The factor at play here, as anyone who has ever lain awake at night anticipating all of their own imminent metaphysical electric shocks knows, is dread. The researchers here describe what they call “exponential dread”—dread that increases exponentially as the thing you’re dreading draws nearer. Participants were also more averse to pain that came farther in the future, though the dread increased by smaller increments as the wait grew longer. So by choosing to take the pain now, participants were avoiding a punishment: the pain of the dread itself.

The anticipation of something unpleasant can be processed a lot like pain by the body. A 2012 study found that people with high levels of math anxiety, when faced with a looming math problem, had increased activity in regions of their brains associated with threat detection and “visceral pain.”

In 2006, researchers did a very similar electric shock study, while scanning the brains of the participants. They had a choice between a higher voltage sooner, and a lower voltage later (90 percent in 3 seconds or 60 percent in 27 seconds). They divided participants into “extreme dreaders” and “mild dreaders,” and found that, based on differences in brain activity between the two, dread that drove their decision-making came from, in large part, the attention the person was paying to the part of their body that was getting shocked (in this case, a foot).

“Although dread is usually thought of as an emotion based on fear and anxiety, our localization of dread to the posterior elements of the [brain’s pain] matrix suggests that dread has a substantial attentive component,” the study reads. The researchers suggest that distracting the person from thinking about their soon-to-be-shocked foot could decrease dread. The study did not address the efficacy of distracting yourself from emotional or spiritual dread, but it's probably worth a shot.

All of this makes getting it over with seem like a logical response to impending future bad stuff, maybe even the responsible thing to do, if the thing you’re dreading is something like “going to the doctor” or “paying your bills.” In fact, Logan Sachon has a recurring weekly post on The Billfold called “Do 1 Thing” in which, every Thursday, she tries to motivate and encourages readers to “do that 1 thing you don’t want to do but also don’t want to continue thinking about doing,” things like updating her resume or opening a savings account.

But if the thing you’re dreading is performance-based, like, say, taking the SATs, rushing to get it over with could lead to worse results than you were hoping for. In one weirdly specific example that I dredged up from the depths of Google Scholar, a study on soccer penalty shootouts noted that “high preparation speed was related to low performance,” even though many people who “choke under pressure” tend to take a long time to do so.