Research Recap with Skye: Procrastination
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 Skye Waterson for our Research Recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what it says, how it was conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways that we can give you.
In this episode, we’re going to be discussing a paper called "Brain potentials reveal reduced attention and error processing during a monetary go/no-go task in procrastination." This study looks at how procrastinators handle mistakes and try to stay focused, especially when tasks get harder, and how those differences in rewards and punishment affect those outcomes. So, there is a lot there—and I’m going to tell you, this paper has a ton of acronyms. Let’s get into it.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/289
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William Curb: All 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 Skye Waterson for our Research Recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what it says, how it was conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways that we can give you.
In this episode, we’re going to be discussing a paper called "Brain potentials reveal reduced attention and error processing during a monetary go/no-go task in procrastination." This study looks at how procrastinators handle mistakes and try to stay focused, especially when tasks get harder, and how those differences in rewards and punishment affect those outcomes. So, there is a lot there—and I’m going to tell you, this paper has a ton of acronyms. Let’s get into it.
Skye Waterson: Yeah, a ton of acronyms. But we love our neuroscience papers because they show us how the brain is working differently. I actually got asked a question about that on a podcast yesterday, and it’s nice to be able to say, "Yes, this is happening. This is different."
So, what they were looking at is procrastination—which we all know, but just as a reminder, is a phenomenon where people voluntarily delay intended, 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. Since this is a huge thing people talk about all the time, it’s really important to get a sense of what’s going on.
William Curb: Yeah, especially looking at the outcomes of these procrastination things. Like, what causes it, and what is the outcome of procrastination beyond the task just not getting done?
Skye Waterson: Yeah, exactly. They looked at 179 students. Only 48 of those were male, which is quite unusual; usually, there are more males. However, they weren't specifically looking at ADHD; they were looking at procrastination. I thought that was an interesting difference in how they usually operate, where they say, "This is how we figured out if these people have ADHD." They didn't do that in this study. They were looking for people who just struggled. They actually excluded participants with psychiatric or neurological illnesses.
William Curb: It was really a study where they were saying, "Hey, this is a mental profile of what happens with ADHD, and we’re just going to look at that."
Skye Waterson: What did you think about that, by the way?
William Curb: It was a very interesting study design—having this aspect of not taking ADHD into account and just using that profile. There are some great ways to look at that. It opens up a lot of pathways, like, "Oh, we’re not just looking specifically at ADHD; we’re looking at what people with ADHD do, which is procrastinate."
Skye Waterson: And I think that is why I have a problem with this design. I’m like, "This is what they’re saying exists," but often looking at the why behind procrastination is a bigger issue than just saying procrastination happens. With executive dysfunction, that changes why procrastination is happening.
William Curb: Yeah, exactly.
Skye Waterson: So, basically, what they did was a combination of an activity and brain scans. People were doing a modified version of a "go/no-go" task, which is basically looking at how they respond to things that say, "You’ve got to start" or "You’ve got to stop" for monetary rewards specifically.
There was conversation about that, and then they were looking at fMRIs to scan their brains. I don’t know—how helpful did you feel like the brain scan was? It was interesting.
William Curb: Yeah, it was certainly interesting, but I felt like it was a step they didn't need. It does give a lot of, "Oh, this is how the brain is interacting during these tasks," which is great. But the more important takeaways for this study all came from the results of the "go/no-go" part of it. While they did relate the brain study aspects of it, I felt that was just an additional piece of data. It’s interesting, but not actually giving me meaningful information.
Skye Waterson: Yeah, exactly. It was nice to see, but it wasn't necessary—which is not always the case. Usually, it's the opposite when you're doing these kinds of brain scans.
William Curb: And I do think it's important here to say, "Hey, we're not neuroscientists."
Skye Waterson: Oh, yeah.
William Curb: So that might be why we’re playing it down, like, "Yeah, this isn't that important; this isn't what is interesting to us." We’re interested in the actual results. The neuroscientists might be saying, "Yeah, but 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."
Skye Waterson: I’ve done post-grad neuroscience, but it still didn't hit. So, if someone else has something that really mattered, definitely let us know. That would be amazing—maybe we'll have you on.
Basically, they were looking at "post-error slowing." They found that post-error slowing was increased in people who were high academic procrastinators, which was really interesting.
William Curb: It’s the—now I’ve got another acronym that I forgot—the ERN, the "error-related negativity." They were seeing this as maybe related to problems in how they are allocating those brain resources. This is why they really wanted to look at those brain scans: "How are they allocating these resources?" People who are academic procrastinators have more problems allocating resources, and based on how they did the study, they attributed this to "reduced motivational engagement." It’s really hard to accurately measure that in a study where money is involved.
Skye Waterson: You have the financial motivation there, but it’s not much—it's like the difference between getting $5 or $10. What they found was that procrastinators had problems with executive control. That’s what they theorized—that they needed time to reorient their attention from committing a mistake to response execution in the following trial.
I highlighted that because I thought it was a really solid suggestion in terms of describing how people work. People with more of this—which they then discussed as potentially having ADHD—need time to reorient. It reminded me of that "bleed effect" or transition time conversation.
William Curb: Yeah. And it was also really interesting with the differences between the regular "go/no-go" versus the higher-intensity one. They had that twist where, on the hard level, procrastinators had a significant dip in their performance. This is where you see that executive function.
Let me describe what the hard level was first. In the regular "go/no-go," you have a series of digits put on the screen—say, one through two—and you push "go." For the rest of the digits, you don't. They measure how quickly you push the button. But with "hard mode," you have to really think about it because there is a specific digit you aren't supposed to push anything on, and also, if a digit is repeated—even if it's a "go" digit—you don't push it. If "one" was the "go" and it repeats, don't push it the second time. It’s really amping up the need to think about what’s on the screen versus what previously happened. I can see myself just pounding the key and forgetting it all the time, trying to be fast but not doing it right.
Skye Waterson: It’s also funny because it reminds me that there is a relationship between ADHD, these kinds of things, and dyspraxia. I feel like there is a conversation here about general ability to move your body fast enough. I don't know if reaction time is specifically related to ADHD, but it is a conversation. I think I would struggle to do that just because my body and my brain are not working at the same speed, generally speaking.
William Curb: Yeah. And it would also be interesting to see this with frustration tolerance. You try to do it in the beginning and then you're like, "I'm not getting it because I'm trying to go too fast," and then you go the other way and you're going too slow.
Skye Waterson: Yeah. For example, if they had someone who was an academic procrastinator who also played a sport, would that have made a difference? It’s just a curiosity. I’m not saying this isn’t a really good study—they tried to think of everything—but it’s a thought.
William Curb: Yeah. Overall, if we’re looking at this paper, there are some great takeaways. Procrastination is fundamentally linked to our attentional fluctuations. This 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 core problem we’re dealing with.
Skye Waterson: Yeah, that’s a really, really good point. Can you give me an example of what this would look like in real life?
William Curb: I think specifically, this is like having a deadline coming up in a month. Trying to manage your time beforehand is really hard. If we’re looking at this purely from a procrastination/time management standpoint—like, "I’m going to work at these times"—it's not enough. I need to have a bunch of other strategies in place so that I’m not procrastinating. Just having that month-long deadline doesn't work for me. It doesn’t matter how well I put together my calendar if I don’t have other things in place, like accountability, working with someone at specific times, and working out the steps that need to happen.
Skye Waterson: Yeah, exactly. It’s funny because this is an academic example, and I always think of my clients in academia who write papers for a living. They found they almost entirely had to write papers with a team for that reason. The single deadline was not doable and they procrastinated a lot. In fact, that’s why we’re here doing this together—it helps us both read academic articles.
William Curb: Yeah. I think there’s a lot we can take from this: procrastination isn't a failure of time management; it's a failure of other attentional difficulties. 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. Tiny amounts of money probably won’t do it, but rewards are often great for ADHD.
Skye Waterson: Yeah, 100%. They found that the data confirmed previous findings of executive dysfunctioning and academic procrastination. These were observed at the neural and behavioral levels 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.
This is the bit where they talked about ADHD. They mentioned that executive and attentional deficits observed in ADHD are suggested to be related to cortical arousal caused by decreased tonic activity of the noradrenergic system. So they really were suggesting this is probably related to ADHD, but they only brought that in at the end.