The Secret Solution to Procrastination?

Here’s a story you’ve probably heard before: It’s a Friday night. You have a six-page essay due Monday. But you just can’t bring yourself to start it; it’s a Friday night, after all! There are much better things to do and there’s so much time left before the deadline...

Then comes Saturday. It’s a little bit closer to the deadline. You decide you should probably work on it, but maybe in a few hours. Sometime later, just not right now...

Then it’s Sunday. You look at the clock and realize there’s only one night left to do that dreaded essay. The panic settles, the adrenaline kicks in, and you stay up all night with caffeine to help you through it.

We know procrastination sucks. The anxiety from compressing days worth of work into 1 sleepless night isn’t exactly the best feeling. But for some reason, we just can’t seem to stop ourselves from doing it. For a lot of us, it’s a tragic cycle of self-inflicted suffering.

Maybe you’ve accepted procrastination as just a part of yourself. After all those years of grade school and even as a student in university, you just can’t seem to shake this horrible habit. So, is there any way to reduce procrastination?

Recent research suggests that while there may not be a magic cure to immediately end procrastination, you can definitely work towards minimizing it. A 2019 study surveyed a group of 331 students, measuring their levels of mindfulness and procrastination across 6 different times.¹ To measure mindfulness, they asked students to rate how much they agree with statements like “I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing because I’m daydreaming, worrying, or otherwise distracted.” For procrastination, students rated their agreement to statements such as “I postpone starting in on things I don’t like to do.” 

The results showed that at any given time, there is an inverse association between procrastination and mindfulness. When students expressed a higher level of mindfulness, it resulted in lower levels of procrastination. This suggests that if one was more mindful at a certain time, they tended to procrastinate less. And, when people procrastinated more, they tended to be less mindful. Overall, their research suggests that if we actively choose to be more mindful, we can reduce our tendency to procrastinate the projects, essays, and other deadlines we constantly have as students.

So you want to procrastinate less, and you want to be more mindful, but how do you increase mindfulness? A good start is 5 minutes of mindfulness meditation every day. Mindfulness is any act of being intensely aware of the physical and emotional feelings you have in the present moment. Guided meditations can teach you exactly how to do it, and it’s easy to start with a quick download of a phone app like Simple Habit or Calm.  There are also many mindfulness meditation videos on YouTube! Once you get the hang of the techniques often used to promote mindfulness (more can be found in a previous Thrive Thursday post) or start using an app to coach you through mindfulness exercises (more in a Thrive Thursday app review), you can practice these exercises throughout your entire day and become a less stressed student ready to take on the world.

 

1. Cheung, R. Y., & Ng, M. C. (2019). Being in the moment later? Testing the inverse relation between mindfulness and procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 141, 123-126. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2018.12.015
2. Moore, A., & Malinowski, P. (2009). Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility. Consciousness and Cognition,18(1), 176-186. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.12.008