Does procrastination cause poor physical and mental health because people, say, put off starting a new exercise regime or seeing a doctor about a health problem? Or is it the other way around? Does poor physical health, say, lead people to procrastinate because they don’t have the energy to do the task now? To try to solve this riddle, we conducted a longitudinal study – that is, a study that followed people for a period of time, taking measurements at various points in the study. We recruited 3,525 students from eight universities in and around Stockholm and asked them to complete questionnaires every three months for one year. A weekly email with evidence-based analysis from Europe's best scholars Our study, published in JAMA Network Open, aimed to investigate if students who procrastinate have a higher risk of poor mental and physical health. Of the 3,525 students we recruited, 2,587 answered the follow-up questionnaire nine months later, where several health outcomes were measured.
To understand how procrastination relates to later health outcomes, students with a greater tendency to procrastinate (as scored on a procrastination scale) at the start of the study were compared with students with a lower tendency. The results showed that higher levels of procrastination were associated with somewhat higher symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress nine months later. Students with higher levels of procrastination were also more likely to report disabling pain in the shoulders or arms (or both), worse sleep quality, more loneliness and more financial difficulties. These associations remained even when we took other factors that could affect the association into consideration, such as age, gender, parents’ level of education, and previous physical and psychiatric diagnoses.