Overcome procrastination: Enhancing emotion regulation skills reduce procrastination

By Marcus Eckert, David Daniel Ebert, Dirk Lehr, B. Sieland, Matthias Berking. 2016

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Procrastination is a widespread phenomenon that affects performance in various life domains including academic performance. Recently, it has been argued that procrastination can be conceptualized as a dysfunctional response to undesired affective states. Thus, we aimed to test the hypothesis that the availability of adaptive emotion regulation (ER) skills prevents procrastination. In a first study, cross-sectional analyses indicated that ER skills and procrastination were associated and that these connections were mediated by the ability to tolerate aversive emotions. In a second study, cross lagged panel analyses showed that (1) the ability to modify aversive emotions reduced subsequent procrastination and that (2) procrastination affected the subsequent ability to tolerate aversive emotions. Finally, in a third study, a two-arm randomized control trial (RCT) was conducted. Results indicated that systematic training of the ER skills tolerate and modify aversive emotions reduced procrastination. Thus, in order to overcome procrastination, emotion-focused strategies should be considered.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7cf80863ac6e8026dd50c13c341ae00a5810a993

Citations in the corpus

• Self-Compassion and Bedtime Procrastination: an Emotion Regulation Perspective (2018, unknown): “…is consistent with theory and research on general procrastination, which posits that affect regulation is a key factor in the maintenance of procrastination (Pychyl and Sirois 2016; Sirois and Pychyl 2013), and that bolstering emotion regulation skills reduces procrastination (Eckert et al. 2016).”