Last week I was working at Cardiff University and we were looking at the topic of students procrastinating, especially whilst they were meant to be writing up their doctoral thesis. I had the opportunity to interview a dozen students all with the same problem and I / we discovered something:
In every case the procrastination was caused by fear. Let me explain.
For any behaviour to be considered to be Procrastination usually has to be counterproductive, needless, and delaying.*1
Many psychologists consider that procrastination is brought about as a as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. *2 I think I can now be a little more specific about that anxiety…
About 95% of our fears are anticipatory, by which I mean they are fears of a future event but are not based on a real event that has occurred to us in the past (episodic fear). When I tested all 12 students I discovered that every one of them had played a mental movie of them failing their doctorate.
The most frequent movie of failure they had played in their own head was the moment after the Viva Voce when they are called back in. They usually saw and heard the examiner saying “Sorry but…”
Even those students who stated they had not played such a projection in their head, all stated that when they did the movie was strangely familiar, suggesting that the projection had been made a an unconscious level.
Not only was the procrastination brought about by anxiety, there is strong evidence to suggest procrastination is as a direct result of a fear of failure induced by internal mental projections / representations of the moment of failure. In other words we play a mental movie of the thing we don’t want to happen - failing. When we play a movie of failing this activates a fear response in the brain which results in our not wanting to do the thing we are putting off.
*1 Schraw, G., Wadkins, T., & Olafson, L. (2007). Doing the things we do: A grounded theory of academic procrastination [Electronic version]. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 99(1), 12-25.
*2 Fiore, N. A. (2006). The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt- Free Play. New York: Penguin Group.
