Why Do We Procrastinate and How Can We Stop?

Procrastination is something which affects nearly all of us in our day to day lives. According to Steel (2010), 95% of people admit to procrastinating at least some of the time. However, research suggests that procrastination can have a negative impact on our lives, such as by increasing our stress levels and delaying seeking medical treatment (Sirois et al., 2003). So, why do we continue to procrastinate and how do we stop?

To answer these questions, let us understand….

What is procrastination?

Procrastination can be defined as “the voluntary delay of an intended and necessary important activity, despite expecting potential negative consequences that outweigh the positive consequences of the delay” (Klingsieck, 2013). When we procrastinate, we justify why we will not do the task or make the decision. We tell ourselves we will do it next week when we are less tired, or more mentally focused, or when we believe we are a stronger version of ourselves. We keep finding justifications, and the task gets more and more delayed, and in the meantime we may undertake displacement activities (e.g., managing our inbox), which help us to feel like we are in control of the situation, when in reality, the task is still not being done.

Why do we procrastinate?

Research suggests there are many reasons why we procrastinate, for example, psychological inflexibility, lack of self-efficacy, surplus of anxiety, fear of failure (Glick et al., 2014; Ariani & Susilo, 2018; Abu & Saral, 2016). Alongside these, the levels of neurotransmitters within our brains may play an influential role. Research suggests that before making a decision, our dopamine levels within our brain rapidly increase (Bang et al., 2020) and when our dopamine levels decrease, we can experience indecision (Baston & Ursino, 2015).

We may therefore procrastinate as a result of low dopamine levels, which can prevent us from making a decision. Research suggests that when you make a decision, if the outcome produced less reward than expected, dopamine levels can decrease (Schultz, 2022), and we may try to avoid that feeling due to the pleasurable feeling we experience when dopamine levels are high, resulting in procrastination.

How do we stop procrastinating?

So, how can we stop procrastinating? In our podcast released on the 12th June 2022 we offer 6 tips to help reduce how much you procrastinate. For further information, check out the Chief Psychology Officer Podcast by Dr Amanda Potter and Tim Hepworth on ‘Decision Making & Procrastination’, available on the official podcast website: https://www.thecpo.co.uk, as well as on Apple, Spotify, and Google.

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Written by Emily Willis and Dr Amanda Potter, Zircon.

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References

Abu, N. K., & Saral, D. G. (2016). The reasons of academic procrastination tendencies of education faculty students. The Online Journal of New Horizons in Education-January, 6(1).

Ariani, D. W., & Susilo, Y. S. (2018). Why do it later? Goal orientation, self-efficacy, test anxiety, on procrastination. Journal of Educational, Cultural and Psychological Studies (ECPS Journal), (17), 45-73.

Bang, D., Kishida, K. T., Lohrenz, T., White, J. P., Laxton, A. W., Tatter, S. B., ... & Montague, P. R. (2020). Sub-second dopamine and serotonin signaling in human striatum during perceptual decision-making. Neuron, 108(5), 999-1010.

Baston, C., & Ursino, M. (2015, August). A computational model of Dopamine and Acetylcholine aberrant learning in Basal Ganglia. In 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) (pp. 6505-6508). IEEE.

Glick, D. M., Millstein, D. J., & Orsillo, S. M. (2014). A preliminary investigation of the role of psychological inflexibility in academic procrastination. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 3(2), 81-88.

Klingsieck, K. B. (2013). Procrastination. European Psychologist.

Matthews, G. (2015, May). Goals research summary. In Ninth Annual International Conference of the Psychology Research Unit of Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER). San Rafael, CA: Dominican University of California.

Pychyl, T. A., & Sirois, F. M. (2016). Procrastination, emotion regulation, and well-being. In Procrastination, health, and well-being (pp. 163-188). Academic Press.

Schultz, W. (2022). Dopamine reward prediction error coding. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.

Sirois, F. M., Melia-Gordon, M. L., & Pychyl, T. A. (2003). “I'll look after my health, later”: An investigation of procrastination and health. Personality and individual differences, 35(5), 1167-1184.

Steel, P. (2010). The procrastination equation: How to stop putting things off and start getting stuff done. Random House Canada.