Estimated Reading Time: 15–17 minutes

There is a familiar moment that happens so quickly we often fail to notice it. You sit down to complete something important, but before you have really begun, your hand reaches for your phone. You come home after a demanding day and finally have an hour with nothing urgent to do, yet instead of enjoying the quiet, you immediately turn on a television show, open social media, start cleaning, or search for something else to occupy your mind. A difficult conversation ends, and within minutes you are checking emails, browsing online shops, reorganizing a drawer, or suddenly becoming very interested in a task you had ignored for weeks. We usually describe these behaviors with one convenient word: distraction. Sometimes we go further and turn them into judgments about ourselves. We decide that we lack discipline, have poor concentration, waste too much time, or simply need to develop better habits. Yet distraction is not always primarily an attention problem. Sometimes, it is an emotional strategy.

The more revealing question, therefore, may not be Why am I so easily distracted? but What becomes noticeable when I stop distracting myself? For one person, the answer may be anxiety about an uncertain future. For another, it may be loneliness that becomes more obvious when the house is quiet. Someone else may encounter disappointment, shame, resentment, grief, boredom, self-doubt, or the uncomfortable awareness that something in their life needs to change. The activity we reach for may seem completely unrelated to the emotion underneath it, but psychologically it can serve an important function: it changes what occupies our attention and temporarily reduces contact with an uncomfortable internal experience.

This does not mean that distraction is inherently unhealthy. Shifting attention is one of the many ways human beings regulate emotion, and sometimes temporarily stepping away from distress is exactly what we need. Emotion regulation involves the processes through which people influence the emotions they experience, when they experience them, and how those emotions are expressed or managed (Gross, 1998). The problem is not that we sometimes watch a film instead of thinking about our worries, become absorbed in a hobby after a difficult day, or decide that we do not have the emotional capacity to process something immediately. The difficulty begins when distraction becomes so automatic that we rarely discover what we are distracting ourselves from. When every uncomfortable feeling is quickly covered with stimulation, activity, information, entertainment, food, work, conversation, or scrolling, we may become increasingly skilled at escaping our inner experience without becoming equally skilled at understanding it.

What You Will Learn

• Why distraction can function as emotional regulation rather than simply a failure of concentration.

• Which emotions commonly hide beneath the urge to stay busy, scroll, procrastinate, or seek constant stimulation.

• Why emotional avoidance can feel helpful in the short term while becoming costly when it turns into a rigid pattern.

• How procrastination may sometimes be an attempt to change how you feel rather than a problem with time management.

• Why identifying and naming emotions can make them easier to approach.

• How to distinguish healthy, intentional distraction from automatic emotional avoidance.

• Practical ways to become more comfortable noticing difficult feelings without becoming overwhelmed by them.

Distraction Is Not the Enemy

A useful conversation about distraction must begin by removing the assumption that emotionally healthy people should always face every feeling immediately. Human beings regulate their emotions in many ways, including changing situations, redirecting attention, reinterpreting events, solving problems, seeking social support, expressing feelings, and sometimes deliberately putting an emotion aside until they are better able to deal with it. Gross's influential process model of emotion regulation includes attentional deployment as one point at which people can influence their emotional responses, which means that changing what we focus on is not inherently dysfunctional; it is part of the normal architecture of emotional regulation (Gross, 1998).

Imagine receiving upsetting news ten minutes before you have to give an important presentation. You may consciously decide, I cannot deal with this fully right now. I will focus on the presentation and return to it afterward. That temporary shift of attention may be adaptive. Similarly, after an exhausting week, watching a comedy, going for a walk, playing a game, or spending time with friends may give the nervous system needed relief. Emotional health does not require endless introspection, and there is no psychological prize for forcing yourself to analyze every uncomfortable feeling the moment it appears.

The more meaningful distinction is between choosing distraction and depending on distraction to avoid contact with your internal experience. Intentional distraction usually feels flexible. You can decide when to use it, recognize what you are taking a break from, and eventually return to what needs your attention. Automatic distraction feels different. The moment stimulation disappears, discomfort emerges, and almost immediately you begin searching for another source of stimulation. One episode ends, so another begins. You put your phone down and pick it up again seconds later without making a conscious decision. You finish one task and immediately invent another. You keep something playing in the background even when you are not watching it. Silence itself begins to feel uncomfortable. At that point, distraction may be telling you something important: perhaps the real difficulty is not what you are moving toward, but what you are trying to move away from.

What Are You Trying Not to Feel?

Psychological research offers a useful concept for understanding this pattern: experiential avoidance. Broadly speaking, experiential avoidance refers to an unwillingness to remain in contact with unwanted private experiences such as painful thoughts, emotions, memories, bodily sensations, or urges, along with attempts to change, suppress, or escape them. Research has associated rigid patterns of experiential avoidance with psychological difficulties, although researchers also caution that the concept is complex and should not be interpreted to mean that every attempt to avoid discomfort is harmful (Chawla & Ostafin, 2007).

Avoidance makes sense because unpleasant emotions are unpleasant for a reason. Anxiety creates tension and uncertainty. Shame can make us want to hide. Grief can make an ordinary room suddenly feel unbearably empty. Anger activates the body and pulls attention toward what feels unfair. Loneliness makes us acutely aware of the absence of connection. If opening an app, starting a television series, ordering something online, eating, working, or becoming busy reduces that discomfort for even a few minutes, the mind learns a simple association: When I feel this, doing that makes me feel different. Repeated often enough, the response becomes increasingly automatic, and eventually we may experience the urge to distract ourselves without consciously recognizing the emotion that triggered it.

This helps explain why some distracting habits feel more compelling than their content seems to justify. You may believe that you desperately want to check your phone, but what you may actually want is relief from the feeling that appeared just before you reached for it. You may think you suddenly need to clean the entire kitchen when what you really cannot tolerate is sitting still after an argument. You may tell yourself you are simply “keeping busy” after a loss when the constant activity is also helping you postpone contact with grief. The behavior and the feeling can become so closely linked that we notice only the behavior.

The purpose of recognizing this pattern is not to shame yourself for avoiding emotions. In fact, shame tends to strengthen avoidance. The goal is curiosity. Instead of immediately asking, How do I stop doing this?, it may be more useful to ask, What is this behavior doing for me right now? That small change in perspective turns distraction from evidence of personal weakness into information about your emotional world.

Anxiety: “Give Me Something Else to Think About”

Anxiety is one of the most common emotions beneath distraction because uncertainty naturally pushes the mind toward action. Imagine that you have sent an important message and are waiting for a response. You intend to continue with your day, yet every few minutes you check your phone. You open your messages, then email, then social media, and then return to your messages even though you know logically that checking again cannot make the response arrive faster. On the surface, you appear distracted by your phone. Underneath the behavior, however, may be questions that feel much harder to tolerate: Did I say the wrong thing? Are they upset with me? What if the answer is no? What if something has changed?

The repeated checking gives an anxious mind something concrete to do in a situation where it has very little control. Each refresh creates a tiny sense of action and possibility. This same process can occur with work. A challenging project may generate anxiety about whether you can perform well enough, so instead of starting, you conduct more research, reorganize your folders, answer unrelated messages, adjust the formatting, make another cup of coffee, or suddenly remember three household tasks that seem urgent. You may call yourself unfocused, but the deeper problem may be that beginning the work requires you to encounter uncertainty about your competence.

This distinction matters because productivity strategies cannot fully solve an emotional problem. You can turn off notifications, use a focus timer, block websites, and place your phone in another room, and these changes may certainly help. But if starting the task still activates the thought What if I cannot do this well enough?, the mind may simply search for another escape route. Understanding the anxiety does not eliminate the need for practical boundaries around distraction, but it addresses the reason those boundaries can sometimes feel surprisingly difficult to maintain.

Shame and Inadequacy: When Distraction Protects the Self

Some distractions protect us not from fear about what might happen but from painful conclusions about who we believe we are. Consider someone who has lost a job and needs to update their résumé. Every time they open the document, they feel an uncomfortable heaviness. Within ten minutes, they are watching videos, cleaning the house, or researching something unrelated. They may describe themselves as procrastinating, but if we slow the sequence down, something more complicated becomes visible. Opening the résumé reminds them of the job loss. The job loss activates the thought, I should be further ahead by now. That thought produces shame or inadequacy, and distraction then provides relief from the feeling.

Shame can be particularly difficult to tolerate because it often transforms a specific event into a global judgment about the self. There is an important emotional difference between Something went badly and There is something wrong with me. A person who fears the second conclusion may unconsciously avoid situations that could activate it. Someone may postpone looking at their finances because the numbers evoke shame about past decisions. Another person may avoid replying to a friend because they already waited too long and now feel embarrassed about the delay. Someone may keep postponing a medical appointment, application, conversation, or project because engaging with it would force them to confront the possibility that they have neglected something important.

The irony is that avoidance often creates a second layer of the very emotion it was meant to reduce. You avoid the résumé because you feel inadequate, and later you criticize yourself for wasting the day. You avoid replying because you feel ashamed about being late, and the longer you wait, the more ashamed you become. You postpone the task because it threatens your confidence, and then interpret the procrastination itself as proof that you lack discipline. This is how emotional avoidance can become self-reinforcing: the strategy that reduces distress in the moment can gradually produce more of the same distress.

Procrastination May Be About Mood Before It Is About Time

This emotional perspective is particularly useful when thinking about procrastination. We often treat procrastination as a scheduling problem and assume that better planners will naturally stop postponing things. Planning matters, of course, but researchers Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl have argued that procrastination can also be understood through the lens of short-term mood regulation. When a task feels aversive, delaying it can provide immediate emotional relief, even when doing so creates greater problems for our future selves (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013).

Suppose you need to prepare a presentation. The presentation itself is not an emotion, but thinking about it may evoke boredom, uncertainty, self-doubt, resentment, fear of evaluation, or frustration. When you switch from the presentation to a more pleasant activity, your mood improves immediately. The future cost remains abstract, while the present emotional reward is real. Tomorrow's version of you will have less time and more pressure, but today's version of you has successfully escaped discomfort. From this perspective, procrastination is not always irrational in the moment. It can be quite effective at accomplishing its immediate goal: changing how you feel.

Recognizing this can fundamentally change the way you respond to procrastination. Instead of repeatedly telling yourself to “just start,” you can become more specific: What feeling does starting bring up? If the answer is boredom, you may need to make the task more engaging or break it into shorter periods. If the answer is anxiety, you may need to reduce the perceived stakes and define a smaller first step. If the answer is resentment, perhaps you need to acknowledge that you do not actually want to do the task rather than pretending enthusiasm. If the answer is perfectionism, you may need permission to produce an imperfect first version. The practical strategy becomes more effective because it is responding to the emotional obstacle rather than only the visible behavior.

Loneliness: When Noise Becomes a Substitute for Connection

Not all distraction happens when we are supposed to be productive. Some of the most revealing distraction occurs during moments when nothing is required of us. A person can move through an extremely busy day without feeling particularly lonely because work, conversation, errands, and responsibilities keep their attention occupied. Then evening arrives. The messages stop. The children go to sleep. The work is finished. The room becomes quiet, and an unexpected heaviness appears. Within seconds, the television goes on and the phone comes out.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying entertainment at night, but sometimes constant stimulation softens the awareness that we feel emotionally disconnected. Social media can be especially complicated in this respect because it offers the appearance of social contact without always providing the depth of connection we need. We can spend an hour surrounded by other people's voices, photographs, opinions, celebrations, arguments, and updates while remaining physically and emotionally alone. The mind is occupied, but the underlying need may remain untouched.

This is why some forms of distraction leave us feeling strangely unsatisfied. The behavior reduced awareness of the emotion but did not respond to what the emotion was communicating. If loneliness is signaling a need for meaningful connection, another hour of stimulation may numb the signal without meeting the need. The question then becomes not simply How do I spend less time online? but What kind of connection am I actually missing? Perhaps it is conversation without multitasking, friendship that allows vulnerability, belonging to a community, physical presence, affection, or simply the feeling of being known by another person. Once the emotion is named, the need underneath it becomes easier to see.

Boredom May Be More Complicated Than It Looks

Boredom is another feeling that often triggers immediate distraction, particularly in an environment where stimulation is always available. Waiting in a line, sitting on public transport, eating alone, or having five unoccupied minutes can quickly lead to reaching for a screen. Yet boredom deserves more curiosity than it usually receives. Sometimes boredom simply means that an activity is insufficiently stimulating. At other times, however, it appears when we have become accustomed to such constant input that ordinary levels of stimulation begin to feel uncomfortable.

There is also a deeper form of boredom that is not solved by entertainment because it concerns meaning rather than stimulation. A person may fill every evening with content while quietly feeling disengaged from their own life. They may describe themselves as bored when the deeper experience is dissatisfaction, lack of purpose, loneliness, or the sense that their days have become repetitive and disconnected from what matters to them. In that situation, more stimulation can temporarily cover the feeling without answering the question the boredom may be raising: What am I missing?

Allowing yourself to experience a little boredom can therefore create psychological space. Without immediately filling every pause, thoughts and desires that were previously drowned out may become noticeable. You might realize that you miss being creative, that a relationship has become distant, that you are exhausted rather than bored, or that you have been consuming far more than you have been creating. Not every quiet moment will produce profound insight, of course, but if every empty space is filled immediately, there is little opportunity to discover what might emerge within it.

Anger, Resentment, and the Feelings We Were Taught Not to Have

Distraction can also protect us from emotions that conflict with how we believe we are supposed to feel. Anger is a good example. Someone who has learned that anger is dangerous, selfish, disrespectful, or unacceptable may not consciously recognize it when it appears. Instead, they may become restless, compulsively busy, irritable, or absorbed in something else. They might spend an evening scrolling after agreeing to a favor they did not want to do, never making the connection between the compulsive distraction and the resentment created by saying yes.

Emotions often carry information, even when they do not provide perfect instructions. Anger may indicate that we perceive unfairness, violation, obstruction, or a crossed boundary. Resentment may reveal that we are repeatedly giving more than we genuinely want to give. Envy can sometimes reveal an unacknowledged desire. Disappointment can show us where our expectations or hopes were invested. If we immediately distract ourselves whenever these emotions appear, we lose access not only to the discomfort but also to the information contained within it.

This does not mean acting on every feeling. Feeling angry does not automatically justify confrontation, and feeling envious does not mean someone else has done anything wrong. Emotional awareness and emotional obedience are different things. We can listen to what a feeling may be telling us without allowing it to dictate our behavior. In fact, naming an emotion often creates more room for thoughtful choice because we no longer need to spend so much energy pretending the feeling is not there.

Grief and the Temptation to Stay Busy

Grief can produce a particularly powerful relationship with distraction because slowing down may allow the reality of loss to become more vivid. After bereavement, separation, a major life transition, or the loss of a hoped-for future, some people become extraordinarily productive. They work longer hours, organize everything, care for everyone else, make plans, and keep moving. From the outside, they may appear remarkably strong. Sometimes this activity is genuinely stabilizing. Routine can provide structure during periods when life feels disorganized, and there is no single correct way to grieve.

Yet constant activity can also become a way of negotiating with pain: If I keep moving, perhaps it will not catch me. The difficulty is that grief does not necessarily disappear because attention has moved elsewhere. It may return during a quiet drive, in the shower, before sleep, while hearing a particular song, or months later when life finally becomes calm enough for the loss to be felt.

This is one reason emotional processing cannot be reduced to a timetable. Sometimes we distract ourselves because we truly are not ready to feel everything at once, and that may be protective rather than pathological. The goal is not to tear down every defense immediately. It is to develop enough awareness that distraction remains one tool among many rather than the only way we know how to cope.

Why Naming the Feeling Matters

One of the simplest alternatives to immediate distraction is also one of the most easily underestimated: putting the feeling into words. Research on affect labeling, the process of identifying and naming emotional experiences, suggests that labeling emotion can influence emotional responding. In a well-known neuroimaging study, Lieberman and colleagues found that putting feelings into words was associated with reduced amygdala response to negative emotional images and increased activity in a region of the prefrontal cortex involved in regulation (Lieberman et al., 2007). Later research has continued to examine affect labeling as a potentially useful emotion-regulation process, including in contexts involving fear (Kircanski et al., 2012).

In everyday life, this does not require sophisticated psychological vocabulary. Instead of vaguely experiencing “something bad” and immediately escaping it, you might pause long enough to say, I think I am anxious because I do not know how this will turn out. Or, I am embarrassed about what happened yesterday. Or, I am lonely tonight. Or, I am angry that I agreed to this when I wanted to say no. The purpose is not to make the emotion disappear. Naming creates clarity. An unnamed feeling can feel like an atmosphere surrounding your entire experience; a named feeling becomes something you can observe, understand, and respond to.

Precision can help as well. “I feel bad” gives you very little information. “I feel disappointed because I expected more from this relationship” tells you considerably more. “I am stressed” may actually mean “I am afraid I will disappoint someone,” “I am overwhelmed because I have taken on too much,” or “I am resentful that people expect me to handle this alone.” The more accurately we understand the emotion, the more intelligently we can respond to the need, expectation, interpretation, or situation connected to it.

Pause Before You Reach

Changing your relationship with distraction does not require eliminating your phone, abandoning entertainment, or spending hours analyzing yourself. It can begin with a pause of only a few seconds. The next time you notice a strong urge to reach for stimulation, particularly when the action feels automatic, try becoming curious about the moment immediately before it. What were you thinking about? What were you doing? What sensation appeared in your body? Did you feel tension, emptiness, restlessness, heaviness, embarrassment, uncertainty, or irritation? What would you have been left with if you had not distracted yourself?

You might discover, for example, that every time you sit down to work on a particular project, you suddenly want to check messages because the project makes you feel inadequate. You may notice that after interactions with one particular person, you tend to eat, shop, or scroll because you leave those conversations feeling angry but do not permit yourself to acknowledge the anger. Perhaps you realize that your strongest urge to binge-watch television occurs not when you are tired but when you feel lonely. Or you may discover that nothing dramatic is underneath the behavior at all; you simply enjoy the activity and have developed a habit. That is useful information too.

The purpose of the pause is not to create another rule with which to judge yourself. It is to insert awareness into a process that was previously automatic. Once awareness enters the sequence, choice becomes possible.

Ask What the Feeling Needs, Not Only How to Make It Stop

Once you identify the feeling, the next question is not necessarily How do I get rid of this? A more useful question may be What does this feeling need from me? Anxiety may need reassurance, preparation, or acceptance that certainty is unavailable. Loneliness may need actual connection rather than more stimulation. Anger may need a boundary. Shame may need self-compassion and perspective. Overwhelm may need rest or a smaller task. Grief may need time, remembrance, companionship, or permission to hurt. Boredom may need creativity, challenge, meaning, or simply tolerance for a quieter pace.

Sometimes the answer will still be distraction. You may recognize, I am anxious, I cannot solve this tonight, and I am going to watch a film and give myself a break. The psychological difference is significant because the behavior is now conscious. You are not pretending the anxiety does not exist. You have recognized it, decided that immediate processing is not useful, and intentionally shifted your attention. This is very different from repeatedly running from an unnamed feeling.

At other times, the pause may reveal that distraction is preventing you from taking an action you already know you need to take. You may need to send the application, apologize, make the appointment, have the difficult conversation, say no, ask for help, leave something that is no longer right for you, or admit that you are unhappy. In these cases, the uncomfortable emotion is not merely an obstacle to remove. It may be part of the information required to move forward.

Building the Capacity to Stay

If you have spent years automatically distracting yourself from uncomfortable feelings, becoming more emotionally present may initially feel worse rather than better. This is important to understand. When stimulation decreases, emotions that were already present can become more noticeable. Someone may begin spending less time online and conclude that the change is making them anxious or lonely, when in reality the reduction in distraction may simply be revealing anxiety or loneliness that had previously been obscured.

The goal is therefore not to force yourself into prolonged emotional exposure. Emotional capacity can be developed gradually. You might sit with a feeling for two minutes before deciding what to do next. You might write a few sentences about what is happening internally. You might notice where the emotion appears in your body without immediately constructing a story around it. You might call someone instead of scrolling through strangers' lives. You might allow yourself to be bored during a short walk without filling the silence with a podcast. These are small practices, but they teach an important lesson: an uncomfortable feeling can be present without requiring immediate escape.

Over time, this can increase psychological flexibility. Instead of having only one response to discomfort, you develop several. Sometimes you solve the problem. Sometimes you seek support. Sometimes you accept uncertainty. Sometimes you rest. Sometimes you cry. Sometimes you redirect your attention. Sometimes you discover that the feeling changes on its own when you stop fighting it. The aim is not constant emotional awareness but a wider range of choices.

When Distraction Is Actually Rest

It is equally important not to turn emotional awareness into another form of self-surveillance. Once people learn about avoidance, they can begin questioning every pleasurable activity: Am I watching this because I am avoiding something? Am I exercising because I am running from my feelings? Am I meeting friends because I cannot be alone? This can become unnecessarily rigid. Human beings need pleasure, play, imagination, rest, entertainment, absorption, and periods when we are not actively working on ourselves.

Healthy distraction often leaves you feeling restored. You deliberately step away from something difficult, engage in an activity you enjoy, and later feel more capable of returning to your life. Avoidant distraction often feels more compulsive and less satisfying. You may continue long after the activity stops being enjoyable because stopping would bring you back into contact with whatever you were trying not to feel. The distinction is not always obvious, but one question can help: After this activity, do I feel replenished, or do I mainly feel that I successfully postponed something?

Even then, there is no need for harsh judgment. Avoidance is often an attempt at self-protection. It developed because, at some point, moving away from difficult internal experiences felt easier or safer than staying with them. Understanding this allows us to replace self-criticism with curiosity while still recognizing when an old coping strategy is no longer serving us well.

The Question Beneath the Habit

Many conversations about distraction focus on the object of distraction: the phone, television, food, work, gaming, shopping, social media, endless news, or constant busyness. These things certainly matter. Modern environments make distraction extraordinarily accessible, and changing our surroundings can help us protect our attention. Yet removing the object does not automatically resolve the emotional function it was serving. If you delete one app without understanding why you were opening it forty times a day, another behavior may simply take its place.

A deeper approach asks what happens in the seconds before the urge. Perhaps you are about to begin something that matters and feel afraid of failing. Perhaps you have finally stopped working and realize how exhausted you are. Perhaps you are alone and notice that you do not feel connected to anyone. Perhaps you are angry about something you have been telling yourself “shouldn't bother you.” Perhaps there is a decision you have postponed because either option involves loss. Perhaps you are grieving a version of your life you expected to have by now. Or perhaps you are simply tired and need uncomplicated pleasure.

Not every distraction conceals a profound psychological truth. Sometimes a phone is simply entertaining, a television series is genuinely enjoyable, and a tired brain wants an easy reward. But when the urge to distract yourself feels repetitive, compulsive, or strongest during particular emotional moments, it may be worth listening more closely. The habit may be pointing toward something that needs attention.

Conclusion: You Do Not Have to Eliminate Distraction to Understand It

The goal is not to create a life without distraction. Such a life would be neither realistic nor necessarily desirable. We need breaks from concentration, temporary relief from difficult emotions, and activities that allow us to rest, play, laugh, imagine, and step outside our immediate concerns. Distraction becomes psychologically important when it shifts from something we choose into something we repeatedly need in order to avoid what emerges in its absence.

The next time you find yourself automatically reaching for your phone, opening another tab, turning on background noise, starting an unnecessary task, or searching for something to occupy your mind, you do not have to immediately stop yourself. Instead, become curious for a moment. Ask what was happening just before the urge appeared. Notice what feeling might be present and what that feeling may be asking you to acknowledge. Perhaps you will still choose the distraction. Perhaps you will discover that you need rest. Perhaps you will realize that you are anxious, lonely, angry, ashamed, disappointed, bored, or grieving. And perhaps, occasionally, you will decide to stay with the feeling a little longer.

The important change is not that you never distract yourself again. It is that distraction stops being the only language you have for discomfort. When we become capable of recognizing what lies beneath the urge to escape our own experience, we gain something more valuable than perfect concentration: the ability to understand ourselves well enough to choose what we actually need.

References

Chawla, N., & Ostafin, B. (2007). Experiential avoidance as a functional dimensional approach to psychopathology: An empirical review. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 63(9), 871–890. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20400

Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.

Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Feelings into words: Contributions of language to exposure therapy. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086–1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612443830

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x

Sirois, F. M., & Pychyl, T. A. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011