Here's a theory about one of the things that causes procrastination to be so hard to beat. I'm curious what people think of it.

1. Hypothesis: Many parts of the mind are influenced by something like reinforcement learning, where the emotional valances of our thoughts function as a gross reward signal that conditions their behaviors.

2. Reinforcement learning seems to have a far more powerful effect when feedback is instant.

3. We think of procrastinating as a bad thing, and tend to internally punish ourselves when we catch ourselves doing it.

4. Therefore, the negative feedback signal might end up exerting a much more powerful training effect on the "catcher" system (aka. whatever is activating frontal override) rather than on whatever it is that triggered the procrastination in the first place.

5. This results in a simple counter-intuitive piece of advice: when you catch yourself procrastinating, it might be a very bad idea to internally berate yourself about it; Thoughts of the form "%#&%! I'm procrastinating again! I really shouldn't do that!" might actually cause more procrastinating in the long run. If I had to guess, things like meditation would be helpful for building up the skill required to catch the procrastination-berating subsystem in the act and get it to do something else.

TL;DR: It would probably be hugely helpful to try to train oneself to make the "flinch" less unpleasant.