Transcript

Kim Mills:?You know the old saying, never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow? Yes, procrastination. No one feels good about it, but most of us do it at least occasionally. You might have a big work project that's due, you feel stressed about it and suddenly you realize you can't possibly get started until you clean your desk. Then you need a snack. Then maybe a quick walk to clear your head. Oh, and don't you need to finish solving Wordle before you can tackle that job? Before you know it, hours have passed and you're right where you started and more stressed than ever.

Why is it so easy to fall into this trap even when we know better? According to some psychologists, the answer is not that people are lazy or have poor time management skills. Instead, research suggests that procrastination is a problem driven by our emotions, and learning to manage negative emotions effectively can help us overcome it.

So why do people procrastinate? What tasks are they most likely to avoid? How does procrastination affect people's lives and their mental and physical health? Why is procrastination so tied up with guilt and shame, even though it's something nearly everyone does? And when we're faced with the temptation to put something off, how can we change our mindset and our environment to help us buckle down and do what needs to be done?

Welcome to?Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Fuschia Sirois, a professor of psychology at Durham University in the United Kingdom, and author of the book?Procrastination: What It Is, Why It's a Problem and What You Can Do About It, published in July by APA Books. She is a social, health and personality psychologist who is broadly interested in how self-regulation—how we manage our thoughts, emotions and behaviors—affect our health and wellbeing. In addition to studying procrastination, she also researches perfectionism, self-compassion, gratitude, time and loneliness. She believes in the importance of communicating psychological science to the public to improve people's lives and has been interviewed about procrastination for news outlets including?The?Washington Post,?The New York Times?and the BBC.?

Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Sirois.

Fuschia Sirois, PhD:?Oh, thanks for having me, Kim. I'm really thrilled to be here.

Mills:?All right, well, let's not put it off any longer. How do you define procrastination in your research? What's the difference between procrastinating and simply deferring something for another time? Is there a difference?

Sirois:?There is indeed a difference. I'm going to start with a quote that a colleague and friend of mine who got me into this area of research, Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada, one that he often uses to make the distinction between procrastination and delay. And procrastination is a form of delay, so we can say that “all procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination.” And really what that means is that procrastination is a very specific type of delay and how researchers in the field, how we define it so that we can go out and explore what are the consequences and causes of procrastination, we define procrastination as an unnecessary form of delay. It's a delay that's voluntary.

So it's not like there's an emergency, it's not like somebody pulled you off of what you were doing. So you've chosen to delay and there's no really good reason to. And it's usually on a task that we said we're going to do. So we have an intention to make, to do that task. You said, “I'm going to do that. I'm going to clean out the garage this weekend. I'm going to write that report by Friday.” And that's the other thing too, it's usually a task that held some importance. And I think that lays into the final part of the definition, which is that we engage in this type of unnecessary voluntary delay of these intended tasks despite knowing there will be negative consequences for ourselves and others.

Mills:?Most people procrastinate occasionally, but some people struggle with it more than others do. Do you know what percentage of people are chronic procrastinators to the point where it's really affecting their health?

Sirois:?Yeah, it's a great question, and indeed, a lot of us can procrastinate just occasionally, which we would call sort of more of a situationally based procrastination. You might procrastinate in your health, but you may not procrastinate at work, for example. Or you may just do it from time to time depending on the circumstances. And so some of the estimates, the rough estimates we've gotten for that versus somebody who procrastinates on a fairly regular basis, almost to the point where it's like part of their personality, we can almost look at it like a personality trait, that percentage of the population in student samples, for example college and university students, it's estimated about 50% of college and university students procrastinate chronically, whereas about anywhere between 80% to 95% procrastinate at least once or more, but not necessarily to a large degree. So it's actually quite high in college and university samples.

When we shift over and we look at adults who are now out in the workforce, they've got their degrees and they're out there just getting on with their lives, it's still fairly high in terms of the chronic procrastination. And again, estimates there range between 15% to 25%, which is still quite a few people who are really engaging in procrastination as a fairly regular way of dealing with tasks that they don't want to deal with.

Mills:?Well, the crux of your research is that procrastination is not, as so many of us think it is, a problem of laziness or poor time management. Instead, it's a problem, as you say, of emotion regulation. So what does that mean? What does emotion regulation have to do with procrastination?

Sirois:?So yeah, I mean there's a lot of myths out there about why people procrastinate and the common wisdom out there is that, oh, teach somebody to manage their time better and they'll stop procrastinating, or give them better self-control or tell them they're lazy and crack the whip and get them going and that'll reduce it. And really that sort of perspective is more of looking at the symptoms of procrastination rather than the causes. And this is what—as you mentioned, emotions are at the core of procrastination. And this comes from a lot of the research that suggests that the type of tasks that we procrastinate on are ones that we don't enjoy. They're ones that we find unpleasant, aversive and that can range the full spectrum from just simply boring to gut wrenching, nerve wracking and anxiety provoking. So anywhere along that spectrum of a task that makes us feel that, these negative emotions in one form or another, those are the tasks that we're more likely to procrastinate on.

And so when we look at procrastination then in terms of emotion regulation, what one way to think about is that we're not avoiding the task per se, what we're avoiding is the negative emotions associated with that task. And so procrastination becomes a way to cope with that negative mood and those negative emotions, especially if you're someone who hasn't had a lot of experience managing your negative emotions effectively, or maybe you've got a lot of other stressors going on in your life that you've sort of—your resources, your inner resources for coping with a task that might be really unpleasant or stressful or frustrating or creates a lot of worry for you, in those sorts of situations, you might resort to procrastination. Because what procrastination does is it gives you immediate relief. That's why we say it's sort of a short-term mood repair. It gives you that quick fix.

So you take that task that's really stressing you out, you've got that report you've got to write, you're worried about what your manager's going to think because maybe a promotion rides on it, or you're worried if you're going to be doing it correctly, or if you're going to do it as perfectly as what you want, and you take that task, you put it aside and you get busy with other things and you've now have this immediate sense of relief. You've actually just repaired that negative mood and you feel better. And the problem with that is it's immediately reinforcing. You get rewarded for doing that.

And this is where some people can get caught in the trap of procrastination as almost a chronic habit or way of dealing with these unpleasant tasks. So yeah, that's how the emotions are involved. It's really about the emotions that are associated with the task and not necessarily the unpleasantness of the task. It doesn't have to be objectively an unpleasant task, but it's what our interaction with that task, the emotions that arise from that interaction and how it makes us feel and if it's something unpleasant and we can't quite work through those feelings, procrastination becomes a way to solve that, at least in the short run.

Mills:?So what are some strategies or techniques to combat procrastination and just get things done, and how does thinking of it as an emotion regulation problem change how we approach the situation?

Sirois:?Well, I think that's really key. If we want to address any type of problem, we've got to know what the core cause is. And coming at it from this mood regulation or emotion regulation perspective then, what that suggests is that we need to find ways to manage those emotions first and foremost. And there's multiple layers of doing this. I think especially if it's a task that's really creating a lot of stress and really frustration or anxiety or anticipated anxiety, sometimes that's not how we feel right now, but we're anticipating that as soon as we start working on those tasks, we're going to get frustrated and that's enough to keep us from going with it. So finding ways to manage those negative emotions, especially if they're really intense, is key. And some very simple ways that the research has borne out and that takes the edge off them is forgiveness and self-compassion.

And it sounds counterintuitive because collectively we like to think about productivity and just crack the whip and get going. And if somebody is not being productive and procrastinating, we think if we push them harder and get on their case, then they'll actually be more productive, rather than saying, “Hey, it's okay” and taking more of a compassionate approach. And actually the research suggests that both those approaches can be very beneficial. Students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on academic work were found two weeks later to actually procrastinate less. And we know that self-compassion can be a very powerful tool for regulating negative emotions, and that's another approach too, especially if we're really struggling and just say—it's not giving yourself a free pass. It's basically saying, “Hey, yeah, I'm struggling with this task. I'm having difficulty, but you know what, it's okay. Other people have struggled with this task too. There's nothing special about my struggle. I just need to work through that rather than getting hard on getting hard myself or beating myself up about this and making it worse,” which actually can make it worse, the more that you get more critical about yourself about procrastinating, that can actually increase the chances that you'll continue to procrastinate.

Mills:?Right. You get into that endless feedback loop.

Sirois:?Yeah, exactly.

Mills:?So how does chronic procrastination affect people's mental and physical wellbeing?

Sirois:?It has a huge impact on it and I think this is a thing a lot of people don't think about when they think about procrastination. We think about the immediate damage it can cause. So if you're a student and you're procrastinating on your academic work, then it's likely you're not going to do as well performance-wise. You're going to hand in things late or you're not going to do your best work. And the research bears this out. Students who chronically procrastinate tend to have poorer performance in terms of their grades. And in the workplace as well. People who chronically procrastinate or procrastinate regularly don't progress through their company as well. They tend to also have more insecure job status, in other words, they're jumping from job to job and they never really advance much, and they actually make less money than people who don't chronically procrastinate. And there's been some research on that.

So we tend to think of the productivity side of it. But a lot of what my research is focused on over the last couple of decades is exactly what you said, that there's these real health consequences. Procrastination can be bad for your health. And so we know it's associated with higher rates of depression and anxiety, definitely higher rates of stress, that's one thing I found consistently, not just with students that I've done research with, but also adults out in the community. And it can have very real physical health effects. And this makes some sense if we think about how harmful stress is to our bodies. Not just it's harmful for our mental health, it's also harmful for our physical health. It has an impact on our immune system, makes us more vulnerable to catching bugs and flus and colds and all kinds of other stress-related illnesses.

And this is something that I've found in my own research too, that students who chronically procrastinate tend to report more of these sort of stress-related mild health complaints, but they also can impact engaging in health behaviors. So if you're changing your diet, something that can be unpleasant, you have to give up some foods that you really enjoy, getting off the couch and away from the screen and getting out and doing physical exercise, if you're not used to it, that can be unpleasant to start too. And so it's not surprising that we find that people chronically procrastinate also tend to put off engaging in those health promoting behaviors that would really help their health overall. So if you put those two things together, higher stress and poor health behaviors, and you tie that in with somebody who's got this pattern of dealing with unpleasant tasks in this very avoidant manner by procrastinating, over time, there's going to be some cumulative damage.

And although I've only done one study in this area, one study that I did do looking at people with heart—their heart health, so in terms of having hypertension or cardiovascular disease, I found that those who scored higher on a measure of chronic procrastination, when you controlled for all kinds of other factors that might account for poor heart health, they were more likely to be in the group that had poor heart health. I think it worked out to the extent that they had a one point increase on this measure, so it was a self-report measure that we use. We ask people about how often they procrastinate or if they're putting things off to tomorrow. So for every one point increase on that measure, their chances of having poor heart health increase by 63%, and that's after accounting for a lot of other factors.

Mills:?Wow.

Sirois:?Yeah. But it makes sense though too, because if you're stressed all the time and you're not looking after your health, these healthy behaviors—and stress and health behaviors are two key pathways to good health and when you don't engage in them, we know that they are risk factors for poor heart health. So I think that's kind of the extreme case over several decades. So there's short-term health impacts, but there's also some more serious long-term health impacts as well.

Mills:?So a moment ago you mentioned the couch and the screen, being able to get away from those things, and I'm wondering whether does the ubiquity of social media and electronic devices have an impact on procrastination or have procrastinators always been able to find excuses to put things off?

Sirois:?That's a great question. There are a lot of—there's some procrastination research that did just that, just looked at the sort of social media and digital distractions, and that's a whole research program is in that area. And there is indeed a connection. So people who are prone to procrastination do tend to use more social media, tend to be engaged with their digital distractions. And there might be some generational influences there too. But that being said, there's other things that we can do to engage in procrastination for sure.

And if you look at something like bedtime procrastination, which is a particular form of procrastination where you say, “Hey, I've got an important meeting tomorrow morning, I'm going to go to bed at 11 o'clock,” and here we are 1:00 AM in the morning and you're still on your social media. Or you may be sitting up reading that novel or you may be knitting that sweater. So the researchers that have looked at what people do to procrastinate on their bedtimes, it's not just digitally oriented distractions, they engage in a whole bunch of things. Some of them bake, even. I mean it's really bizarre. So I think it's whatever your fancy is, something to distract you from the emotions that you're not dealing with about the tasks that you should be doing, which is going to bed and maybe it's because you haven't processed what went on in that day. But that again, it's an emotion regulation issue. And I think, yeah the digital media makes it easier for certain generations and I think that other generations might equally find other types of distractions and activities to engage in.

In fact, anecdotally a lot of the people I've talked to when I say I do procrastination research, I get a lot of people telling me about their procrastination story. So you hear a lot of different things. And I remember there was one journalist I spoke to and he said, “Yeah, I remember when I was a student at university and I hate cleaning, I hate housework, but whenever I had a big paper or exam coming, boy, was my house ever clean.” And so instead of doing studying, he was running around getting the house perfectly clean. And you see this a lot. It's not like procrastinators are sitting around lazy, they're doing other things. It's just not that thing that they should be doing right now that's looming and important and will have negative consequences if they don't get it done.

Mills:?In prepping for this conversation, I of course had to go to Dr. Google and find out who are famous procrastinators, and there are lists, as you've probably seen them, and they include luminaries like the Dalai Lama, Frank Lloyd Wright, Herman Melville, Leonardo DaVinci. Putting aside whether these lists are historically accurate, they raise the question, is it possible to be a chronic procrastinator but also extremely productive?

Sirois:?That is a really good question. And I think, yeah—I mean, I would go back to, well, were they really procrastinating or were they engaging in some other form of delay? So we talk about sagacious delay where on the surface when somebody puts something off, we might look at them and say, “Hey, they're procrastinating,” or we might even look at our own behavior and just because it's a delay and we're not doing what we know we should be doing, we might say, “Well, I'm procrastinating.” But if you sort of look below the surface, it may be that maybe you haven't started that report because you're waiting to hear back with some key information that's essential for you to get going on this and if you started without that information, you actually would be wasting a lot of time. And so I think we really do have to make that distinction between delay and procrastination.

There might be some really monumental delayers out there, but they could be sagacious delayers, wise delayers who are doing it with purpose. And I think the people that I've spoken to who really struggle with procrastination, they are in a bad way. They have career issues, health issues, they're not fulfilling their dreams, they're not reaching their goals. So rather than frame it in terms of productivity, which I think feeds into a lot of our social norms about what we should and shouldn't be doing and how much we should and shouldn't be doing, I'd rather frame it around whether you're reaching your goals or not or do you have all these things you started and never finished, do you have all these unfulfilled goals that you just never got round to doing because of fear of failure or just worried it wasn't going to be good enough or worried whether you could manage maybe some of the challenges that you might face when you engage with that task?

Mills:?Given that these famous alleged procrastinators maybe weren't procrastinators at all, I thought it was interesting that there weren't a lot of women on the list that I saw. A couple of names popped up, Margaret Atwood, J.K. Rowling for example, who are also highly productive. But should we take that to mean, if there's any truth to these lists at all, that women procrastinate less than men?

Sirois:?So that's a great question. There has—It's a little bit controversial. So the evidence, it's a little mixed. A lot of studies haven't found any difference and since—some more recent evidence does suggest that men tend to procrastinate a little bit more than women. And often it depends on the measures that you're using as well. And I guess here we're talking about chronic procrastination as opposed to procrastinating from time to time. So yeah, I would say there is some evidence suggest men might procrastinate a little bit more than women, but it's not a huge difference and we may get some evidence in the coming years that that levels out because I think it is really driven also by what's going on. Just coming out of the situation we're coming out of now, many more people working from home and having to deal with a lot of distractions they didn't have to deal with before. I think that would kind of level the playing field for many people as well in terms of whether they were able to be productive or whether they found themselves falling into a trap of procrastination.

Mills:?Well, somewhat related to my last question, are there cultural differences among people who procrastinate? For example, there's some countries where deadlines are loose, trains and planes don't run on fixed schedules. And then there are other countries where efficiency and productivity are highly valued. So are we all in some sense a product of our culture when it comes to procrastination?

Sirois:?The best way to answer that, and I do agree there's different cultural norms, if you like, and just unspoken standards about what is and isn't acceptable across different countries and different parts of the world. I would think that it's more about—it's not necessarily that you would procrastinate more or less necessarily depending on what the restraints were. If it was a country where the tolerance for procrastination was quite low, that might certainly have an impact, but I think it's about the acceptability as well. And there is some research, there's some procrastination researchers down in Peru, and we do these conferences every couple of years, just sort international conference on procrastination and we hear about the different research that's going on different in parts of the world on the topic of procrastination. And one of the researchers there, she mentioned that especially in the workplace in Peru, it's like people procrastinate quite regularly because they see their managers and their bosses procrastinating so it sets the standard and everyone thinks it's okay.

But there's tolerance for it too. So as much, there's not so much as a strong response to procrastination in cultures where things are a little bit more lax in terms of timelines. And I think it has to do with deadlines and how flexible those are. Then you go to other parts of the world and one part of the world where there's actually quite a booming research or culture of researchers looking into procrastination. That's Germany. And again, we think of Germany is being highly efficient, trains running on time and everything sort of very precise, and the tolerance there for procrastination is quite low. And that's probably why there's a lot of research into it there too.

But I remember some years back at one of our conferences, we had some students presenting posters about their research on procrastination and there was this, what did they call it? They called it a “procrastination ambulance,” which was I think their way of translating saying it was like a clinic for procrastination at a university, for students who were really troubled by their procrastination. So they could come in, engage in this program over a few weeks, it would help reduce their procrastination. And they showed the data suggesting that their program worked and they showed the mean scores on this measure of chronic procrastination at the beginning of them coming to the clinic and at the end so they could say, “Oh look, there's some improvement.” And I remember standing there with a colleague of mine and we both were looking at the scores on this measure of procrastination at time one, and the level of procrastination that they found troubling was well below the average national mean for the procrastination in the U.S. and Canada, but this was troubling in Germany. In Canada or U.S., it would've been “That's not an issue.”

Mills:?Yeah, I could see that.

Sirois:?Yeah. And this is what I'm saying, sort of the tolerance for procrastination, I think, differs across different cultural contexts.

Mills:?You also study perfectionism, which is a topic that we recently talked about on another episode of this podcast. I just want to ask if perfectionism and procrastination are linked and are perfectionists more or less likely to procrastinate?

Sirois:?Great question. Yeah. And I think first thing I have to say is that perfectionism isn't sort of a single entity. We have these sort of different subcategories or dimensions of perfectionism. So there's this thing called perfectionistic concerns, which is of a self-critical type of perfectionism where the person has really high standards for themselves and is really driven to try and please other people. Their self-worth is contingent upon whether they live up to some sort of idealized standard that they think society or their friends or their family expect of them. And then you've got this other flavor of perfectionism, which is this perfectionist strivers, which is more someone who's driven by their own internal standards, but these standards are still quite high. And so because of that, they might sort of not be able to savor their successes when they actually reach those standards.

And so we actually conducted some research a couple years ago where we did this thing called a meta-analysis, which is just basically a review of all the research that's ever been done looking at the associations between perfectionism, both perfectionism dimensions there, and procrastination. And we had 40-some-odd studies, it included 10,000 people and when we looked at the links between chronic procrastination and perfectionism, we indeed found that individuals who were more prone to chronic procrastination also scored higher on this measure of the self-critical perfectionism. However, there wasn't a link with the other form of perfectionism. So I sort of lay that out there because it's slightly different there. I can say yes and no because no to one type, but yes to another. And I think it makes sense though too, because if you are really driven and your whole sense of self-worth is focused on how well you do this task and you're so worried about that task, that's enough, that fear of failing, that fear of it not being good enough or not pleasing others can be enough to put you off ever even starting it.

And the other thing that happens too, when you don't start a task, you can still live in that wonderful space where you can imagine how great it's going to be and you can picture how perfect the ending's going to be when you finish writing that report or redecorating your house or whatever it is, that task that you're dealing with at that time. But the minutes you take action and start to encounter problems, which we all do, right, it's never a straight direct path from point A to point B when we're trying to reach our goals, there's ups and downs along the way, but people who have these sort of self-critical perfectionism, the minute they hit one of those bumps in the road, so to speak, on the path to their goal, they give up. They have a zero tolerance sort of policy for any sort of mistakes or anything not going correctly and so they tap out. And then yeah, what we see that as procrastination.

Mills:?Procrastination has to be a tough thing to study in a lab. How do you do that? I mean, if you bring people in to be observed and to be experimental subjects where you tell them to procrastinate, I mean how do you do this?

Sirois:?The quick answer is you can't. You actually can't because if we look at the definition, it's got to be something they intended to do. We can't impose that on them. I mean, that being said, there has been some experimental research done where they gave students a range of tasks easy and more difficult and looked at the time on task and what things they did otherwise. But that's the closest we can get to it. And so this is one of the reasons why, at least with my research anyways, what I've defaulted to is looking at people who have a chronic tendency to procrastinate, because that's—in a sense we're holding that procrastination constant and we're looking at what are the sort of thoughts that they have? What are the sort of consequences that they experience?

And then also studying it naturalistically, so recording behavior. So some of my students have looked at getting people to answers and questionnaires at one time point, and then following up with them and getting them to fill in with grids based on 30-minute or 15-minute segments of the day. Were you procrastinating in that time? And then we do a bit of a calculation to get an idea of how many minutes they were procrastinating. So it's much easier to study it instead of a naturalistic setting by just getting people to self-report or to look at people who chronically procrastinate because what you study in the lab is going to be delay for sure, but it not isn't necessarily going to be procrastination. And that is a real challenge.

Mills:?So last question. What are you working on now? What are the next things that you're looking at in the realm of procrastination or even the other areas where you're doing research?

Sirois:?Great. Yeah, I'm doing a few different things. So one of the projects I want to look at, I know there was this type of work that was done with perfectionism showing that perfectionism is increasing over time. So I'm curious to know whether the rates of procrastination over the last couple decades are increasing over time as well. So that's one project that I'll be working on and looking at sort of existing research out there to see if the mean levels of procrastination, chronic procrastination that is, have gone up, especially in student samples over the last couple of decades. Other areas I'm looking at is trying to get a handle on some of what's happening with respect to the emotion regulation and specifically this idea that we tend to often not get started on a task because we make emotional mountains out of molehills.

So there's this task, we may not have enough information about it, and we start imagining how difficult it's going to be and how complex it's going to be and how we're going to fail or struggle. And that's enough to keep us from actually getting started on the task. And this sort of fits in with an area of research that's called affective forecasting, which basically says that as human beings, we're not very good at predicting our future emotional states. And I think this happens a lot with procrastination, that we predict that we're going to feel a lot worse when we're doing the task than when we actually get on and just do it. And we also think that it's going to last longer, we're going to be stuck in this state of frustration or stress or what have you as we're struggling with this task. And push comes to shove when we actually do it, it's like, “Wait a second. That actually wasn't very hard at all and it was a lot faster to get through than what I expected.” But there isn't a lot of research on that. So that's conducting some experiments now to see if maybe people prone to procrastination are over-anticipating how difficult that task is going to be. So sort of drilling down into understanding better that emotional side.

And then some of the other work I'm doing is just, again, trying to maybe get some more hard indicators of the health effects. So actually looking at more objective measures using Smart watches to track people's behavior, their physical activity and seeing again, if in fact people who are prone to procrastination are actually being less active than others. And I'll mention one final thing too. I've done some preliminary work looking at using self-compassion to address procrastination and it does suggest that it at least increases people's intentions to get on with the task and not procrastinate, but I want to follow up with some research to actually track that. So if we tell people to recall a time that they're procrastinating and then give them this sort of script that re-frames that experience in a self-compassionate manner, basically “You're not the first person to procrastinate, nor will you be the last. So get over it, get on with it and move forward.” Does that actually have an impact on their ability to stop procrastinating and get things done?

Mills:?Well, that's some good advice for you procrastinators who are listening to us today. Just do it and you'll feel a lot better than you think you will.?

Well, I want to thank you for joining me today, Dr. Sirois. I'm so glad that we did not put off this discussion.

Sirois:?Myself as well. Thank you for having me.

Mills:?You can find previous episodes of?Speaking of Psychology?on our website at?www.speakingofpsychology.org?or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at?speakingofpsychology@apa.org.

Speaking of Psychology?is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.?

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.