In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of lower priority, or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time. In accordance with Freud, the Pleasure principle may be responsible for procrastination; humans do not prefer negative emotions, and handing off a stressful task until a further date is enjoyable. The concept that humans work best under pressure provides additional enjoyment and motivation to postponing a task. Some psychologists cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. Other psychologists indicate that anxiety is just as likely to get people to start working early as late and the focus should be impulsiveness. That is, anxiety will cause people to delay only if they are impulsive.
The psychological causes of procrastination are in debate. Drawing on clinical work, there appears to be a connection with issues of anxiety, low sense of self-worth, and a self-defeating mentality. On the other hand, drawing on meta-analytical correlational work, anxiety and perfectionism have no – or at best an extremely weak – connection with procrastination. Instead, procrastination is strongly connected with lack of self-confidence (e.g., low self-efficacy, or learned helplessness) or disliking the task (e.g., boredom and apathy). The strongest connection to procrastination, however, is impulsiveness.
These characteristics are often used as measures of the personality trait conscientiousness whereas anxiety and irrational beliefs (such as perfectionism) are aspects of the personality trait neuroticism. Accordingly, Lee, Kelly and Edwards (2006) indicated that neuroticism has no direct links to procrastination and that any relationship is fully mediated by conscientiousness. For most of human evolution, laziness and short-term but fast thinking (impulsiveness) were overall adaptive. Laziness was adaptive because energy and time were much more limited than today in more-developed countries for most people.
Limited energy – e.g., lack of food – meant that avoidance of labor not necessary for short-term survival was adaptive; after all, the energy invested in longer-term plans might be wasted due to unexpected disasters (very common before human control over our surroundings – technology – grew). Similarly, needing to work on survival matters most of the time meant that time had to be conserved. For handling day-to-day survival, short-term thinking was most of what was needed, with planning limited to solving immediate problems; taking time to think about longer-term plans could be a distraction from short-term survival.
Today, most people in more-developed countries lack pressures for immediate survival most of the time; our motivations are more abstract. It is harder for such abstract motivations to overcome avoidance of tasks that do not give us short-term pleasure and may cause us short-term pain (e.g., due to boredom).
Research on the physiological roots of procrastination mostly surrounds the role of the prefrontal cortex. Consistent with the notion that procrastination is strongly related to impulsiveness, this area of the brain is responsible for executive brain functions such as planning, impulse control, attention, and acts as a filter by decreasing distracting stimuli from other brain regions. Damage or low activation in this area can reduce an individual’s ability to filter out distracting stimuli, ultimately resulting in poorer organization, a loss of attention and increased procrastination. This is similar to the prefrontal lobe’s role in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, where underactivation is common.
For some people, procrastination can be persistent and tremendously disruptive to everyday life. For these individuals, procrastination may be symptomatic of a psychological disorder such as depression or ADHD. Therefore, it is important for people whose procrastination has become chronic and is perceived to be debilitating, to seek out a trained therapist or psychiatrist to see if an underlying mental health issue may be present.
Traditionally, procrastination has been associated with perfectionism, a tendency to negatively evaluate outcomes and one’s own performance, intense fear and avoidance of evaluation of one’s abilities by others, heightened social self-consciousness and anxiety, recurrent low mood, and “workaholism”. According to Robert B. Slaney adaptive perfectionists (when perfectionism is egosyntonic) were less likely to procrastinate than non-perfectionists, while maladaptive perfectionists (people who saw their perfectionism as a problem; i.e., when perfectionism is egodystonic) had high levels of procrastination (and also of anxiety). Accordingly, meta-analytic review of 71 studies by Steel indicate that typically perfectionists actually procrastinate slightly less than others, with “the exception being perfectionists who were also seeking clinical counseling.”
Ironically, here bellow is a video about the science of procrastination that you can watch to avoid doing some other task. But it’s not quite the singularity that it could be, because it also gives you some tips for keeping your time-wasting in check.