IT WAS AS OBVIOUS as the crud-caked plates
piled like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in his
kitchen sink – three hours after he’d promised
himself he’d get right down to business and
start scrubbing.
At uni, Carl would blow deadlines and pull
all-nighters cramming for tests he’d known
about for weeks. Later, as he settled into the
life of a working guy, he would feel a growing
dread as the deadline to file his tax return
loomed closer. He’d delay and delay until
finally he’d panic-file at the last minute.
And then there were the bills. He’d open a
couple, vaguely note the due dates and vow
to take care of them on time. But inevitably
he’d receive late notices and toss them into a
pile with the other unopened mail, knowing
that the longer he waited, the harsher his
creditors would be. It was nuts, all of it. I
have the money, he’d scold himself. And in
the end he’d always pay. Why couldn’t he just
take a few minutes to pay them and spare the
needless torment?
“Each day I put it off, the stress would grow
a little more,” says Carl. “Eventually there was
this constant, pervasive sense of urgency, and
even danger, lurking in the back of my mind.”
On the spectrum of stallers, Carl is on
the extreme end. But even the most diligent
among us, when faced with one of life’s uphill
grades, occasionally slips into idle – from the
Christmas Eve panic shopper to the Sunday
snoozer with the Serengeti lawn.
“The tendency to delay or postpone
may be one of our most basic, universal
human behaviours,” says Dr Joseph Ferrari, a
professor of psychology at Chicago’s DePaul
University. “Not only here but also in Canada,
Spain, Peru, Venezuela, Italy, Turkey, Poland,
Austria, Saudi Arabia... everywhere.”
It’s also one of our oldest human traits.
“Do not put your work off till tomorrow and
the day after,” the Greek poet Hesiod finger-wagged back in 700BC. US Founding Father
Benjamin Franklin singled out “to perform
without fail what you resolve” as one of his
13 virtues. And while no evidence exists to
prove it, it’s no stretch to picture the first
caveman crawling back under his sabre
tooth tiger pelt at the thought of painting
yet another hunting scene on the walls of his
living room. There’s even a patron saint – St
Expeditus – for procrastinators.
For some, like Carl, the prayers are needed.
Facing an unpleasant task of any kind turns
into a psychological cage match against a
monster of their own making. And recently,
scientists have learned that the consequences
of these battles may go beyond sleepless
nights and self-flagellation. A growing body of
research now links chronic postponement with
a higher susceptibility to headaches, gastric
problems, migraines, colds and flu, among
other maladies. That alone might be enough to
spur some procrastinators into action.
Plus, last year came this finding:
chronic procrastination may be deadly.
Dr Fuschia Sirois, a researcher at the
University of Sheffield, discovered that for
each point people scored on a widely used
procrastination scale, their chances of having
hypertension and heart disease increased
by more than 60 per cent. That makes this
stressor as potentially lethal as a pack-a-day
cigarette habit: daily smokers also have a
60 per cent higher risk of heart disease than
people who have never smoked.
“The findings are significant,” says Sirois,
who was teaching at Bishop’s University in
Canada when the study was conducted. “We
need to start thinking of the tendency to
procrastinate as something that may increase
your risk of developing a potentially life-
threatening health condition.”
That this particular form of stress would
rise above all others in its toxicity wassomething researchers had long suspected. “It
makes sense,” says Ferrari, who’s published
many groundbreaking studies and books on
procrastination. “It’s already been shown to
cause all kinds of other health problems.”
Given the type of unrelenting, adrenaline-
spiking pressure that’s the hallmark of
procrastination, he adds, the heart would
almost have to be particularly vulnerable.
Still, people tend to either make light of the
behaviour or dismiss it outright as a character
flaw. “People will say, ‘It’s just procrastination.
Everyone does it. It’s not a big deal.’ And that’s
true, though occasionally it isn’t,” says Sirois.
“When it’s a characteristic way of approaching
things in life, these findings suggest that it’s
more than just a bother. It can be dangerous.”
That distinction – between the occasional
dawdle and wholesale, chronic delay across
numerous aspects of life – is the key factor in
determining who is vulnerable.
“Everyone procrastinates, but not everyone
is a procrastinator,” explains Ferrari. The worst
offenders – roughly a quarter of the population
(and slightly more men than women) – have
made it their lifestyle. “They do it at home, at
school, at work, in relationships,” he says.
For their health to be at risk, procrastinators
must also perceive the avoided task as
significant and be aware that there will be
negative consequences, Sirois says. It’s like the
alcoholic contemplating just one drink: “You
know it’s bad. You know you shouldn’t do it,
but you do it anyway. There is a distinct feeling
of acting against your own will,” she says.THE PAPER – AN ESSAY ON CHAUCER – was
your basic knock-it-out 10-pager, with a three-
month heads-up to boot. To Sam Harrison,
however, it might as well have been a four-
volume thesis on The Canterbury Tales. So the
liberal arts major did what he usually does
with things he’d rather not face: he locked it
deep in a corner of his brain to be dealt with
later. And there it lurked, for weeks.
So in this case, “later” was 10:30pm the
night before the paper was due. Panic, which
he’d mostly managed to keep out of his
consciousness, grabbed him and shook hard.
“I was so stressed that I almost made
myself puke that night,” recalls Harrison, a
participant in Sirois’s latest research. “I binged
on junk food. I took this weird stress shower.
I just needed to feel some hot water on me,”
he says, marvelling at his own agitation. As
morning dawned, he drifted off. He jerked
awake at 9am with his head throbbing, his
chest thudding, the doomsday clock ticking in
his brain.
Harrison made the deadline. His grade?
Lousy, although after learning of Sirois’s
findings, he should have been more worried
that his heart would fail him.RESEARCHERS HAVE SPENT more than
half a century watching, recording and
quantifying how we poison ourselves with
worry. In 1984, the Whitehall Study, which
assessed mortality among British male civil100 APRIL 2016