(Cover illustration: Time’s Mindless Drift by Poh Le Yang)

DISCLAIMER: This article is not meant to be used as an excuse for missing deadlines, nor used as justification as to why you put off important tasks for “late”. The author would like to emphasise the importance of punctuality in completing tasks, especially at work or at school.

It’s 11.59 pm, and you’re hard at work slaving away at the graded take-home essay due the next day. Glancing at the clock, you realise that you will have to submit an at best unpolished at worst unfinished piece of work in about 8 hours time, given you even manage to stay awake for that 8 hours. Regardless, you persevere on, hoping to complete the task that you were given 3 months to complete in about the same number of hours. Alas, you lose your battle with sleep, and you are left with no choice but to resign yourself to the fate awaiting you the next day.

Although the consequences are slightly over-the-top, I’m sure that this scenario would resonate with many of your own personal experiences. Burning the midnight oil rushing through last minute work, missing deadlines and begging teachers for time extensions is almost certainly part and parcel of a student’s life. However, this does make one wonder: Why do we subject ourselves to so much anguish and anxiety when we could have utilised the entire time period allocated to finish your work? In short, why do we procrastinate?

What is Procrastination?

To answer the million-dollar question, we need to know what procrastination is. Procrastination is clinically defined as is the practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time, sometimes until the last minute. This behaviour is ultimately self-defeating as we trade long-term benefits for short-term gains.

Procrastination in Society

Procrastination is prevalent in our modern day society. About 20% of adults procrastinate chronically, while 80-95% of all college students (ages 17 - 24) procrastinate. The end result is an unnecessary increase in stress levels, decreased mental well-being, and poorer quality of work, as most students can attest to. 94% of respondents in a study recorded that procrastination had a negative impact on their happiness, with 18% recording this effect as “extremely negative”. Procrastination has been even dated back to 800 B.C., where the Greek poet Hesiod cautioned not to “put your work off till tomorrow and the day after.” This makes procrastinatory behaviour all the more inexplicable - with well-documented negative side effects and little positive outcomes, and despite plaguing society for decades, why do so many people still procrastinate?

Cost-Benefit Analysis

The most prevalent answer to this procrastination paradox has to do with cost and benefits. Procrastination can often be simplified as the option between choosing between short-term pain for long-term gain and short-term pleasure resulting in long-term suffering. While the choice may seem obvious now, when it actually comes to doing tasks, the decision may not be so straightforward. Rather, the outcome of our choice is dependent on two key brain systems: The limbic system and the prefrontal cortex-dominated executive function system.

Battle of the Brain

Although the limbic system and prefrontal cortex are physically closely intertwined, they could not be more different in function. The former is emotion and impulse-dominated, while the latter is logical and precise. The limbic system manages your emotions and behaviours, taking in information from the environment and reacting accordingly, hence is autonomic in nature. It is engineered to avoid pain, activang in instances such as us instantly retracting our hand when we put it near a candle flame. This makes it highly critical for our continued survival, hence it is one of the oldest and most dominant parts of our brains. A key organ in the limbic system is the nucleus accumbens, which links motivation and action together, playing vital roles in reward processing. This results in us seeking activities that make us feel good in order to “reward” our brains through stimulation of the nucleus accumbens. In fact, this is also the basis of addiction. This principle also applies to procrastination, where we put off that dreaded assignment to indulge in fun recreational activities that are orders of magnitude less important. Hence, the tendency to avoid painful activities and actively seek pleasurable ones causes the limbic system to promote procrastinatory behaviour.

In contrast, our prefrontal cortex helps in attention regulation, memory processing, and response inhibition, helping us think logically and stay focused. This is also the part of the brain that allows you to sacrifice short-term gain for long-term benefit. Unfortunately for procrastinators, this part of the brain had much less time to develop in comparison to the aforementioned limbic system. Consequently, the prefrontal cortex is not as well-developed as the limbic system. With this temporal disparity, the limbic system is able to dominate our thinking by causing the brain to prioritise responses from the limbic system as compared to the prefrontal cortex. This, in turn, causes impulsive decision-making and short-sightedness in the pursuit of instant gratification, ultimately sending one down the vortex of procrastination.

Perfectionists, Scaredy-Cats and the Amygdala

This problem is exacerbated by fearing the task. Other than the nucleus accumbens, the limbic system also contains the amygdala, the brain’s centre of emotional processing. The amygdala is particularly sensitive to fear and anxiety. As Dr Erhan Genç, a researcher at Ruhr University Bochum, found out in a study by conducting 264 brain scans and comparing them with the results from a participant survey, individuals with a larger amygdala may be more anxious about the negative consequences of an action, tending to hesitate and put off things.

When the amygdala perceives fear, it produces the “fear response”, better known as the fight-flight-freeze response. This can either lead the person to face their fears, or, as it is more often the case, run away from the task at hand, resulting in procrastination. Initially, this solves the problem as the person has managed to avoid the task that is causing him distress. However, the task does not solve itself most of the time, and more often than not the reality is that one would eventually have to face their fears and complete it. Usually, by the time the person comes to this realisation, he or she must now face the prospect of a late-night mad scramble to finish it.

The Procrastination Gene…?

Recent studies regarding procrastination have yielded surprising results. One study has shown that procrastination is linked with impulsivity, and, more interestingly, both are moderately heritable traits. A recent study, which Dr Erhan Genç was also involved in, linked procrastination to the gene that makes tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), which helps regulate the production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in attention, motivation and memory. Dopamine had been previously linked with increased distractivity and decreased cognitive control, resulting in people being at higher risk of procrastinating. An interesting caveat about the findings is that only women found with a variant of this gene were observed to be more likely to procrastinate. Further research is being conducted to investigate the “missing link” between TH gene expression and procrastination, which is likely related to the female sex hormone estrogen and the menstrual cycle.

The Long-term sufferings of Procrastination

Unfortunately, blaming it on biology offers little more than a feeble excuse for procrastinatory behaviour. The cold, hard truth is that procrastination has the potential to result in severely ruinous long-term effects. These include reduced self-esteem, missing out on opportunities, self-sabotage, poor decision-making and reputational damage. Ultimately, this could lead to ruining your career, your relationships, and more importantly, yourself. A study has also linked procrastination to suicidal ideation.

Solutions and Conclusion

Procrastination is not an innocuous habit, let alone a helpful one. Hence, we must all try our best to nip the problem at its root. By planning our work and sticking to it, we prevent ourselves from finding excuses to delay us ad infinitum. Current research-based solutions include:

Reframing the dreadful task in a positive manner
Breaking the challenging task into simpler, manageable blocks
Listing the costs of procrastinating each task
Disconnecting from social media

However, this list is non-exhaustive, and many other solutions to procrastination exist. Take inspiration from the current solutions marketed on the web, from creating to-do lists to breaking down tasks, from rewarding yourself periodically to minimising distractions, and create your own work strategy tailor-made for you. Ultimately, the price to pay for putting off that one piece of work for just a little longer can eventually snowball into a life-altering event, for the worse.

Procrastination could also be a sign of deteriorating mental health. If you suspect yourself to be facing such difficulties and would like to get help, you may call the following hotlines:

Institute of Mental Health’s Helpline: 6389 2222
Singapore Association for Mental Health Helpline: 1800 283 701920

References

Issue 4 - Apr 2025

Articles - Psychology and Psychiatry

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