Word-Of-the-Week #1096: Enjoyment
August 21, 2025 by Susan Clarke
Enjoyment– the pleasure felt when having a good time.
Are you waiting for the right time to have a “special occasion”? Do you believe that difficult tasks will somehow be easier in the future?
This week features the last half of “Why we procrastinate on joy, and how to stop,” by Richard Sima of The Washington Post.
We may fall into a ‘trap’ of wanting something to feel special, which causes us to delay enjoying it now, research says
To Recap:
- Waiting on joy
The new research suggests that people delay enjoyable experiences to maximize the benefits and avoid “spoiling the moment,” O’Brien said.
“‘Right now’ always feels insufficiently special compared to any better moment in the future,” he said.
This mindset may be shaped by what behavior psychologists call “occasion-matching,” a phenomenon in which people really care about when and where they enjoy things. We might wait to open an expensive bottle of wine for the perfect celebration even if it would taste just as good right now.
“Ironically, the thing that really builds dust is the really fine wine,” O’Brien said.
At the same time, we tend to believe we will have more time and energy in the future to do the things we like, which may be why people who live near landmarks and attractions often put off going to see them, as one 2010 study found. (Research also suggests that we tend to believe difficult tasks will somehow get easier to do in the future.)
However, while this general tendency is “important and interesting,” there may be more than one explanation for why different people procrastinate, said Akira Miyake, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “I think things are much more complex, and we need to start paying attention to idiosyncrasies or adopting more person-specific ways of looking at why this is happening,” he said.
For example, returning to a fun activity after a long break might require more effort to reacclimate, which is aversive.
Or seeking out specialness might relate to perfectionism, which is associated with procrastination tendencies in general, said Miyake, who was not involved in the study.
Plus, other goals we have may take more precedence, he said. “In everyday settings, you always pursue multiple goals,” Miyake said.
- How to stop putting off enjoyable experiences
We may not always be aware that we are procrastinating doing things that make us happy even when it comes at a cost, but there are strategies to help us, experts said.
Notice the trap: If we are more aware of the tendency to continue delaying positive things, we can catch ourselves and subvert it, O’Brien said.
Change the friction level: Borrowing from research on habit formation: If you want to do something positive, make it easier to do it. Come up with ways to remind yourself of what you want to do so you don’t forget it, Miyake said.
Schedule fun: Making a rule to do something enjoyable at a set time could make it easier to follow through than simply relying on willpower alone, Miyake said.
Change your mindset about what’s special: Trying to get over the trap of specialness may be key.
In one last set of experiments, O’Brien and his colleagues tested different strategies to get people to return to their long-delayed enjoyable activities sooner.
A strategy that surprisingly did not work was having participants reframe how much time had elapsed as not being that long in the grand scheme of things; they were still not more likely to jump back in compared with the control group, which received no such instruction.
Instead, what worked was reframing what could count as a special occasion.
“Think about how any moment can be made to feel extra special from the right perspective,” O’Brien said. “You can make any random Tuesday feel extra special if you really think about it.”
This week’s focus is on enjoyment Are you delaying positive things? How would it feel to schedule FUN?
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