Survival instincts may be cause of procrastination
Stress for Success
May 17, 2011


Do you repeatedly procrastinate? Do you wonder why you don’t just get on with it? If procrastination is a “gap between intention and action” what keeps you from putting your intention into action?

You’re in good company since virtually everyone procrastinates. But not everyone is a procrastinator. Those reporting they procrastinate swelled from only 5% in 1978, to 20 – 25% today based on two recent large studies by psychologist Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University.

Procrastination is impulsivity winning out over future rewards. This is probably why it’s on the increase: our modern world has limitless distractions too many TV channels, electronic games and Internet temptations. Referring to all of these amusements, University of Calgary psychologist Piers Steel speaking of procrastination says, “You couldn’t design a worse working environment if you tried.”

Historically, it was said procrastination was caused by perfectionism, fear of failure, and rebellion against overbearing parents that one has never outgrown. Then there were the thrill seekers who profess they work best under pressure and use procrastination to create that pressure.

Steel reviewed 553 studies of procrastination and concluded it has four related variables regarding your task:
1. Your confidence in your ability to do it;
2. Its value;
3. Your need for immediate gratification and sensitivity to its delay;
4. Impulsiveness;

He suggests about the task:
· The more confident you are, the less you’ll delay.
· Its value is determined by how much fun it will be and its meaning to you. The more fun or the more meaningful the less you’ll procrastinate.
· The need for instant gratification looks at both how much time will pass before you’re rewarded for doing the assignment and how badly you need a reward to work on it. You’re more likely to finish a job due next week if it results in an immediate reward. If the reward comes much later, dawdling increases.
· Impulsiveness is determined by how easily distracted you are. The more distractible you are, the more likely you are to procrastinate.
He created a formula to predict your procrastination likelihood: Your confidence multiplied by the task’s importance/fun, divided by how badly you need the reward for finishing it, multiplied by how easily distractible you are.

Impulsivity, he says, is the most important part of his equation. “There’s a huge correlation between procrastination and impulsivity … that has to do with evolution. Procrastination reflects the difficulty of coping with some aspects of modern society with hunter-gatherer brains because our forebears lived in a world without delay. For them … meat kept for three days and danger lurked around every corner. It was a very immediate environment. We learned to value the now much more than the later to survive.”

Without going into the details about the functioning of our survival brain, he says we do less well planning for the future, where goals exist. “So, a second piece of chocolate cake wins out over a trim figure down the road.”

Next week we’ll look at ideas to get going.

Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., is an international speaker and a Stress and Wellness Coach. Order her book, Let Your Body Win: Stress Management Plain & Simple, at http://www.letyourbodywin.com/bookstore.html and request she speak to your organization.