You need to complete an important task. You open your laptop, but feeling a wave of anxiety, you think “I’ll just check my phone for a few minutes”.
You scroll through Instagram, watch a few TikTok’s, and get lost in a YouTube video. Time slips by. “Just five more minutes” you tell yourself, but five turns into twenty, then forty. Before you know it, an hour has passed. That important task you meant to do is still waiting.
Sound familiar? We’ve all been there.
Putting off tasks that make us feel worried or frustrated is something we are all susceptible to. This is known as procrastination- an unnecessary but deliberate delay of a task despite knowing it may come back to bite us later.
Why We Procrastinate
So why do we procrastinate despite knowing the stress it causes us? Procrastination isn’t just laziness or having bad time management. It’s a complex response rooted in:
- Our emotions
When a task feels overwhelming, boring, or anxiety-inducing, your brain looks for an escape to feel better- something fun and easy. That’s why watching one more TikTok feels so good in the moment. Your brain rewards you with relief for avoiding stress.
But here’s the catch: that short-term relief creates long-term stress. It’s like borrowing happiness from tomorrow with a crazy high interest rate.
- Our desire to prioritise our current self over our future self.
If you’ve ever felt like your future self can just deal with it later- you have low future self-continuity, aka not feeling connected to future you. If procrastination is a frequent habit, chances are your future self feels like a stranger that you don’t really care about dumping things on as opposed to a good friend you want to help.
How Procrastination Affects our Health
Procrastination might seem relatively harmless- a little delay here, a small pushback there. But these delays can come at a cost to our health.
Think about it- when you keep putting off an important task, does it really go away? No. Instead, it lingers in the back of your mind, adding to your stress. And the more stressed you feel, the harder it becomes to take care of yourself.
If you procrastinate a lot, you’re more likely to avoid doing healthy things like working out, or eating something nutritious¹. On top of that, you’re more likely to do unhealthy things like smoke and drink alcohol².
In the end, procrastination doesn’t just steal your time- it messes with your health.
How to Overcome Procrastination
As I recently watched Gladiator II- Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will a life with less procrastination (because let’s be real, a completely procrastination-free life doesn’t exist. Even those productivity gurus have accidentally got sucked into the internet black hole!). But with a few tweaks, you can stop snoozing on your to-do list and start showing up for your health.
- Be your own hype person (aka be self-compassionate)
Imagine your friend tells you they’re procrastinating. Would you look them in the eye and say “Wow, you’re the worst! You’ll never change”? No. You’d probably encourage them and remind them they are human- we all procrastinate from time to time.
So why not treat yourself the same way?
Instead of beating yourself up, catch your negative self-talk and reframe it (I’m lazy -> I’m not alone in how I am feeling).
- Get to know your future self
Your future self shouldn’t feel like a stranger- they’re you, just a little older! The more connected you feel to them, the more likely you’ll make choices that help them out.
Try this:
Close your eyes and picture the future you 5 or 10 years down the road. Where do you live? What’s your daily routine? How do your current choices affect the future you?
If that feels too abstract, use an aging filter on your phone and literally talk to your older self. (Sounds weird, but it works!³).
Procrastinating thrives on disconnecting current you from future you- so bring them closer so they feel like a friend you care about, not a distant stranger.
Little by little, these shifts will help you outsmart procrastination. And hey, even the Gladiator had to take things one battle at a time. But with each step, you’re building a healthier you.
References
- Kelly, S. M., & Walton, H. R. (2021). “I’ll work out tomorrow”: the procrastination in exercise scale. Journal of Health Psychology, 26(13), 2613-2625.
- Johansson, F., Rozental, A., Edlund, K., Côté, P., Sundberg, T., Onell, C., Rudman, A. & Skillgate, E. (2023). Associations between procrastination and subsequent health outcomes among university students in Sweden. JAMA network open, 6(1), e2249346-e2249346.
- Keane, E., & McDonnell, M. (2023, October). The Effects of Gender and Age-Progressed Avatars on Future Self-continuity. In Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (pp. 42-62). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
