Our culture says that people procrastinate because they're disorganized and lazy. After all, how hard can it really be to do a task you've committed to doing, and one that you even know will benefit you?!

But I learned through this episode that procrastination isn't about disorganization or laziness at all - it's much more about managing how we feel about tasks - and we can learn how to do this more effectively.

Those of us who don't struggle with procrastination can also do quite a bit to support the folks who do, to make it easier for them to get stuck in and be successful at the task.

Learn more about navigating your own procrastination and supporting your child in doing this as they get old enough for it to become relevant to them in this episode.

Fuschia Sirois Book:Procrastination: What it is, why it's a problem, and what you can do about it. (Affiliate link)

Jump to highlights

(02:04)  Definition of Procrastination

(03:19)  The 2 kinds of Procrastination and the difference between the two

(04:07)  How common is procrastination?

(08:03)  The interconnections between Procrastination and people's health

(11:04)   How can Procrastination be linked to stress?

(18:01)   Bedtime Procrastination and its implication to people's health

(21:25)   Link then between people's emotional states and procrastination

(25:42)   The connections between perfectionism and procrastination

(29:45)   What is active procrastination and is it a good thing?

(33:20)   Interaction between procrastination and shame

(40:42)   What can we do to manage our emotions and take on tasks that are important and valuable to us

(42:34)  How can forgiveness and self-compassion affect Procrastination

(45:36)  What is a paper doll diagram?

(48:48)  Can children procrastinate and at what age does procrastination start to show up?

(50:42)  Healthy ways of managing negative emotions

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[accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]

Emma  00:00

Hi. I'm Emma, and I'm listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives. But we're surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast is still scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, then get a free infographic on the 13 Reasons Your Child Isn't Listening To You and what to do about each one. Just head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon you're going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro. So come and record one yourself at yourparentingmojo.com/recordtheintro.

Jen Lumanlan  00:45

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast and today we're going to address a challenge that I know a lot of listeners struggle with and that is procrastination. Whether you're a chronic procrastinator yourself or you're worried about raising a child who procrastinate or potentially both will help you to understand why you procrastinate and offer some concrete tools for how you can navigate tasks that are important to you more successfully. My guest for this conversation is Dr. Fuschia Sirois - Professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University in England. For more than 20 years, she's researched the causes and consequences of procrastination as well as how emotions play a role in it. Her research also examines the role of positive psychology traits, states and interventions for supporting self regulation and enhancing well being and health. Welcome Dr. Sirois. It’s great to have you here.

Dr. Fuschia Sirois  01:30

Thanks, Jen. Thanks very much for inviting me to be on.

Jen Lumanlan  01:33

I was trying to think of a way of phrasing this that doesn't sound really bad. There are a lot of things I struggle with in life. I am not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination, lots of things I'm not good at. Procrastination by large is not among them. So I read your book about a month before our scheduled interview. And I prepared the questions about two weeks before and I don't know why but I've just never seen the need to wait to get tasks done. But I know a lot of people do. Can we start with a definition of what procrastination is and then maybe understand how common it is?

Dr. Fuschia Sirois  02:04

Yeah, of course, that's a really good place to start. Because a lot of people think they might procrastinate. And actually what they're doing is a form of delay. And procrastination is a particular type of delay. And it's a type of delay that involves self regulation, difficulties or difficulty managing, you know, your thoughts, your emotions and your behaviors towards reaching your goals. That sort of what we package is self regulation. Specifically, procrastination involves unnecessary delay, voluntary delay, something you chose to do something that's not that is not necessary, there's not an emergency pulling you away from that task that you had to do by and it's a task that you intended to do. So you said, I'm going to do this, it's not something somebody forced you into, right? You said, Yeah, I agreed, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this on. And so you engage in this type of delay, unnecessary, voluntary and candid task. And something that holds some importance, it's not a, you know, a really minor, something, we all put off those little things, but that wouldn't necessarily technically be called procrastination. And we do all this despite knowing that there's going to be harm for ourselves or others. So there's going to be negative consequences. And that really speaks to the irrationality of procrastination and why it can be such a problem.

Jen Lumanlan  03:10

Okay, and there's a couple different kinds, right? There's situational and dispositional, can you help us understand what's the difference between those two things?

Dr. Fuschia Sirois  03:18

Yeah. So I mean, we can think about procrastination as we can about any other sort of, you know, behavior or quality that we might have, it can be something that we do occasionally. And it can be specific to a domain. So you may have someone who's Ultra efficient at work, but when it comes to their health, they have a real hard time following through with that exercise and diet regimen, as they tend to put that off. So if you didn't have domain specific or search what we call situational procrastination, where you just do it in one area of life perhaps and or you may just do it occasionally. And then it becomes more frequent and more generalized, we then start to look at procrastination as more of a chronic tendency, almost like a personality trait. So something that you would do frequently and across a wide variety of situations, and probably to a greater degree of harm. That's what we refer to as sort of a chronic procrastination.

Jen Lumanlan  04:02

Okay. How common is procrastination?

Dr. Fuschia Sirois  04:07

This is, you know, being around for years, and it is kind of a hard thing to pin down when we use self report measures usually, but what our best estimate suggests that a range say for college university students, for example, it's quite high, could be anywhere from you know, 80 to 95%. Have, okay, you know, procrastinate once in a while. Okay. And that makes some sense, if you think about the academic environment and the constant demands on time and, you know, the challenges involved there. In the adult population, other estimates depending on what country you go to, can range from between, say, 15 and 25% of the adult population procrastinate chronically, I should back up and say, though, too, so although it makes sense that students procrastinate quite frequently, there's actually some evidence to suggest that 50% of students do so chronically. And that becomes quite problematic, especially when you know, it can affect their academic achievement.

Jen Lumanlan  04:59

Yeah, I was super curious when I read the range of which people procrastinate with students being so high. And I'm just thinking, is this really about the students or is this something about the college experience that is difficult? I mean, I'm thinking it's the first time that students have really been responsible for themselves. They've been in school their whole lives, and you're told what to do and when to do it. And there's a lot of regimented control. And all of a sudden, they're in an environment where they get to make a lot of choices for the first time in their lives, probably. And I was wondering if it's something related to that, rather than something about the students themselves? Because apparently, most of them get over it, right? They're not doing it chronically for the rest of their lives, otherwise, the adult population numbers will be higher.

Dr. Fuschia Sirois  05:37

No, I think, you know, the academic environment certainly be a pressure cooker for procrastination. And there's two things going on there. So this is where I often have some difficulty, because on the one hand, yes, what you're saying, I think, makes a lot of sense that we've got these extra demands. And then for the first time, they're in uncertain situations, we need people prostate more, when they feel uncertainty, there's ambiguity, they don't know what's expected of them. All those are factors that can contribute to a tendency to procrastinate, and so you know, all of that, and the anxiety around that the stress that all can add into it. On the other hand, I often think that the numbers are so high because of the fact that we actually have markers to measure the procrastination, right? So we talked about academic procrastination, and how many times did you submit work late, right, because you didn't get your assignment done, that you love studying to the last minute. So we have a much clearer way of assessing whether somebody's procrastinating in an academic environment. But we don't have that same clear way when we look at procrastination in the adult environment, our questions change, they become more generalized about, you know, generally, you know, how often do you put things off? Or I'm always saying, I'm going to do it tomorrow. So I think actually, the stats on procrastination in the adult population are probably underestimated if anything, I still think they're higher in the college environment for the reasons that you just mentioned, I think it's underestimated in the adult population, just because we don't measure it the same way. We don't have those same hard deadlines, except maybe in the work environment, you know, quite a different situation.

Jen Lumanlan  07:05

Yeah, you also have psychology professors offering course credit to complete questionnaires about procrastination on a regular basis. So you're asking people regularly as well, right. So presumably, that has something to do with it?

Dr. Fuschia Sirois  07:18

Yeah, it's highly assessed, you know, there was a researcher in Israel, for example, who's done quite a few large scale surveys of the types of procrastination that people engage in what domains they procrastinate in, how often they procrastinate. And the numbers are coming up roughly about, you know, the same as what they are in some of the North American Studies, for example, but you know, one of the biggest areas that people procrastinate, and which is I found quite interesting was our health. So that actually was top ranked in that particular survey that was conducted. But yeah, again, we don't ask the same questions about procrastination to come to those numbers in the adult populations is what we do in the student populations.

Jen Lumanlan  07:54

Yeah. Okay. So let's pick up that thread on health then. So I know you've studied procrastination in regards to people's health a lot. What are some of the interconnections there? How does procrastination affect people's health?

Dr. Fuschia Sirois  08:03

That means this is what got me into the whole field of procrastination research, you know, 20 some odd years ago, because the first study on this had come out in 1997. And it suggested that student procrastinators tended to be report better health at the beginning of term and worse health at the end of term. And there were some suggestions that may have to do with stress or other things. And study didn't really address that. And so that got me into looking at, you know, what's going on? What are the pathways here, you know, if you look at chronic procrastination as sort of a personality trait, and you look at some of the other theories and research has been done on the links between personality and health, it seems sort of common pathways come up mainly, these are having to do with through stress, okay, additional stress and through, you know, impeding important health behaviors. And this is, in fact, what I found in my research, both in cross sectional and longitudinal research with the student populations and adult populations as well. So you know, procrastination is always you can think of it, someone who chronically procrastinates is going to create a lot of stress for themselves. And we know stress has really, you know, negative impact on our health states in the short term in terms of compromising immune system and making us more vulnerable to infections and other types of stress related illnesses, but also in the long term as well, right, it can have a really detrimental effect on our immune system functioning and make us more vulnerable for development of a variety of chronic diseases major in life. So stress is one pathway but also if you're procrastinating, which is a it's a behavior and you're procrastinating things that are you find unpleasant and most people find making changes to their health routines unpleasant because you have to give up sweets or they have to become more active rather than sitting down in front of a screen, then they're likely to put those behaviors off too. And we know you know, all the researchers have done for decades that health behaviors are a key pathway for someone's health trajectory. So if you don't engage in health behaviors you set yourself up for obesity or heart health, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, you name that. Right? And so those are really the two pathways that I've been investigating. And you know, there's correlates along there, such as coping. And we know that procrastinators don't cope very well with their stress, which means they're going to be experiencing more intensely, and it's going to have more of those negative consequences on their health.

Jen Lumanlan  10:15

Okay, so I want to dig into this idea of the links between procrastination and stress a little bit more, because I was really trying to sort that out in my own mind. And you said in the current book, procrastinating on important and intended tasks can lead people to experience a range of negative thoughts and emotions, including guilt, shame, stress, anxiety, depression, self loathing feelings of competency, I looked back to some of the studies you referenced, which referenced other studies, which are looking at mostly correlational, rather than causal evidence. And then you also wrote another book in 2016, where you wrote, there's little to no research to date providing evidence of procrastination associated with chronic stress. And then you sort of go on to conclude that procrastination is linked to chronic stress. And so I'm trying to understand is it that stress is a really sort of big thing. And procrastination impacts that a little bit in some way. And that stress is really the thing to focus on, or is procrastination, like procrastination is a really big source of stress in how people manage their health

Dr. Fuschia Sirois  11:04

Flat out, stress is bad for your health, right? Like that is a key thing. So you know, being someone who studies personality and health, we look at personality as a source of stress, but it says stable source of stress. Right? So I think, you know, we're saying there about, there isn't the evidence to look over time. So I've done cross sectional studies, right, where we looked at, for example, there's one study where we have 1000 people, pulled out people who had a clean bill of health, no chronic health conditions and those who had poor heart health. So hypertension and cardiovascular disease, looked at their scores on the measure of chronic procrastination control, other personality variables, other socio economic status variables that we know make someone vulnerable for poor heart health. And, you know, the odds came out that basically, if you know, for every one point increase on that procrastination measure chronic procrastination, your odds of being in the poor heart health group went up by 63%. Right? You know, it's cross sectional, that's not a minor thing. If it makes sense, theoretically, that we're talking about not poor management of stress, poor management of health behaviors to indicators of poor health and chronic illness over time, theoretically, it makes sense that way. So we don't have the longitudinal research, I guess it's what I was saying to show that there's linked to chronic stress, we can't, but you have to show that over time. Theoretically, though, we know that if this is a chronic tendency, and in the short run, it generates stress, it's going to continue to generate stress. So theoretically, cross nation, we can reasonably say that it's linked to chronic stress. Okay, right. Okay. I think that's where the clarification in terms of what you were saying, it wasn't contradicting so much, theoretically, we know. And we know that from other personality traits to where there has been more research on say, like the big five factors and that type of thing, then there has been procrastination and stress. But theoretically, we would expect this, and I have that one study to suggest that, in fact, that may be the case. But I agree, you know, we need more work, to research to follow over time, if people are interested in that. And I think going back to your original question about, you know, is it stress or is it procrastination, it's always stress. But, I mean, there's a number of sources of stress. And if somebody has a general behavioral tendency that puts them at risk for greater...