The question ‘To what extent is procrastination an emotion regulation strategy’ has left me
wondering how procrastination and emotion regulation are even connected to each other! In
this paper we will first discuss what procrastination is, then what we mean by emotion
regulation strategy, how it is related to procrastination and, at last we will be talking about
how we regulate our emotions with the help of procrastination every day without even
knowing.
So, what do we understand by the term Procrastination? Not many people understand the
exact meaning of procrastination and there are many different definitions of it. In my
opinion procrastination means the act of postponing the task in hand because we simply do
not wish to do it or are not comfortable in doing it at the moment. Some people procrastinate
by Precrastinating(Pre-Crastination David A. Rosenbaum, Lanyon Gong, Cory Adam Potts)
The main reason of procrastinating is that we think that there is always tomorrow to finish the
task hence the reason we prolong the said task. The cause of procrastination is classified into
three categories.
First, the emotions class under which individuals succeed in time constrained situations and
interpret such conditions as challenging and exciting. Second, avoiders who leave things
because of their low self-efficacy to reduce anxiety. Third decisional procrastinators, who
are unable to make decisions at a specific timeframe and procrastinate due to their limited
decision-making skill (Ferrari 2000). Procrastinating causes many health issues related to
heart because the result of procrastinating is stress, the stress to complete the task on the due
date or the stress to face the consequences of not doing the task.