⌛️ Why You Procrastinate (and What Your Brain Is Doing Instead)

New research reveals how poor emotional and attentional control feed chronic delays

The inclination to procrastinate affects all of us from time to time. Young people will put off school assignments until the day before the deadline. Adults will delay important administrative tasks at work and repeatedly tell themselves “I’ll go next week instead” when it comes to their gym memberships.

For some people, procrastination is a chronic habit—one that interferes with goals, success, and even health. Despite common perceptions, psychologists have long suspected that this habit isn’t just about laziness or bad time management. Instead, it may stem from deeper struggles with how we manage emotions and control our thinking processes.

A new study offers fresh evidence for this idea. It identifies key psychological and cognitive mechanisms that predict who’s most likely to delay tasks—and why. The findings suggest that procrastination is best understood as a breakdown in both emotional regulation and sustained attention.

Before you find out what happened in the study, here’s a quick poll to reflect on:

🔧 Looking under the hood of procrastination

In a 2025 study published in the British Journal of Psychology, researchers investigated whether the tendency to procrastinate is linked to deficits in attention and emotion regulation.

To explore this, they recruited 206 university students in Poland, who completed:

• A battery of psychological questionnaires, including:

  • The Pure Procrastination Scale

  • A measure of emotion dysregulation (DERS)

  • A scale assessing spontaneous mind-wandering

• A demanding cognitive task called the ANTI-Vea (Attentional Networks Test for Interactions and Vigilance – executive and arousal components)

The ANTI-Vea task is designed to simulate real-world challenges in sustained attention. It mixes several types of trials that test different cognitive functions:

1. Standard attention trials (60%) – Participants respond to the direction of a central arrow, while ignoring “flanker” arrows on either side that may point in the same or opposite direction, making the task easy or difficult respectively.

2. Executive vigilance trials (20%) – When a rare, vertically misaligned arrow appears, participants must detect the change and press the space bar. These trials test the ability to maintain focused attention and respond to infrequent targets—something that typically degrades over time without strong mental effort.

3. Arousal vigilance trials (20%) – A red stopwatch appears on screen and starts counting in milliseconds. The participant’s goal is to stop the clock as fast as possible with any keypress. This tests basic readiness and reaction speed.

The test was also structured to measure vigilance decrement—how attention fades over time—and attention span, calculated as the number of consecutive trials a participant could complete with optimal performance.

After the cognitive task, participants filled out a stress questionnaire reflecting how engaged, worried, or distressed they felt during the task.

So what happened with the procrastinators?

Participants who scored higher on the procrastination scale showed:

• Worse performance on executive vigilance tasks. They were less effective at noticing the rare, misaligned arrows, suggesting a difficulty in staying locked onto multiple overarching priorities.

• Normal performance on arousal vigilance, meaning their basic ability to react quickly wasn't significantly impaired.

• Lower attention spans, lower task engagement, and higher distress and worry. They struggled to maintain optimal focus and performance across trials, and were more likely to feel emotionally unsettled.

According to the statistical analyses, two specific psychological traits explained these attentional problems in chronic procrastinators:

1. Emotion dysregulation: difficulty managing negative emotional states

2. Spontaneous mind-wandering: frequent drifting into task-unrelated thoughts

That means people weren’t just inattentive or unmotivated. Their difficulties staying on task seemed to arise because they couldn’t manage uncomfortable emotions or suppress internal distractions.

If you often have trouble regulating your thoughts and emotions, you may find it challenging to complete important tasks in good time. Procrastination seems to emerge not from laziness, but from an inability to remain emotionally centered and mentally focused.

⭐️ Takeaway tips

#1. Treat procrastination as an emotional issue, not just a time issue

• Rather than relying purely on time management tools when it comes to staying on track with work, pay just as much attention to any interference your emotions can cause. Mindfulness and cognitive reframing may help you manage the negative emotions that make tasks feel aversive.

#2. Practice tolerating imperfection

• Perfectionism often hides beneath procrastination. When you're avoiding a task, ask yourself if you're delaying out of fear that your output won't be “good enough”. Aiming for progress rather than perfection can reduce avoidance and help you get started sooner.

#3. Use “task anchoring” to stay engaged

• If you tend to lose focus and let your mind wander when trying to complete a task, try anchoring your attention with small, visible goals (e.g. “I’ll finish this one paragraph” or “I’ll keep typing for the next 5 minutes”). These mini-commitments help contain mental drift by giving you clear targets to aim for.

“Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.”

~ Miguel de Cervantes

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