Yeah, I'm really wary of the "when done properly, it's effective" rhetoric. It's like "we know this isn't effective, but that's because nobody does it properly". Well if it's impossible to do properly, how is it effective?

I think the reason monks have a (reported) 100% success rate is because they've perfected explanation/mentoring for many generations. Obviously, someone on HN paraphrasing an article they saw once isn't going to have the same effect.

I still see the irony, though. "it works 100% of the time, for 1% of people!" So it works 1% of the time then?

Knowing these things hasn't helped me at all in life, btw. It's just some trivia.

> I'm sure most smokers trying to quit think about how bad it is every single time, yet they can't.

No, this isn't it. It's trying to take control of the actual act of doing the thing. Being self-aware about its harm doesn't count.

So, you'd have to realize what you're doing before you get out the cigarette. The aim is to do it without relying on the compulsion so that the compulsion will eventually go away.

It's not just thinking about it really hard.

I didn't mean to suggest smokers trying to quit only think about how bad it is once their cig is lit. I don't understand your suggestion; that one can be more self-aware than noticing one doing something.

It's not about self-awareness, is the thing. If you notice you're doing something after you've already started doing it, then you already did it compulsively, without thinking. The goal is to start doing it on purpose so that the compulsion doesn't even have to happen at all. By doing this, you teach your brain that you don't need the compulsion anymore.

Is there any research to suggest that's a real thing? It certainly does not sound like something that should be possible when you put it this way.

I read a paper recently that proposed that procrastination involves a slow increase in anxiety as a deadline approaches and a stimulus that is conditioned by the removal of that anxiety. That is, chronic procrastinators receive a greater reward when they wait until the deadline. This is supported by animal studies.

It is possible that there is a similar mechanism here. The choice to delay gratification is akin to procrastination; the urge itself becomes a conditioned stimulus reinforced by the strong reward of delaying gratification until the scheduled time.

> That is, chronic procrastinators receive a greater reward when they wait until the deadline.

Yeah, absolutely. I have severe ADHD and this is my experience. I usually can't do something until it's completely necessary, and doing it at the last second is the most exciting/rewarding.

In school I used to finish all my homework before I even went home, because forcing myself to do that was more exciting/rewarding than doing it any other way. But this same mechanism is responsible for a bunch of my procrastination, too :)

I also tend to hate my chores a lot, absolutely despise doing them, but I think that's on purpose to try to make the act of completing them more rewarding. Completing something I don't care about is meh, getting rid of something I absolutely hate is good.

Not aware of any research on it, no. Monks do it, but I don't know if they do it in the exact same way I describe. I searched through my history to see if I could find the article where I heard this, but I can't find it.