Hey, welcome to Science Stuff production of iHeartRadio. Hoarhitch Ham and do they We're finally getting to the science of procrastination. Why do we procrastinate? Who procrastinates? And is there a cure. We're gonna be talking to not one, not two, but three psychologists about this phenomenon, all of whom have a different take on why we procrastinate, and then we're gonna talk about possible strategies you can use to stop procrastinating,
including some that you might find unusual. So, whether you're someone who keeps putting things off, or if you want to understand people around you should do, then don't delay. Listen on as we tackle the science of procrastination.
Y enjoy.
Hey everyone, So I am a big procrastinator. If you work with me, then you probably know to give me a fake deadline just to make sure I don't turn things in late. I've also written comics groups about procrastination. It was a big theme in PhD comics, and I've delivered a lecture on procrastination in academia called the Power of Procrastination about four hundred times in universities all over the world. So I was very interested and a little
scared about tackling today's subject. Now, I know I'm not alone. According to the experts we're talking to today, about ninety five percent of all human beings report procrastinating at least a little bit in their lives. I mean, come on, we all do it. I say that other five percent of the population is just lying. But some people procrastinate a lot, and they do it to the point where
it starts to affect their lives. Maybe it's a nagging sense of guilt they carry with them, or maybe it results in misopportunities, or there could even be health consequences. By the way, if you have any medical issues that you need to get checked or anything, go do that right now. Don't mess around with that now. As it turns out, there is a whole field of scientific research
into procrastination. If you search for academic papers with the word procrastination, you get about three hundred thousand results, about thirty thousand of those just in the last three years. Like I said, it happens to a lot of people, and according to the first expert we're talking to today, it's kind of a consequence of our evolution and our history. So here's my conversation with doctor Pier Steele, a professor
of organizational psychology at the University of Calgary. Well, thank you so much, doctor Steele for joining us.
Great to be here.
Thank you.
Now I reached out to you, I want to say, maybe like ten years ago, and we put it off. Yes, we procrastinated a little, but we finally did it. We finally connected. Is this a historic case of procrastination?
Well, I did a historic review of it, and some of the ones are pretty out there.
You've seem worse, seem worse, far worse.
One thing, I've always wanted to restart the Procrastination Club of America.
Oh, but something keeps getting away. It might take a while to get members to sign up.
Yeah, it might take a little bit of a while. But procrastinations funny, right, uh huh, It's tragic and funny simultaneously.
Right. Oh no, we take it very seriously here at sign stuff.
Well, I know the science of it, if that's what people want, but it has you know, deep lines going back in history.
Tell us about the history of procrastination.
Okay, well you want to go back. It's as old as time, really as old as us. If you go back far enough. I mean one of the first historical references to it are in about fourteen hundred BC in ancient hieroglyphs. And the reason why, of course, is because we just started getting our civilization together.
According to doctor Steele, yea of procrastination basically started with complex civilization. Before women were just hunters and gatherers. We just kind of did whatever we wanted to do. But then things got complicated. Society has got more complex. We needed to coordinate with others and do things in groups, and suddenly we had deadlines.
That's right, we had coordination problems. Agriculture is like the first long term basically goal. You had to plant in the spring to reap.
In the fall, right, you had to plan ahead.
Yeah, that's right. Things have to happen.
So before we evolved as animals in the wild and we just did whatever we wanted to do. In fact, we should have all to not worry too much about the future.
Back in the day, when food was short and it's spoiled, you better gorge what's good because it's really difficult to get food and high energy ones that's what you need to serve. We have like one hundred million years of evolution and ancestors that go along with So if you're living in an environment where there are no long term goals and projects, your mind evolves towards the short term. It naturally does.
And this, Dougor Steele argues, means we kind of evolved to have two brains in our heads.
So we have this kind of clusion of a brain. We have this older limpic system, which kind of wants things that sees right, and you have this prefront the cortex, which is good for planning in the future.
I see, it's not like someone designed a human being from scratch. It's like we evolved and we built on top of what sibilis there and what's under there was least be an animal.
Yeah, I mean we evolve from that. We didn't get rid of that, We just added to it like an extension, so that part of us is still there.
This is what psychologists call the dualistic theory of mind, which says that we kind of have two brains, the primitive animal brain we evolved for millions of years, called the limbic system, and the rational planning brain we've wrapped around it called the prefrontal cortex. And doctor Pierre says that procrastination is basically what happens when those two brains fight with each other, especially about something called temporal discounting.
Procrastinations is simply an expression of our temporal discounting, which we fire value the now more than later.
Okay, here's an example. Let's say you want to exercise more well, when the time comes, your prefrontal cortex knows that exercise is good for you and that it will pay off in the future, But your limbic system doesn't really understand the future. It just knows that you're tired, that exercise is boring and it's uncomfortable effort. Or let's say you need to work on your taxes. Your prefrontal cortex knows you need to do it or you'll get in trouble in the future. But all your limbic system
knows is that it's a pain in the butt. And so the two parts of your brain are always fighting it out. And sometimes your limbic system wins and you procrastinate, and sometimes your prefrontal cortex wins and you get things done. All of this can be captured. It's something that doctor Steele calls the procrastination equation. Yes, there is math involved in procrastination.
Well, there's an equation, right, I wrote the book the Procrastination Equation, So there is actually a mathematical formula for Oh what is it? There's three basic variables, and the first is just rational gambling.
Okay, here's a mathematical equation that doctor Steele says basically can predict whether you're going to procrastinate or not. The equation says that how likely you are to do something is equal to how confident you are that you can do it times how much value you think you'll get out of doing it, divided by the amount of impulsiveness in your life. So if you're really confident you can do something, the more likely you are that you're going
to do it. The more something is worth to you, like how much money you'll get out of it, or how much trouble you'll get into if you don't do it, the more likely also that you're going to do it. But then both of those terms are divided by the impulsiveness in your life. So if you have a lot of impulsiveness in your life, you're less likely to get
things done. But if you have less impulsiveness, the more likely you're going to do things, and this impulsiveness, doctor Steele says, is a combination of a the personality you're born with. B the skills you've learned in life, and see how many distractions you have around you. Now, two
of those things you can change. You can learn new skills to get yourself organized and avoid procrastination, and you can reduce the number of distractions in your life, like turn off your cell phone or don't work in front of the TV. But the third, your personality is something you're just born with.
Well, the degree of procrastination is really it's genetic. It's eighty percent. Because it's a personality trait. It comes under conscientiousness and boat's neuroticism. Anxiety is a better, more transparent term for it.
Psychologists can track personality traits in people, and the two scientists have found that are most associated with procrastination are called conscientiousness, which is how diligent you are, and neuroticism or anxiousness, which is how much you tend to worry about things and overthink them. In scientific studies, people who are diligent tend to procrastinate less, and people who are anxious or neurotic tend to procrastinate more. And we know these are genetic from twin studies.
So you can do this by twins raised together versus raised to part So then you can see if they are still like pretty much identical despite being never have met each other and raised in different households. Be given things like, you know, a procrastination or impulsivity test, and all the rest of them. And if they both have a strong agreement correlation with each other, you know with a high degree of certainty it's genetic, right. You don't actually have to go in the DNA to do it.
So if your twin is a procrastinator, chances are you're a procrastinator too. Or if you find that your daughter is a procrastinator, uh like I have, then you have no one to blame but your own genes. The tendency to procrastinate is hereditary. Okay, So to recap, scientists have a mathematical formula for procrastination. It says that you're less likely to procrastinate if you're confident and the task is important to you and you've learned how to organize yourself.
But you're more likely to procrastinate if you're impulsive or if you have a lot of distractions around you. Now, does that mean we've solved procrastination? Not quite. According to the next scientist we're going to talk to, this a question doesn't answer one of the main questions about procrastination, which is why do we do it? If we know something is important to us, why do we still choose not to do it. When we come back, we're going to answer this question, and we're also going to talk
about how to stop procrastinating. So don't procrastinate. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about the science of procrastination, and so far we talk to one expert who says procrastination is simply an expression of our temporal discounting. That's the idea that we value the
present more than we value the future. For example, if I give you the choice of taking one thousand dollars in cold hard cash right now versus taking one one hundred dollars in say, two years, your brain is probably thinking I'll take the cash now. That's what's happening. According to doctor Pier Steele, when you procrastinate, you're discounting the potential negative consequences that might happen in the future if
you procrastinate. Doctor Steele even has a procrastination equation. But according to the next procrastination expert I talk to, there's something missing from this view of procrastination, and that is why do we do it? It only counts as procrastination if you feel you should be doing something else, So why do it? Why do we still make that choice to put things off? And for chronic procrastinators, why do
they keep making that choice over and over again? To answer that, here's my conversation with doctor Fusia Sira, a professor of Social and health psychology at Durham University in the UK. Well, thank you, doctor Sirah for joining.
Us, no problem, thanks for having me.
And we finally were able to connect. We've been trying for a while. We've been procrastinating.
No no, we've been making wise delay to find the perfect time.
Okay, this is interesting. According to doctor Sira, there is an annual conference on the scientific study of procrastination. Well, it's not quite annual.
We had a procrastination conference in Yutrik University in Netherlands this summer. We do it every two years. As a running joke that that's about as often as we can get around to doing it because it's procrastination.
These are people who procrastinate or people who study procrastination.
People who study procrastinations. That's sort of the the international group of scholars who study procrastination, which has been growing over the last few years, which is good to see a lot of new young researchers coming into the fold and taking up the call to better understand procrastination from a scientific perspective.
According to doctor Sarah, there is still a lot of healthy scientific debate about what counts as procrastination and why people do it. Well, they just start us off, can tell us what is procrastination? How do scientists define it?
So procrastination is a form of delay, but it's not your garden variety delay. So it's unnecessary and voluntary delay of an important task that you intended to do, despite knowing that there's going to be negative or harmful consequences by not following through. This is why it is such a fascinating phenomena to study, because people do this thing that's so irrational. They know on some level it's going to be harmful, yet they still do it. Like what's going on there?
Right? Yeah, what is going on here. Well, any Deductor Sirah, the answer is actually not that complicated.
I think the initial work on procrastination was taken up by behavioral economists who look at the cost of things, the cost of behavior, and the trade offs, because it looks like there's trade off with procrastination on the surface. So there was this view that it's something that you could put down to some sort of a formula, and it was always about your what you expected and what you valued, and things put into the formulas motivation times, you know, future value equals tendency.
But here's the thing, doctor Sierra argues, people don't really follow a formula when they procrastinate.
People don't think that way when they procrastinate. They don't make a conscious decision to procrastinate. It's irrational. You can't foot it in to formula. So it's absolutely rational. Yeah, and that's why if you try to explain it using rational formulas, you're always going to miss the footing.
Acquitting Deductor Surrah, the real reason we procrastinate is emotional.
After several discussions, we did put out a theoretical paper where we want to just turn over this idea that it's just this rational formulaic thing, and no, this is it's irrational. And what else do we know in our
human experiences is also i rational emotions. So we've put forth the idea that is a sort of temporal mood regulation sort of model where really what we're doing when we procrastinate is we're trying to regulate our mood and it's not the task, it's the emotions associated with that task.
What are Sura saying is that at the heart of every decision to procrastinate, there isn't a calculation about what's good for us now or later, or what is the value to us. When we're procrastinating, we're simply reacting to an emotion.
It's the low self esteem, it's the perfection is. It's to worry about what's to come or not to come. It's the threats to our sense of competency. So you've got this thing you're really worried about. It's like, it's going to be horrible. I've never done it before. It's not going to be good enough. I'm going to be criticized, I'm going to feel terrible about myself. Like, well, it's just boredom. Sometimes because boredom is an unpleasant state as well.
It's a full range of negative emotions. As human beings, we avoid negative emotions.
Oh I see.
So we argued that what you're doing with procrastination is you're avoiding the emotions associated with that task, right, and we react to that. Okay, I need to regulate this emotion. What do I do? I think I go do something more interesting or that I enjoy, because that will help me forget about this thing that I know I should be doing right now that I'm not doing.
Oh my goodness.
The unwillingness to work on that project or task or goal that is causing you challenging emotions that you don't know how to deal with except by disengaging from them, walking away from which we see behaviorally as procrastination.
Yeah. I don't know about you, but at this point in the conversation I was feeling, as people say expost, what doctor Sira is saying is that at the heart of every time you procrastinate, there's a core emotion being
triggered by the thing you're supposed to be doing. Maybe you're afraid that people will judge you if you do it, or you're afraid it won't turn out as good as you want it to be, or maybe you associate the task with something stressful that's happened to you before, or maybe it's just hard or boring, and that negative emotion is enough to keep you from doing it and to make things worse. The fact that you're not doing it can cause the negative emotions to pile up.
But it doesn't last because it's not effective mood regulations. People feel bad about the procrastination, then they start beating themselves up about procrastinating, and now they've gone another layer of negative mood onto the task. And is that going to get them to do it? No, it'll make the procrastination even more now to move away from that negative mood. And so you get this precious circle. And if you people stepping in going why aren't you doing this? Again?
More negative mood, they're going to put it aside.
Oh wow.
It doesn't help people to make them feel bad about the procrastating. It has the opposite effect.
I feel gotri Sura that you're peering into my soul right now. You're laying bare all the hang ups and decisions in life.
That's what we all go through when we procrastinate. It's pure raw emotion and it needs to be managed. And that's it.
I see.
And there's different strategies you can take to do this. But unless you recognize that emotions are ground zero for procrastination, any other stuff you do isn't going to be effective in the long run.
All right, Well, I feel like you're making it sound rational, which defeats to the rest of the definition, Like if I'm avoiding it for an emotional reason, then isn't that rational?
No, So he is rational in the moment. It apports you short term mood repair. So there is a reason, a short term reason. You get short term benefit. Yeah, but it is irrational because the cost of not actually getting that task done is the lot what's looming larger. And so the reason to do it is you're afforded this this shift from feeling bad to feeling not so bad or to feeling better because you especially to go
off and do something that's more enjoyable. But it's not effective emotion regulation because it comes back to bite you ten times worse than it was in the first place, right, because you start feeling bad about it, and other people might be getting on your case, and then now it's looking even worse. And you worry more, and it's getting closer to the deadline, and you know all these sorts of things.
Okay, so that's why we really procrastinate. We do it because there's a negative emotion tied to the thing we're supposed to be doing, and we don't know how to deal with that emotion other than to avoid it or put it off, Which means there's a very simple way to stop procrastinating. We'll get to what that is, but first I wanted to know procrastination is really all that bad? What the science say is really the impact of putting
things off. When we come back, we'll talk to another psychologist who was involved in the longest running study on procrastination ever done, where they tracked procrastinators for almost twenty years. We'll see what they found after the break. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about the size of procrastination, and so far we learn what procrastination is, who procrastinates, and why we procrastinate. Now there's
only two questions left. Is procrastination really that bad? And how can we stop procrastinating? To answer the first question, I reached out to psychologist doctor Lisa boylke a research scientist at the University of Tubingen in Germany. Doctor Bolka is one of the authors of one of the longest running experiments on procrastination ever done, where they looked at what really happens to people who procrastinate to tell us
about it. Here's my conversation with doctor Bolka. Well, thank you, doctor boylkeev for joining us.
Yes, I'm happy to be here.
Can you please tell us who you are and what you do.
Well.
My name is Lisa Boyka.
I'm a research scientist and postdoc at the Hector Research Institute of Education, Sciences and Psychology at the University of Tubingen, and I'm interested in understanding how procrastination emerges and how it can be overcome.
Incredible, and we almost didn't have this meeting because I procrastinated in sending you the link to.
Yeah, I'm worrious about that.
I guess I did an effective strategy of reminding and then go fine, good giving you deadlines.
Yeah, well, thank you. So.
At our institute, there was a longitutional study that started in two thousand and two and it was a big cohort with over four thousand students and it started in the high school at the very last year and attract actually students every two years or later on every four years.
And there we have like this massive data set where we could actually track students and ask them several years later, including during the pandemic, on how they are feeling, what they are doing, and this we could connect to their procrastination tendencies as well as to how they developed their procrastination behavior over time.
Okay, I have a lot of questions now, So you tracked people for eighteen years. Every couple of years, you would go back to them and you would survey them and you ask him questions. Yeah, correct, What kinds of questions would you follow up with?
So it was always the same questions, which makes it possible to have a look on how different things develop over time. For instance, if you ask them about generally delaying tasks and then they indicate in one year, yes, I do this a lot, and then several years later this and maybe not so much anymore, so that you can actually see how things changed over time.
So doctor Bulky and her colleagues at the University of Tuingngen have been tracking the same few thousand people since two thousand and two, and this is an amazing feat. I mean, if you think about it, getting a few thousand procrastinators to consistently fill out a survey every couple of years and actually turning it on time seems like an impossible task. I guess it could only happen in Germany.
But what's unique about this survey is that they've been able to not only track how much these few thousand people who procrastinate, but they also attracked how their lives are going, how successful they are, whether they're in a relationship, and how they feel in general. And what they found is pretty interesting. They found two things. The first is that the people who procrastinate more don't do as well
as everybody else. So you could tell like people who procrastinated more over time led a different life than people who did not procrastinate as much.
Yeah, so you could say it in a way like this, So it's correlational findings, but still you have the results over time, so you can't do causal conclusions there, but you can say procrastination was related to these kind of live outcomes and you can see that it had a negative impact.
I see on how much money you make, and what were the negative correlations?
Yeah, so it was for example, lower chances of completing a university three, of getting promoted at work, regarding maintaining a stable relationship, as well as general lower life satisfaction. And it was also associated with maladaptive behaviors during the pandemic, such as increased computer and internet consumption and poor mental health.
Oh wow, it affects your relationships.
Wow, that's actually quite interesting, and we were also thinking about why is that. So you can, for instance, assume that maybe a person that is constantly procrastinating on major life decisions or like also maybe when to enter work, or that studying at university takes for ages, then this might also affect your personal life at home. And then this might also result in not having as many stable relationships or stable relationships at all as people do that are procrastinating less.
Wow. Do you think that's because you would drive your partner crazy or you would never get around to proposing or something like that.
Yeah, it could be both just speculating here.
Yeah, wow, fascinating. And you said poor mental health meaning they were more stressed or they were just in general not feeling as well. What does that mean?
So in other studies it was shown that it is related to increased stress or lower.
Indicated well being.
In this study, we operrationalized it by asking, like, compared to other people, you know, how is your health Is it higher? Is it lower? And they mostly indicated that it's actually lower.
Oh I see, it's self reported mental health.
In comparison to others.
Oh I see, And why do you think they have lower mental health?
I guess like one reason could be that because you're postponing things irrationally, like you're always on the last minute, Like you have more stressful situations. But you can also have a lot of small deadlines. If you know, by the end of every week, I want to do sports, for instance, and then every week you're procrastinating on doing sports, and this of course stresses you out because you realize that this is actually not what you intended to do.
So this might accumulate over time, and then you have overall increased stress.
I see. Do you feel bad about putting things off a lot?
Yes?
I feel like you might be describing my life a little bit.
Maybe talking about it helps you.
Feeling your patterns, ye are very producing an episode might help me. Yeah, So people who procrastinate don't do so well at least in some traditional measures of success. But as doctor Bolkia said, the results are correlational, meaning that it could be that these people are doing less well because they procrastinate, But it could also be that people who don't do well also just happen to be the
kind of people who procrastinate a lot. It could even be that whatever else is going on in their lives that gives them less success is also causing them to procrastinate. As doctor Balka said, you need to dig into it with more research. But the other interesting thing doctor bulk and her colleagues found is that how much people procrastinate changes over time.
So, for instance, we can also see that procrastination tendencies decrease with age, so there is kind of a maturation process that people are actually able also to overcome.
This with age.
Yeah, as we get older, we tend to on average, procrastinate less. And part of it, doctor Bulka says, is that we just mature, we learn to deal with things little better. But part of it is also that the world sort of gives you less room to procrastinate. For example, when you're a student and you're in college, there's lots of flexibility, but once you get out into the real world, things aren't that easy for you.
For instance, studying presents an environment where you don't get a lot of feedback, you don't have many deadlines like you have to organize your learning independently.
So there we can see that a lot of procrastination happens.
But then later on in life, when you have a transition from studying into the work environment, then this is associated with less procrastination. So you change an environment also affects your procrastination overall.
So there is a general trend to procrastinate less over time, but according to doctor Bolka, this doesn't apply to everyone. Some people never stop procrastinating.
We can just see in our study that there is variance in the development, so you actually have people getting better and also people not getting better.
Wow. Wait, wait, are you saying that most of us learn how to deal with procrastination, but some people even procrastinate learning about procrastination.
So yeah, you can see that you have this mean level change that on average people are getting better over time, but you can also see that it doesn't apply to everyone.
Fascinating. I guess what does that tell you about human nature and why we do think it.
Can actually shows that we are able to change, that it's not set in stone, that it is forever. There are also interventions on personality change or how to develop different skills, so it can actually shows that there's a light at the end of the procrastination tunnel and that it's possible to overcome this behavior.
And that brings us to the last question, which is how do you overcome this behavior? What do our experts say about how to stop procrastinating? Unfortunately, we left this question to the end and now we're out of time. We procrastinated telling you how to stop procrastinating. But don't worry, We're going to answer this question in a bonus mini episode that comes out later this week titled how to
Stop Procrastinating. In it, we're going to hear from our experts how they deal with their own procrastination and what advice they give people who want to stop procrastinating. So be sure to check out that mini episode just look for it in a few days. Until then, thanks for joining us. See you there, you've been listening to science Stuff. The production of iHeartRadio Britain and produced by me or Hey Champ heredited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland
and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.