What's the payoff for procrastinating?

Sometimes I like to use the payoff concept with clients. If we are stuck in a pattern of unhelpful behaviour, it can be useful to explore whether there is some psychological payoff that might be keeping that behaviour going.

For example, if our tendency is to dodge social events, what’s the payoff? Ditto if we see a pattern of being unable to hold onto relationships and friendships through sabotaging them at a conscious or unconscious level. Where’s the payoff for something which might be making us miserable?

The benefit or payoff might not be immediately obvious to the client. But a good counsellor can help the client to gain some insight about what the benefit of the dysfunctional patterns might be. That can then facilitate change – change being the underlying aim for many clients in counselling.

The payoff idea can be a good way of looking at a tendency to procrastinate: to put off doing things if we can get away with it. In modern life, we have plenty of readily available distractions to tip us into procrastination. We start off by Googling something we need to know, but then we find that we have gone down various virtual rabbit holes, time has passed, and the main job is still not done. But scrolling may have felt easier than facing the task at hand.

What does research tell us about procrastination?

Previous research by Dr Joseph Ferrari, an American professor of psychology at DePaul University, showed that about one in five adults are chronic procrastinators. Research suggests that procrastination may be even more common among students, where it can contribute to lower grades, missed opportunities and increased stress.

Now, some interesting recent research by Dr Itamar Shatz, a social scientist at the University of Cambridge, has done a deep-dive to identify a number of different types of procrastinator, from the “zigzagger” to the “rebel”.

As a social scientist, he argues that modern life has made the problem worse: humans evolved to focus on their immediate circumstances such as getting the next meal or fleeing a predator. But our lives are very different: the consequences of delaying doing the self-assessment tax return until the deadline approaches (a personal tendency of mine) are of a different order from delaying a hunt for food to ward off starvation.

Even if procrastination is rarely life-threatening for us, it can carry a high emotional cost. It can bring up feelings of guilt and shame, as we become self-critical for not getting something done. And anxiety and feelings of stress can multiply as the tasks accumulate.

Backfiring on perfectionism

Among his various types of procrastinator, nine in all, Dr Shatz identifies the perfectionist. This is certainly a type which I would recognise from my practice with clients.

I remember working with a student who would diligently research everything he might need to include in his university essay. He would gather more and more material that he might want to include, but he would delay the actual writing of the essay as long as possible because he thought he would need to have everything exactly right before tackling the terror of the blank screen.

But this approach can then backfire as the deadline for submission of the essay gets ever closer, as he chases perfection by researching every possible angle. He is then anxious and stressed that he doesn’t have enough time left to do the actual essay well, and poorer marks might reflect that. The counter to this sort of perfectionism is the concept of “good enough” – acknowledge that the perfect is unattainable, that mistakes are not mortal sins.

In a similar vein, I remember a fellow student whose default mechanism rather than writing an assignment was to deadhead the roses in her garden. Dr Shatz would have classed her as a worrier, someone who would put things off because she was anxious that things might go wrong. For her, the counter might have been to do just one paragraph or to break the task down into manageable chunks to ease the fear.

Working with a counsellor might have helped her to tease out the emotional drivers towards procrastination as a way of understanding the payoff. She might then have been able to use that new insight to manage change around tasks which have to get done in the end. The roses could wait for another day.

Understanding what drives procrastination can be the first step towards breaking the cycle and finding a different way forward. Counselling can offer a supportive space to explore the emotions and patterns behind procrastination and develop new ways of responding to them.