How Procrastination Impacts on Wellbeing

As Benjamin Franklin once said; You may delay, but time will not. One of the most challenging hurdles in an average personr's day to day life is procrastination. It is defined as delaying urgent tasks for something which one seeks enjoyment, putting unimportant tasks before the important ones. Putting off tasks may feel beneficial for the short term, but in the long term it doesnt seem so beneficial. Time will continue to go on even if you chose to defy it, it will always go on regardless of oner's actions. Supposedly maybe thatr's why people say; time is precious. Firstly, procrastination is valued as a dysfunctional behaviour (Sowon et al 2016). People who do this irrationally postpone tasks, they will prioritise other tasks over what needs to be done. For example, a student may decide to go on their phones or watch television over revising. By them doing this later-on they will stress more about the work which they never completed, then the pressure rises (Ferrari, 2001). This could be interpreted to suggest some unhealthy disorder in their life as they have their priorities completely wrong. If this is the case, then it does negatively impact their wellbeing as they are inducing more stress on themselves than if they just did the work over other irrelevant activities. Obviously, students sometimes arent aware of the long-lasting effect procrastination has. They will feel a sense of short-term happiness which is what makes it so appealing to them and this is why people tend to do it so much, the short-term happiness seems to, illogically, outweigh more important tasks. In comparison, itr's been studied that students do gain some sort of self-awareness of their performance decreasing due to procrastination and then they start to ruminate (Flett et al, 2012) which then leads to increased levels of anxiety (Lay & Schouwenburg, 1993). Therefore, the worry and pressure that derives from procrastination leads to mental illnesses which will then lead to a negative effect on their general wellbeing. Additionally, procrastination effects studentr's academic stress negatively as well as normal everyday strains. Social media has become much more in demand than ever before and has both positive and negative effects. Especially within students, they really demand on platforms such as Facebook to procrastinate. Itr's been studied and found that Facebook causes students to have more Facebook related strains and had a higher mean than actual academic stress (Meir et al, 2016). This shows that using Facebook to procrastinate has more of an impact on their lives overall, not just their studies. Obviously, it will affect their test results as they are inducing much more stress on everything. Itr's been seen that Facebook will put strains on aspects of life such as relationships, work, stereotypes which is more targeted towards young adults. Therefore, students will be much more targeted at the negative impacts of social media. This negatively impacts their wellbeing as they may seem to induce more pressure on themselves to fulfil the demands that Facebook points out, as well as trying to balance out their studies. It could be said that Facebook is the way students find ?more important things to do rather than revise as it doesnt tend to focus on important things, such as revising, but little irrelevant things, such as watching funny relative videos about families/ partners. However, even though all the above is true to students, it may not be relative to the rest of the population. The research that was carried out by Meir et al may relate to students, but maybe not as relatable to everyone. For example, people can procrastinate when doing anything really, whether it be household jobs or their day job. Yet we are still unaware due to all lack of variety in participants. As previously mentioned above, procrastination seems to fulfil a sense of short-term happiness. Regarding this, in the study conducted by Meir et al they revealed that Facebook seems to have an ambiguous role in which students enjoy using Facebook. Even though the enjoyment they received out of using Facebook, indirectly increased their academic stress (Meir et al), participants seemed to self-report some kind of decrease in their academic stress. Participants did record high levels of enjoyment whilst using Facebook. This could be interpreted that procrastinating with the use of Facebook is positive for peopler's wellbeing. As well as this, it is believed that people who procrastinate tend to have a higher level of self-efficiency as to people who dont participate in it. There are several types of procrastination; active and passive and people who are actively procrastinators have a stronger self-efficiency belief than passive procrastinators (Hsin Chun Chu, 2005). The study found that people who actively procrastinate tend to delay tasks to focus their attention to more important and urgent issues, this is because they then feel like they have more control over situations. They will then have more confidence in completing tasks. This shows that by procrastinating people seem to build a sense of control which makes them more confident. By being more self-efficient and organised it decreases the amount of stress that occurs. By them feeling in control of everything they will take more positive approaches and, therefore, having a more positive wellbeing. To conclude, procrastination tends to have both positive and negative effects on peopler's wellbeing. But also seems a very a very common behaviour and appears to be prevalent in everybody. Studies have shown that by procrastinating, it induces academic stress which leads to worry and anxiety within students. As a way to procrastinate students use Facebook which causes stress on academic progress, and also induces Facebook related strains. Yet, it also seems to carry some positivity by some people feeling they have control over situations and using platforms such as Facebook to do so, generally, does give some enjoyment.

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