Are you staying up too late to squeeze in some leisure activities after a long day, leaving you tired and behind the next day? Are you cleaning the bathroom instead of responding to work emails? Odds are you aren’t alone. COVID-19 has spawned a global mental health crisis, and that’s feeding one of our more harmful human tendencies: procrastination.
People don’t necessarily procrastinate because they are lazy. Procrastination has roots in our evolutionary development, with two key parts of the brain vying for control.
“Procrastination is an emotion-focused coping strategy,” says Tim Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, and author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle. “It is not a time-management problem; it is an emotion-management problem.”
And while the arrival of vaccines has offered hope as the devastating pandemic drags on, one year since the World Health Organization declared it a global pandemic, lockdowns and isolation will likely continue for months in the United States as we build herd immunity. That leaves many people grappling with fear and frustration that often allow procrastination to win the battle in our brains.
“Procrastination can be from a combination of mental and physical health issues,” says Nitin Desai, a physician based in Fayetteville, North Carolina. “The pandemic has caused increased stress, anxiety, and depression, leading to more individuals [suffering from] those underlying conditions, leading to more procrastination.”
Here’s a breakdown of the science behind procrastination, how the pandemic has driven a rise in different forms of the behavior, and some of the strategies we can use to get our brains back on track.
Brain battles
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