It's now 1pm and I've had all morning to write this piece. Rather than face the blank page, however, I've watered my house plants, phoned a friend, sent some non-urgent emails and watched umpteen viral videos of a baby monkey playing with its plush toy.
The more time that has passed, the more anxious I feel about my impending deadine – yet somehow, it has been hard to get my mental cogs turning.
I’d like to say this is an isolated incident, but it touches many areas of my life.
Whether I’m making medical appointments, returning library books or arranging my own birthday party, there always seems to be some excuse for putting off the job until it’s almost too late.
I’m far from alone in this problem: psychologists estimate that as many as one in four people suffer from procrastination. Nor is it a modern ailment.
In around 700 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod advised: “Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.”
It’s only recently, however, that scientists have started to uncover the true causes of procrastination, its costs and its cures.
“People tended to think that the harms were just isolated to productivity,” says Prof Fuschia Sirois at Durham University. “But it can have real implications for your wellbeing.”
Her work should reassure anyone who sees themselves as lazy or weak-willed. Far from being a character flaw, our procrastination may reveal underlying difficulties with stress management, including denial, self-criticism and perfectionism.
And finding new ways to enhance our emotional regulation can therefore work wonders for our timekeeping.
The price of later
Sirois came to the topic by chance. While completing her PhD at Carleton University in Canada, a colleague – Prof Tim Pychyl – had noticed a study showing that procrastinators suffer worse health than people who don’t dawdle.
Would Sirois be interested in exploring the mechanisms, he wondered. She didn’t wait long to say yes – a decision that would forever shape her career.
She began by measuring 400 students’ tendency to procrastinate by asking them a series of statements. These included:
- A letter may sit for days after I write it before mailing it
- I always seem to end up shopping for birthday or Christmas gifts at the last minute
- I am continually saying, “I’ll do it tomorrow”
The more strongly someone agreed with the statements, the worse their procrastination. And, as earlier research had suggested, those scores weren’t trivial. They predicted the students’ wellbeing across the term.
“They reported a lot more acute health problems – aches and strains, flus and colds, digestive issues – all these sorts of things,” explains Sirois.
Sirois and Pychyl suspected that this could be because the procrastinators were simply less likely to eat healthily and exercise, which was indeed true.
The main reason, however, appeared to be their stress levels: they were more likely to feel overwhelmed by their workload and this took its toll on their bodies. A series of replications has confirmed these health effects in the general population.
“It was actually stronger for adults than it was for students,” Sirois says.
Stress loop
As the evidence accumulated, a deeper question emerged. If procrastinators were more stressed – and that stress was harming their health – where was the stress coming from? Was it simply the consequence of putting things off? Or could it be part of the cause?
With each new study, the pattern became harder to ignore. Stress didn’t merely accompany procrastination – it appeared to drive it.
In response, Sirois and Pychyl proposed a radical new theory of procrastination, the ‘temporal mood regulation model’.
Turning conventional wisdom on its head, the theory argued that procrastination isn’t fundamentally a failure of time management, but a strategy for managing mood and stress.
“Instead of thinking of procrastination in terms of a character flaw or poor time management skills, we saw it as an irrational act, and so emotions are the ground zero,” explains Sirois.
According to this theory, we procrastinate when we’re already feeling bored, anxious or frustrated about the tasks that are necessary for the long-term goal.
Rather than face those difficult feelings, we choose a distraction that provides temporary escape and restores our emotional balance.
We may divert our attention to something pleasurable – such as reading the gossip pages of the news, checking Instagram or watching funny TikTok videos – but our time-wasting doesn’t have to be fun; many people procrastinate by washing the dishes or doing the laundry.
“It could be reorganising their spice rack, or whatever – a meaningless task,” Sirois says. We might even tell ourselves that we’re being productive, even though we’re ignoring the more urgent and important activity.
“When you procrastinate, you get immediate relief,” Sirois says. “It’s a form of emotion regulation. But it’s not an adaptive one, because those feelings about the task don’t disappear – and you may even start to feel worse for not doing it. You’ve layered on more and more negative emotion by avoiding the task.”
The result? A vicious cycle, with the long-term accumulation of stress taking its toll on our physical health.
The pitfall of perfectionism
There is now considerable evidence for this idea. People procrastinate more when they already feel upset – and show a range of maladaptive coping strategies to deal with life’s stresses.
They’re more likely to deny their problems and avoid them, rather than seek out the tools that could help them confront the issue, or turn to loved ones for emotional support.
Perhaps most tellingly, a series of studies has shown that procrastinators are often hampered by perfectionism.
They’re so scared of not meeting their high expectations that they avoid beginning the task at all – a strategy that’s only going to increase their chance of failure.
Just consider the following response from one of Sirois’s participants, who often struggled to write her reports:
“Despite myself and my best interests, I feel as though everything I write has to come out perfectly in the first draft. This means that I often delay beginning to work on the assignment because I hold unrealistic expectations and desires with regard to my work…
"I feel as though I’m under so much pressure to perform (put on by myself) that it’s difficult to even begin doing the task.”
These words hardly sound like the thinking of someone who simply can’t be bothered to work, and fit much more neatly with the poor emotional regulation that Sirois and Pychyl propose.
And this isn’t just visible in people’s self-descriptions. It shows up in the brain.
Neuroimaging studies suggest that chronic procrastinators display altered activity in regions linked to emotional control and decision-making, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the right dorsomedial frontal cortex.
These are circuits involved in regulating feelings and weighing rewards against consequences – precisely the processes that falter when we trade long-term goals for short-term relief.
Read more:
- Can't break the procrastination cycle? Blame your parents
- How to actually break your morning procrastination cycle
- Why are some people perfectionists?
Deadline thrills
Sirois’s theory resonates with my own experience, but some people insist their procrastination isn’t avoidance at all – it’s a tool.
“They deliberately and actively procrastinate to improve their performance,” says Dutch educational psychologist Niek Kooren. “They say they work better under pressure.”
You’ve probably met them. The colleague who insists that looming deadlines sharpen their creativity. The journalist who waits until the 11th hour to start writing, convinced the ticking clock will help them produce their best work.
To account for these experiences, some researchers have attempted to differentiate between two different kinds of dithering.
First, there’s passive procrastination, which concerns accidental timewasting – it’s not a strategic choice, but something that we can’t help doing. Then there’s active procrastination, which is a conscious decision, made in a bid to increase our energy and motivation for the task at hand.
But does it work? To find out, Kooren recently performed a large meta-analysis of 96 scientific papers looking at the effects of procrastination on students’ grades.
As expected, they found that passive procrastinators tended to do pretty badly, whereas the active procrastinators’ intuitions seemed to be correct: they performed slightly better than the average person.
The studies that he examined were mostly correlational, meaning that Kooren and his colleagues couldn’t prove that active procrastination causes the improved outcomes.
But one potential mechanism may be the release of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter and hormone that rises when we feel stressed.
In high quantities, this will lead us to feel panicked and overwhelmed, but at moderate levels it can enhance focus and attention – and the active procrastinators could be taking advantage of this fact.
Kooren emphasises that walking this tightrope is a risky manoeuvre, however. “You might put yourself under too much pressure, too much stress and then you kind of fall off the tightrope,” he says. “I wouldn’t advise the strategy.”
Sirois is sceptical of the whole idea. “Procrastination is a harmful delay, right? So by definition, this ‘active procrastination’ with beneficial results isn’t procrastination.”
In short, while a few deadline junkies may thrive on pressure, most don’t. Active or passive, procrastination is a flimsy coping strategy – and, as it turns out, an unnecessary one…
Breaking the spiral
It can feel as though the cycle of delay, panic and regret is hard-wired into you. And in part, it might be.
Twin studies suggest procrastination is moderately heritable – if your parents tend to put off important tasks, you’re statistically more likely to do the same.
But our genes don’t need to be our destiny. If you’re like me, you might have learnt to accommodate your time-wasting tendencies with careful planning. For instance, I try to account for my inevitable dithering when setting a deadline for an article.
Such solutions reflect common advice online, but they only treat the symptoms of our poor emotional processing – whereas Sirois hopes we can now start tackling the cause.
Many of her solutions are disarmingly simple. In her recent book Procrastination: What it is, why it’s a problem, and what you can do about it, she suggests several key strategies. The first of which is mindfulness meditation.
Sure, it’s something that you’ve probably tried before, decided it wasn’t for you and are now sick of hearing about it. But if procrastination is your particular vice, there are decent reasons to revisit it – grudgingly, if necessary.
For instance, in a small randomised controlled trial, Sirois found that eight weekly sessions of mindfulness training helped the students improve emotion regulation more generally, so that they experienced less stress – and, as a result, less procrastination.
The practice itself is almost aggressively simple. Sit down – a chair will do; no lotus pose required – and focus on your breath. You’re not trying to slow it, optimise it or breathe correctly. Just notice it.
When your mind wanders and your inner voice pipes up – which, unless you’re clinically dead, it certainly will (if it doesn’t, then you’ve got bigger problems) – don’t panic. Just notice it and move back to the breath.
When reflecting on your thoughts afterwards, you may pay particular attention to the tone of your inner voice. A string of studies has shown that many procrastinators are excessively self-critical and frequently beat themselves up for their poor timekeeping.
According to Sirois’s theory, excessive recrimination only adds to someone’s stress, which makes it even harder to knuckle down to the task at hand.
For these reasons, she suggests consciously treating yourself with more self-compassion – a mindset that has been attracting increasing attention from psychologists around the world.
While many think self-compassion is just about letting yourself off the hook, it’s more about asking: is being this hard on yourself actually helping get the task done?
It’s not about absolving yourself. But simply avoiding pouring petrol on your stress response.
Sirois gives the example of someone who has put off organising a trip with her friends and discovers that the travel costs have risen due to their dithering. Rather than scolding herself, this person might tell themselves the following:
“I know that I put this off when I didn’t need to, and this may have caused more problems. But I’m not going to be hard on myself. I accept that my good intentions to think about others didn’t translate into the best outcome this time, and I’ll do what I can now to make things right.”
If this self-talk doesn’t come naturally, certain exercises have been proven to enhance self-compassion, which, in turn, reduces stress and enhances motivation for taking positive action.
One is to write yourself a short letter about the situation, deliberately adopting the voice you’d use with a close friend. It can feel faintly ridiculous at first. But that small shift in perspective appears to reduce stress and, counterintuitively, increase motivation to act.
Simply naming your feelings may help too – a process known as ‘affect labelling’. Anusha Garg and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara recently asked more than 1,000 online participants to name a task that they’d been deferring.
Around a third were then asked to describe the emotions that it aroused, explain how it could be broken into small steps, and outline the rewards that might be associated with completing it – a simple exercise that significantly increased their intentions to get on with the activity they’d been delaying.
But we should be realistic about what this can all achieve, Sirois says. “The goal isn’t to reduce or take away all negative feelings that you might have about the task. It’s to approach it in a more balanced way.”
“Instead of seeing it as a lack of discipline, we should recognise that someone is struggling,” Sirois told me. “If someone suddenly starts procrastinating, that may be a sign that there are other things going on in their life.”
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