Why it gets worse and not better

Follow the outer loop. Having avoided it, you now feel guilty, you have lost the afternoon, and there is less time than there was.

So the next time you think about that task, it carries all of that as well. It is no longer just an essay. It is an essay plus the four wasted days plus the evidence that you are the sort of person who wastes days.

The task got more aversive, and the mechanism in this lesson says that a more aversive task is harder to start. That is the whole tragedy of it. Each round of avoidance makes the next round more likely, and none of it required you to become a worse person along the way.