(Message automatically replaces this text). But it still creates a bit of a problem of not having a habit of getting on and doing that other thing. For best results, make your first step . So a lot of things that we do where its of a lot of value, doing something for the first time, doing something that youve never done before, that feels really foreign to you, thats a huge skill building thing. They dont think, Oh, I need to reduce all these negative emotions or theyre going to cause me to go off track with my goals. They associate strong emotions with propelling them to their goals, not with them taking them away from their goals. My podcast guest this week, Dr. Jackson Brammer, says he used to be an expert procrastinator. On a level, thats useful. Procrastination is the act of avoiding something through delay or postponement. Sirois: Myself as well. You can extrapolate out a little bit. What's the difference between procrastinating and simply deferring something for another time? They take a negative emotion and they use it as fuel for their goals. The adrenaline spike and stress of the situation make us think we are better off waiting, but in reality, its unlikely that our delay will make the final product any better.Ill feel more like it later.We deceive ourselves into thinking that we'll feel like completing the task later. And when were on alert more, thats often what sparks creativity. We think about the immediate damage it can cause. This is another self-protective belief.There must be some way I can just not do this.There isn't an easy fix for procrastinationwe usually still have to complete the task. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. So if you have a consistent study habit, it becomes easier to resist distractions. Her research also examines the role of positive psychology traits, states, and interventions for supporting self-regulation and enhancing health and well-being. Sometimes the emotion will disguise itself as a physical sensation, such as anxiousness, nausea, or a rapid heartbeat. "There hasn't been any convincing scientific evidence to say procrastination is the result of poor time management. It would be more accurate to say, "I work under pressure." 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? Rooted in psychology, our personalized lessons help you develop strategies to overcome procrastination. A former reporter and editor for The Associated Press, Mills has also written for publications including The Washington Post, Fast Company, American Journalism Review, Dallas Morning News, MSNBC.com and Harvard Business Review. And I'll mention one final thing too. This creates a problematic cycle, one that erodes our self-confidence. Our audio product manager is Ian Fox. He answers difficult questions about anxiety, depression, relationships, OCD, PTSD, eating disorders and more, breaking things down so they're easier for the average person to understand. 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. There might be some really monumental delayers out there, but they could be sagacious delayers, wise delayers who are doing it with purpose. This can help you rebuild a habit of identifying the things we tell ourselves and have always accepted as truth. A lot of the focus on overcoming procrastination has been on habit forming and discipline, and getting the gumption to face the tasks you dont like doing. ALICE BOYES: Yeah. 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. Making time for time management. Sometimes its just noticing that relationship. Make the goals small and manageable, and focus only on what the very next step should be. Dans ce podcast, j'aborde les deux thmatiques, notamment sous le prisme des troubles du comportement alimentaire. This is good for willpower training. He doesnt do video. 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. CURT NICKISCH: We talked about emotions previously, emotions clearly have a big role in procrastination. Sirois: Yeah. 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. So yeah, that's how the emotions are involved. So if youre like that, then it is thinking about, Well, I need to this thing because I need to be reliable for somebody else. 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. And I think people tend to oversimplify that. For a lot of tasks, Ill just do one or two of them. I would think that it's more aboutit's not necessarily that you would procrastinate more or less necessarily depending on what the restraints were. Planning more than only the first step can be its own form of procrastination. I think that its often part of the creative process that sometimes we procrastinate because were doing something hard. It is the act of delaying or postponing tasks that need to be accomplished. ALICE BOYES: Yeah. So there are some sort of useful forms of it but obviously it can also tie people in knots and lead to lots of self-criticism. So when an emotion comes up, like when someones feeling doubt or someones feeling embarrassment, thats what people who function well do. 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. Mills: Procrastination has to be a tough thing to study in a lab. Mills: Right. So the evidence, it's a little mixed. You get into that endless feedback loop. Its really been great to have you on the show to talk about it. And so because of that, they might sort of not be able to savor their successes when they actually reach those standards. So lots of forms of problem solving benefit from an incubation period where you take a pause between when you hear the problem and when you start working on it. 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 ofyour 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. The second episode of the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy podcast deals with cognitive distortions. So people want to do things with certain outcomes and they tend to procrastinate more with things with uncertain outcomes. 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. The presence of ambivalent emotions tends to put us on alert. 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. 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. People have a comfort level with tasks that they do all the time. However, there wasn't a link with the other form of perfectionism. And that's probably why there's a lot of research into it there too. And then also, cut yourself a little bit of slack about some of the creative procrastination, like recognizing that weve got this image of a productive person being this person who is never distracted, whos always focused, who never procrastinates, whos just hustling all the time. 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. CURT NICKISCH: How do you know when theres a good reason for procrastinating or when its actually just being counterproductive? 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? And then only later maybe realize that a different way of approaching it wouldve been more useful. Dr. Brammer started this path by investigating Impostor Syndrome. Kim I. If you force yourself to think of three different ways, then you can assess which is the best of those. 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. Knowing what the strengths of people are or knowing how to discover them from conversation. So for me, my system is quite tailored to my personality. Why is it so easy to fall into this trap even when we know better? Sirois: That's a great question. CURT NICKISCH: For me personally, the idea of a pre-mortem and testing your assumptions is kind of attractive because I expect that could help a lot with things that always seem to take longer than you thought they were going to. And actually the research suggests that both those approaches can be very beneficial. But again, these very much are self-regulation strategies. They have career issues, health issues, they're not fulfilling their dreams, they're not reaching their goals. Psychologists have identified various drivers of procrastination, from low self-confidence to anxiety, a lack of structure, and, simply, an inability to motivate oneself to complete unpleasant. Do you know what percentage of people are chronic procrastinators to the point where it's really affecting their health? And it's usually on a task that we said we're going to do. And really the name of the game is people changing themselves. But what about that culture of procrastination at a place or in a team? 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. He approaches the platform of Instagram through his strengths and his posts get like 40-50,000 likes each post. So what people want to do is look at the forms of procrastination with the most potential for major harm in their lives, that are causing them the most bother, and be really confident that theyve got strategies for dealing with those. Instead, research suggests that procrastination is a problem driven by our emotions, and learning to manage negative emotions effectively can help us overcome it. And it can have very real physical health effects. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. Because youve given us a lot of tips on managing yourself individually. But there's tolerance for it too. Feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and a lack of energy can make it difficult to start (and finish) the simplest task. Im Curt Nickisch. CURT NICKISCH: Well, lets talk about the work setting a little bit in the sense of teams and organizational culture. Like if you feel guilt. She explains the different causes of procrastination and shares three approaches to beat it: through habits, emotions, and thought patterns. So what does that mean? And there might be some generational influences there too. I want the other person, if theyre waiting on something from me, I want them to understand that its not because theyve done anything wrong or Im angry at them, or I just want to take that uncertainty off their plate. And that might be something that is a really strong value for you that you can use as a motivator. 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. Is the task actually stupid, or is it something you should do, youre just afraid to do it, so youre demeaning it in case you fail? Where can you place it? Yeah, I'm doing a few different things. When we pay attention to ourselves through the gentle observation of mindfulness, we arent striving to fix or self-judge. Other people have struggled with this task too. Its something that is potentially really harmful. CURT NICKISCH: You mentioned earlier that when people do the tasks they know, those are often the easiest to do, and they put off the harder ones. 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. However, we can strengthen our willpower through routine exercise. 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. Emotions all have an evolutionary purpose. Guilt is a useful emotion because it causes us to want to repair things. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. 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. Whatever the causes, those other causes will be mixed in. And that we can come to each other with things that we feel vulnerable about. ALICE BOYES: Yeah, its actually just what I was talking about before. And I guess here we're talking about chronic procrastination as opposed to procrastinating from time to time. The research psychologist, author and DePaul University professor sits down for a truly delightful exploration of why we procrastinate, how prevalent it is, when it becomes harmful, some myths about procrastination, why it's similar to gambling, how . 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. Its not necessarily just about thought processes and habits, but it is such an emotional process too. Sirois: Well, I think that's really key. 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 depending on how complex this task is, my system can have up to six or seven steps. Well, I want to thank you for joining me today, Dr. Sirois. But it makes sense though too, because if you're stressed all the time and you're not looking after your health, these healthy behaviorsand 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.
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