, that's why we're here doing this, doing this because it helps us both read academic articles together, um, as well.

12:12Yeah. And yeah, I think there's a lot that we can take out from this being like, oh yeah, okay. So procrastination isn't a failure of time management. It's a failure of other attentional difficulties. And if that's the case, let's not focus on time management. Let's focus on things I can do to amp up my motivation. Amp up my thing. Tiny amounts of money probably won't do it, but, having, rewards are often great for ADHD, Yeah, 100%. So they found that, yeah, the present data confirmed previous findings of executive dysfunctioning and academic procrastination, and they were observed at the neural and behavioral level, even when the task was relatively easy, but they became more pronounced behaviorally when the working memory load increased, which is, something we talk about all the time.

13:05That idea of memory and, you know, they had. it really did. This is the bit where they talked about ADHD. They talked about executive and attentional deficits were observed, are observed in ADHD and suggested to be related to cortical arri arousal caused by decreased tonic activity of the noradrenergic system. So they really were going in on saying like, okay, this is probably related to ADHD, but they really only brought that in at the end.