I think every International Baccalaureate student can relate to that feeling of having so much work to do, knowing it is so incredibly important and how much it’s worth, yet still watching yourself let the hours and days tick by and leave it to the last minute anyways. If you’re sick of people telling you to “just plan your time out better” or “stop being lazy!”, keep reading, I’ve written this post just for you.
I often find that to first understand why we exhibit or participate in certain behaviours can be very helpful towards changing that behaviour. My logic is as follows: if I understand some of how my brain works, then I have some way of knowing how to control my actions and behaviours. As an IB Alum who took IB HL Psychology and now is a Bachelor of Psychology student at university, allow me to scientifically break down to you some of the reasons why we procrastinate, and some tips from actual psychologists to help you reduce your procrastination behaviours.
The first thing I learnt is that procrastination is a form of self-deception. If asked to define procrastination, you would probably say something along the lines of putting off completing a task even though you know it’s important by telling yourself you can finish it later. Deceiving yourself is a part of it, procrastination is something we inherently know is a negative behaviour, yet we still do it (Psychology Today). This creates cognitive dissonance, where your beliefs do not line up with your actions. In this case, your inherent belief that procrastinating is ultimately bad, does not match up with your action which is going ahead and procrastinating anyways; it is irrational. Due to this, you may experience feelings of guilt, anxiety, or just general negativity. The self-awareness that our own actions being the reason for our failures, is what leaves us feeling so rotten inside.
Next, professor of Psychology Dr. Sirois explained that procrastination is a cycle (Lieberman). I have definitely felt this myself a number of times during my IB studies. Often you procrastinate on an IB assignment for so long, you feel extreme stress and pressure but somehow manage to actually get it done in the nick of time. You feel victorious and so proud of yourself for getting your IB assignment done in time and of course, relief. Rather than face a negative consequence or some sort of penalty, your relief comes from finishing in time, rather than from the quality of your IB work. Unfortunately, this creates a cycle of positive reinforcement (classic Behavioural Psychology), if you get a reward for a certain task or behaviour, you will continue to engage in this behaviour in order to get the same reward. And so procrastination breeds more procrastination in the future, because you know you can successfully get things done last minute. That’s what can turn our procrastinatory behaviours from a one-off, into a habitual cycle.
The next important part, is the reason we begin this procrastination cycle, is as a coping method to manage negative moods. It often feels like we are uniquely unable to manage our time and are waiting for inspiration to strike, but actually professor of Psychology Dr. Tim Pychyl says “Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem,”. Dr. Pychyl and Dr. Sirois’s research has found that we procrastinate with the short-term intention of managing our negative moods taking priority over the long-term pursuit of our intended actions (a.k.a: actually getting on with the task). To put it simply: we put off doing assignments or tasks because we want to avoid the negative emotions associated with those tasks such as anxiety, boredom, stress, insecurity, self-doubt, frustration etc (Lieberman).
Are you also absolutely mind blown by this? When I learnt this I immediately went wow, this makes a lot of sense.
Take writing an IB Internal Assessment (IB IA) for example. Staring at a blank document and immediately thinking of how much it is worth and how good the end product has to be is more than enough to immediately freak you out. You start to worry. Am I smart enough to write this? Will whatever I write be good enough for the IB? What if I end up doing a bad job? Imagine if this IA is the reason I don’t get the IB DP score I wanted. And on and on your brain goes. So what do you do? You put that away for now and get on with something else, so you can deal with all these terrifying thoughts later. But as you procrastinate this more and more, the negative emotions of stress and anxiety associated with the task increase, as do the self-doubt and the self-blame.
This might not apply to all, but some of us can be perfectionists and because of that have a fear of failure or a fear of judgement from others (Psychology Today). If you don’t do the work, you can’t fail at it, right? And so we put it off, feeding into the procrastination cycle. Apparently, that voice in your head that tells you just do it tomorrow or you can wake up early and finish it off, is our way of coping with the guilt we feel when we procrastinate. It is like a temporary pick me up to make us feel better with our bad decision. Kind of crazy, right?
So, that was a lot of information I’ve just thrown at you. I know. I was so surprised yet oddly relieved when I was learning this information. I sort of had this feeling of phew, I’m not the only one. The good news is, not only have psychologists studied why we procrastinate so much, but they also have recommendations and tips that I have compiled together to help us all out:
I’m linking some of the sources I learnt about procrastination from below so you can also learn more about it too. I hope you found this post helpful and are starting to feel some compassion for yourself. I’m learning to break my procrastination cycle too, and I sincerely hope you’ll be joining me! Be sure to send this post to a fellow procrastinator, and see if you can take on the challenge together 🙂
Further reading if you’re interested:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/procrastination
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/why-wait-the-science-behind-procrastination