We’ve all been guilty of procrastinating before, but some people tend to do it far more than others. Research indicates that about 20% of adults can be considered “chronic procrastinators,” and it’s an extremely tough mental loop to break. Not only does procrastinating lead to worse outcomes at school, work, or in creative projects, it can also be highly damaging to a person’s psyche. Regular procrastination fuels intense feelings of shame, guilt, and even major depression. Luckily, there are all kinds of tricks, hacks, and mental games people can use to help defeat procrastination. However, many of them are Band-Aids at best and don’t address the fear, anxiety, stress, and overwhelm that are often at the root of so-called laziness and task avoidance. View this post on Instagram A “cure” for procrastination? One recent study wanted to test a potential “cure” for procrastination: self-forgiveness. A team of researchers from Carleton University set out to determine whether there was a link between “forgiving the self for a specific instance of procrastination and procrastination on that same task in the future.” In other words, does mentally beating yourself up after feeling lazy help you do better next time, or is it more effective to give yourself grace? The method was simple. Researchers recruited 119 first-year university students enrolled in an introductory psychology course, knowing, of course, that students are exceptional candidates for studying procrastination. It’s easy to find students who are behind on their studies. Photo credit: Canva Students were polled after an exam in the class on a variety of self-reported factors, including whether they procrastinated studying and how they felt about their overall performance. They were polled again after a second exam. In the end, the results revealed that students who reported high levels of self-forgiveness for procrastinating on their studying for the first exam were less likely to repeat the same mistake on the second exam. “Negative affect” The team determined that a big reason self-forgiveness was important is that it reduced something called “negative affect,” a psychology term that refers to a bundle of unpleasurable feelings like anxiety, anger, sadness, and guilt. What mattered in whether a person would stop procrastinating in the future was that they rid themselves of those negative feelings. Forgiving themselves for procrastinating the first time helped immensely. We’ve learned a lot about procrastination in recent years. What was once considered laziness is now better understood as a diabolical cocktail of overwhelm, anxiety, fear, and even childhood trauma. That’s why so much advice about procrastination is outdated. Marla Cummins, a productivity coach, writes that using force or authoritarian self-talk like “I have to get this done” used to be commonplace but simply doesn’t work. A research review from 2023 found that self-compassion is far more effective than self-criticism at motivating positive change, further reinforcing the findings from the Carleton University study. Methods that ease those negative feelings and break the cycle of negative self-talk are key to stopping procrastination, or at least doing it less often, in the future. As a human, you are almost guaranteed to procrastinate on something important in your life sometime in the near future. The key to not letting it become a chronic problem may be to forgive yourself for the slip-up and refuse to carry those negative feelings of shame and guilt into your next opportunity. The post Scientists discover one step you can’t skip if you want to stop procrastinating: forgiveness appeared first on Upworthy.