Punishment Doesn’t Fix Procrastination. Here’s What Does.
If you know what to do, but you avoid doing it, what is the most effective way to address your avoidance? Is it a punitive consequence, i.e. fear that something bad will happen, or awareness? We have effectively used mindfulness-based accountability to drive behavior change for over a decade. But do negative outcomes or consequences work better?
Let’s dive into the question and see what we can find out.
Yes, in some studies, especially with a limited scope, we have seen fear of a negative outcome or consequence work. A randomized trial on weight loss found that people who put their own money at stake lost significantly more weight than those who didn’t, but the effect faded once the financial stakes were removed (Volpp et al., 2008). The problem is that the scope has to be really small and the behavior is short lived, remove the consequence and the behavior returns. Negative consequences or fear-based changes aren’t sticky.
To understand why negative consequences don’t stick, we have to dive a little deeper into why we avoid doing things that we want to do even when we have decided they are important. Note we aren’t considering here something someone else wants us to do. There is no lack of agency here, there is a lack of action.
Why We Avoid Important Tasks
The primary reason that we avoid doing something is that we have an aversion to doing it because it’s either unpleasant or overwhelming. Research backs this up. Task aversiveness, how unpleasant or overwhelming a task feels, is one of the strongest predictors of avoidance across hundreds of studies (Steel, 2007).
For example, let’s say you decide that you want to build out an onboarding process for new clients. This will improve customer experience, save time, and reduce errors. We’ve held enough people accountable to tasks like this to know you can really want to do it and also recognize that it is both unpleasant and overwhelming.
In our work, we don’t punish our clients for not completing the task or set up a negative consequence. The negative consequence already exists, customer complaints, internal errors that cost money, manpower, and time. Our clients come to us to address what they are already experiencing because external accountability creates a structure to start working on the unpleasant and overwhelming task. Our first step is usually to break it down into a smaller, doable, weekly action that over time adds up to completing the onboarding process.
While procrastination feels good in the moment, it almost always feels worse later. So by the time we are working together our clients are pretty tired of that cycle and are ready to try something new. Having a small doable step to get started, weekly accountability, and the awareness that being held accountable provides creates a positive cycle of change.
Why punishment makes task avoidance worse
When you feel like you are procrastinating something and have been for awhile, you already have lower self-compassion and more stress around the thing you need to do, and research suggests low self-compassion is actually part of why procrastination feels so stressful in the first place (Sirois, 2014).
We know the brain reacts differently to punishment if you’re a procrastinator. Brain imaging research found that when facing a punishment condition, non-procrastinators showed increased brain activity tied to self-control and monitoring, essentially locking in and focusing harder. Procrastinators didn’t get that same boost (Wypych et al., 2019). So instead of punishment sharpening focus the way it’s supposed to, for procrastinators the brain doesn’t switch on the extra control that usually helps in demanding moments, undercutting the very mechanism punishment is supposed to rely on.
What actually helps: naming it
Until you’ve been in an accountability process, it’s hard to see for yourself why you are avoiding something.
Self-compassion, treating yourself with the same understanding you’d offer a friend, has been linked to lower procrastination and stress (Sirois, 2014). Self-criticism does the opposite: the harder you are on yourself for procrastinating, the more likely you are to keep doing it.
Part of what self-compassion involves is naming what’s difficult for you without judgment, rather than beating yourself up about it.
This removes the charge around the action, “I’m lazy,” “I failed,” “I’m never going to get this done,” whatever you have been saying to yourself over and over, and transforms it into what’s actually holding you back.
Naming it might be:
– What if we don’t have enough business?
– We aren’t prepared to handle more business.
– I don’t know what I’m doing.
Why Awareness Creates Lasting Change
Once there is awareness of what is being avoided you can address it.
No punishment necessary. Punishment only drives behavior for one thing.
If I don’t make 10 calls this week, I have to give my buddy $200. Okay, I made 10 calls this week. Did I learn what was in my way? Can I apply what I learned to the next thing, and the thing after that I want to avoid? Or do I have to keep committing to sending my buddy $200 bucks?
Avoiding a negative consequence is not the same thing as understanding what you are really avoiding and facing it. The former is a short term solution, the latter is real learning you can apply over and over again.
Why Accountability Works
Though people often think that accountability is leveraging peer pressure, it’s actually much more elegant than that. As neutral observers, our job isn’t to apply pressure. Our role is to drive awareness through non-judgmental observation.
And that observation is ongoing. Naming what you’re avoiding once doesn’t dissolve the pattern permanently, new tasks bring new versions of the same overwhelm, and old patterns can resurface under stress. What makes this sustainable isn’t a single breakthrough conversation, it’s showing up consistently enough that naming what’s in your way becomes a repeatable skill instead of a one-time insight.
So although we might see some short term gain in punishment, what we really want is long term sustainable change so that we can consistently do the things we want to do, and that is by overcoming avoidance through awareness. The neutral, outside observer is the easiest most effective way to drive that awareness, name what we are really avoiding, and move through it faster than we would on our own.
References
Sirois, F. M. (2014). Procrastination and stress: Exploring the role of self-compassion. Self and Identity, 13(2), 128–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2013.763404
Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
Volpp, K. G., John, L. K., Troxel, A. B., Norton, L., Fassbender, J., & Loewenstein, G. (2008). Financial incentive-based approaches for weight loss: A randomized trial. JAMA, 300(22), 2631–2637. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2008.804
Wypych, M., Michałowski, J. M., Droździel, D., Borczykowska, M., Szczepanik, M., & Marchewka, A. (2019). Attenuated brain activity during error processing and punishment anticipation in procrastination: A monetary Go/No-go fMRI study. Scientific Reports, 9, 11492. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-48008-4