Psychology researchers identify a key emotional pattern among procrastinators

A recent study published in Psychological Reports has found that people who frequently procrastinate set meaningful personal goals and can vividly imagine achieving them, just like those who do not procrastinate. However, frequent procrastinators tend to experience higher anxiety about failing, particularly when it comes to short-term objectives. These findings suggest that procrastination is less about an inability to envision the future and more about managing the negative emotions associated with pursuing goals.

Procrastination is commonly viewed as a failure of self-regulation. It occurs when individuals delay important tasks even when they know the delay will bring negative consequences. Past studies link this behavioral trait to impulsivity and a preference for immediate rewards over distant payoffs.

This behavior relates to a concept known as temporal discounting, where the value of a reward decreases the further away it is in time. Because of this, people who procrastinate often choose a quick, easy activity over a difficult task with a delayed benefit.

Some researchers have proposed that people who procrastinate might struggle with episodic future thinking. This psychological concept refers to the mental process of creating detailed simulations of possible future events. Previous research indicated that heavy procrastinators might have trouble picturing generic future scenarios with clear sensory details.

The researchers conducting the current study wanted to see if this mental block applies to highly personal events, specifically the achievement of one’s own goals. They designed the study to explore how the tendency to procrastinate relates to the ways people mentally simulate their personal objectives. They specifically compared short-term and long-term goals to see if the timeline changes the emotional or cognitive experience.

“Research on procrastination has often been primarily psychometric – devising and testing personality scales to tell us how much of a procrastinator an individual is (the ‘who’ question). Where it has looked at underlying mental processes (the ‘why’ question), this has often been done for a narrowly defined category of tasks (very often academic ones),” said study author Helgi Clayton McClure, a lecturer in psychology at York St John University.

“We wanted to look at procrastination through the lens of personal goals – selected and defined by each person in the study as tasks which are important to them. This would allow us to identify characteristics of specific tasks that coincide with higher self-reported procrastination (e.g., level of anxiety about the prospect of failure) – beyond cognitive or motivational biases at the person level.”

To test these ideas, the scientists recruited 111 university students from the United Kingdom. The participants completed an online survey where they were asked to write down six personal goals. Three of these were short-term goals expected to be completed within one month, and the other three were long-term goals taking at least six months to achieve.

For each goal, participants rated several characteristics on a sliding scale from zero to 100. These included how much effort they intended to apply and how likely they were to deliberately avoid working on the goal. They also rated how important the goal was to them personally, their perceived likelihood of actual success, how much control they felt they had, and the overall difficulty of the objective.

Next, the participants engaged in a specific mental exercise. They imagined a future scenario in which they successfully completed each goal. They wrote brief descriptions of these achievement events.

Afterward, participants rated these mental simulations based on their sensory details, such as sights and sounds. They also rated their sense of autonoetic consciousness. This term describes the feeling of mentally traveling through time to directly experience an event in the mind’s eye.

The participants then rated their expected emotional responses to these goals. They estimated how happy they would feel upon success and how disappointed they would feel upon failure. Importantly, they also rated how anxious they currently felt when thinking about failing to achieve the goal.

To measure their general tendency to delay tasks, the participants completed a 12-item questionnaire called the Pure Procrastination Scale. This survey asks individuals to rate their agreement with statements about voluntary delay, such as running out of time or delaying decisions until it is too late.

The data revealed several distinct patterns regarding how procrastinators view their ambitions. As expected, the scientists found that individuals with high procrastination scores reported a greater likelihood of avoiding their goals. This avoidance tendency applied equally to both short-term and long-term goals.

High procrastinators also reported lower intended effort and a lower perceived likelihood of success compared to those who procrastinate less. They also viewed their goals as generally more difficult to accomplish.

Despite these negative outlooks, highly procrastinating individuals rated their goals as just as important as other participants did. They also expected to feel the exact same level of happiness upon completing their objectives.

When evaluating the mental simulations, the scientists found no differences based on procrastination levels. High procrastinators were fully capable of imagining their success with rich sensory details. They also experienced the same level of mental time travel during the exercise.

“We expected differences in sensory-perceptual detail (how vividly goal achievement could be imagined) between high and low procrastinators. Yet there was no evidence of these, unlike in another study based on imagining generic future events. This suggests that, when people can choose their own personally meaningful goals to focus on, being a ‘procrastinator’ does not necessarily mean having lower awareness of a positive future state (having completed the goal).”

The most prominent difference emerged in the emotional realm, specifically regarding anticipatory anxiety. People who scored high on the procrastination scale felt more anxious when contemplating goal failure. This aligns with the idea that procrastination is largely driven by a desire to avoid the negative feelings associated with a task. When thinking about a goal brings up intense worry, a person is much more likely to put off starting it.

This anxiety was especially pronounced for short-term goals. The scientists note that this might seem counterintuitive at first glance, as long-term goals are often perceived as more important and carry a heavier penalty for failure. However, for a high procrastinator, imminent deadlines tend to evoke a much stronger and more immediate emotional response. Short-term goals loom larger emotionally, prompting greater anxiety right now.

“The findings shine a light on the relevance of emotional anticipation, a fairly new concept emerging from the clinical literature, in the experience of procrastination. They suggest that a person’s tendency to procrastinate is not just about devaluing far-off rewards (‘I don’t need to work on that yet because the deadline is miles away’) or struggling to control competing impulses (‘I should be working on that but games/drinking/socialising are much more fun’).”

“Anxiety around goal failure may also be a hallmark feature of procrastination. This suggests that strategies for managing anxiety might be just as important as attempts to change people’s perception of distant rewards or help them manage impulses.”

While this research provides evidence for the emotional hurdles of procrastination, it does possess certain limitations. The study relied entirely on self-reported estimates of goal avoidance rather than tracking participants’ actual behaviors over time. A participant’s belief about how much they might avoid a task might not perfectly match their real-world actions.

The scientists suggest that future research should use longitudinal designs. These types of studies observe the same individuals over a longer period. This approach could track the exact steps taken toward goal completion to see how anxiety directly impacts daily action.

“I am currently conducting pilot work with my students looking longitudinally at what happens next: Do high procrastinators show decreased goal progress in real time, and how does that relate to some of the characteristics measured in this study? In the longer term, I plan to integrate this with my broader work on future-oriented emotions in clinical and non-clinical settings; and move towards potential intervention work in the context of motivation and goal pursuit in students’ higher education trajectories.”

The study, “High Trait Procrastination Predicts Increased Goal Anxiety Despite Invariance in Simulation of Goal Achievement,” was authored by J. Helgi Clayton McClure, Stephanie Sayan, and Rachel J. Anderson.