Student Syndrome.

A procrastinator is an individual who avoids tasks or who is avoiding a particular task.

Research on the physiological roots of procrastination mostly surrounds the role of the prefrontal cortex. The area of the brain that is responsible for executive brain functions such as planning, impulse control, and attention. Damage in this area can reduce an individual’s ability to filter out distracting stimuli, resulting in poorer organization, a loss of attention and increased procrastination.

There are said to be two types of procrastinators:

The relaxed type…
These procrastinators view their responsibilities negatively and avoid them by directing energy into other tasks. It is common, for example, for relaxed type procrastinating children to abandon schoolwork but not their social lives. This type of procrastination is a form of denial or cover-up; therefore, typically no help is being sought. The procrastinator avoids situations that would cause displeasure, indulging instead in more enjoyable activities.

And the tense-afraid type…
This type of procrastinator usually feels overwhelmed with pressure, unrealistic about time, uncertain about goals and many other negative feelings. Feeling that they lack the ability or focus to successfully complete their work, they tell themselves that they need to unwind and relax, that it’s better to take it easy for the afternoon, for example, and start afresh in the morning. Usually have grandiose plans rather than being realistic. Their ‘relaxing’ is often temporary and ineffective, and leads to even more stress as time runs out, deadlines approach and the person feels increasingly guilty and apprehensive. This behaviour becomes a cycle of failure and delay, as plans and goals are put off, pencilled into the following day or week in the diary again and again.

I believe I fall under the category of the latter.

But what I want to know is..are we born with the disposition for one or the other of these types? Or have we learnt from observation, association, or reinforcement to behave this maladaptive way? Or maybe procrastination is caused by our biology, or our cognitive thoughts?

I hope to see an increase of research in this area, seeing as all we tend do is stick a label on it, such as ADHD, or student syndrome..How about, we figure out the root causes of procrastination, instead of diagnosing more children, because if no one will even try -I’ll take ADHD as my diagnosis please. I could even make some money on the sly selling Ritalin to school kids.

But setting aside my ‘is procrastination innate?’ question, why have these new disorders come about?? Nothing’s changed -taking E numbers out of smarties hasn’t made a difference -they just taste shit now. Personally, South Park have a great view on ADHD.

See here.

I don’t know nearly as much as I’d like to know about this subject, but hopefully one day, when I’m a famous psychologist, I will.

…Procrastination, just one of the things I wondered about today whilst revising.

Edit: It just so happened that on the psychology exam I had on June 20th, I got a question about procrastination -about why we do it! What a coincidence! As for the exam I made up some bullshit about social learning theory.