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It's for much of the country and that's B.B.C. Radio Scotland news. B.B.C. Radio Scotland very good. Writer no. Hands out who's guilty of putting things off I'm Julian Russell and I'm today's press not biased we're aiming to improve on our progress to nation and to the salmon off certainly knows all about it he's recently written about how plastination was the big of his life. Oh it was a nightmare going for an addition for a T.V. Program when I was in my teens and I got a call back by put off learning the script so I didn't know as well as I wanted to and I made a little demo CD and when I was 1819 and I took it to a club and someone said all of you finish that will be able to get you. Use it festival for this kind of music and I didn't I didn't put my head don't know how to study my degree over 5 years instead of over 4 years but the main thing was the creative element I always wanted to be a writer I wanted to write more than I that I wrote very sporadically and I thought that I had to do it and beg long stretches. Which segues into part of my method which is to take something small like before I was able to write 2 or 3 hours a day I 1st got the discipline of writing for half an hour a day and I did that for about 6 or 8 months before. Until it became normal for me before I before I bumped. The sense to me like the edition are the demo CD that they were potentially quite big things that you were procrastinating about because they were things that could have impacted you your future life direction or could be you know whatever it was it generally picks stuff or did you procrastinate about small everyday stuff as well oh yes replying to emails even Facebook messages which are a little bit more formal the more an oral there was around something the bigger it looked the. Further you go away from the task the more thought well of no reply to that fridge is going to look silly so the pressure on yourself so well it almost goes worse doesn't it the more you leave it I can think about that my own life if I'm procrastinating about I don't know starting out a bunch of holiday photos yeah I'll do that tomorrow or next week or whatever and actually as time goes on it gets bigger and worse it's sort of true and then sometimes you just do it and it takes 5 minutes and you go oh about when you've been hiding in over my head for so long. So just why things are psychologist Dr question Miller says there are lots of reasons we can put things off because we find them to heart you know the feeling of being overwhelmed and you just don't know where to start or it could be that the task that you're trying to do is actually quite unpleasant so you don't really have any motivation to do it whatsoever are just plain dull I think sometimes for things off definitely yes so if things are boring then obviously you have to sort of summon together even more energy and even more motivation to actually get on with it so procrastination can be linked to a number of personality traits so things like being a perfectionist I don't know how many people can associate with that but you know if you're more prone to wanting things to be done perfectly then you're more likely to try and put things off because it's harder obviously to do things perfectly and you're searching for the right moment when it will be exactly that's exactly Julian So it's not only that you want the task to be done perfectly but you want the situation to be perfect as well so you're looking for the right time you know when you're in the perfect situation be it if you want to have a conversation or you you know you have to have an unpleasant conversation with someone or be it you need to sit down and do that bit of. Work or that that task for work you kind of put off oh I need to be in that perfect situation before I can even do it really from a sort of physiological point of view I'm trying to sort inside on our brains and understand what's going on it almost sounds like there's the 2 parts of our brain battling I want you to do this is it almost feels like there's a part of your brain that knows you need to do that things specially that someone has to be done yes there's the other part of your brain maybe the not to part seeing it off and it's like that and conflict Yes Well that is part of it is that procrastination is where you actually actively you know you put effort into putting off what you know you should do if you put all that effort into the top that's what you get is about doing it. Yes So in terms of our actual brains it has been linked to procrastination has been linked to the hypothalamus So the part of the brain that is mostly responsible for emotion so which is linked to self-control if you are very impulsive if you are not great at self-control and not create a sort of controlling these emotions then you're more likely to craft an 8 because you don't sort of have that sort of internal. What shall we say the internal discipline to actually sit down and get on with what we need to do so there can actually be some sort of genetic influence as well because the structure of the brain and the connections and parts of the brain are slightly different in those who are more prone to procrastination than those who are less prone to it well I was going to ask if it was in the 8 or learned as a genetic thing going on anyway yes and I think I mean obviously there's the actual biology part of it but you have to remember as well that lots of personality traits are inherited as well so thing. Like if you're you know perfectionist tendencies or impulsivity conscientiousness even these are all things that we tend to inherit from our parents and there's also been a link as well between procrastination and some mental health outcomes as well which again is something that is strongly linked or can be linked to genetics as well so it's kind of almost like there's a lot of different ways that we can inherit this tendency from our parents. Well you mentioned mental health things there in terms of the impact that it might have on us if we were chronic procrastinator cannot have quite a major impact on our sort of health and happiness Yes definitely and unfortunately it can be a bit of a reinforcing cycle you know we think I should have done that and then you start to feel more negative about it and you can also sort of create more and more barriers to it as well and kind of get into the mindset of I can actually do this so it becomes a bit of a negative spiral and obviously the more negative emotions you have associated with whatever you know whatever the task is. The more excuses you find and the harder it is to actually get this done but it is also linked as well to anxiety as well so if you have an anxiety about doing a task and then you put off doing it then you tend to become more anxious about it you know the closer the deadline comes are or even if you've not got a set deadline just the fact that you're not doing what you're meant to be doing can cause anxiety and again it's very easy for this all to spiral. Lack of confidence and self belief and I think it ties into for a lot of people sort of a level anxiety where they find life quite difficult to deal with in general and they feel that extra pressure of doing this task might tempt them over into somewhere where they're uncomfortable but I identified 5 mean thinking patterns were really contribute to procrastination one is a sort of all or nothing thinking which is if I can't do it all then there's no point in doing it at all the other one is perfectionism like not being able to meet your own standards being afraid that it won't be good enough for you I think a lot of people identify with that then we give ourselves reasons to believe that there's no point or no one will read any Anyway all sorts of reasons we think we convince yourself that there's no point to doing anything and another one that's a really big one edge seeing things as things to be done rather than things to do so you don't enjoy anything you don't see a because I get to read a book you think when can I get this finished so I can move on to the other one is something it's another thing to do list most yes and that makes it worse doesn't absolutely You turn things that should otherwise be pleasurable into a chore and finally just sometimes are just moods or energy or swallow and we feel like we do feel like of course often if we can commit to doing some. For 5 minutes we get in the mood and then we do feel like but a lot of the time it's hard to get over those initial humps I'm not in here just and I think lots of people be not recognizing a lot of that and I mean in terms of those with the kind of reasons that you procrastinated and you said you procrastinated about big stuff small stuff everything what was the impact on your life it goes so much further than just not being able to do things that you want to do it's like you can't enjoy leisure time if you go to the part you can enjoy it because you're thinking of all the things you should be doing or should have done already being a chronic procrastinator has far reaching effects on every element of someone's life and it's really undermined someone's self esteem it undermines their confidence in ourselves and our sense of our own value that we can't discipline ourselves to do the things that we really want to do. Well some of us even struggle to do the stuff we actually know is good for us like things to do with our health and our fitness but why my name is Dr Fisher survival and I'm a reader in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield most of the research that I've conducted over the past 18 years suggests that it's chronic procrastination that is mainly responsible for some of the effects that we see of procrastination on health this is because when people chronically procrastinate their chronically putting off these health behaviors that are important for their health they may be putting off stopping smoking they may be putting off getting into healthy exercise routine or changing their diet a healthier one and if you're a chronic across later then you are more than likely to cross needing on engaging in these types of health protect behaviors on a fairly regular basis which means that over time your risk is certainly increased . Some of the research I've done support system idea in one study we looked at is a sample of people who suffer a port having hypertension high blood pressure cardiovascular disease and then we compared them to another group of individuals who had no signs of any types of chronic health problems and I compared them on their levels of sort of trait to a chronic procrastination and not surprisingly those who self reported having poor heart health scored significantly higher on the measure of chronic procrastination I think what was more telling in this particular study too is that this was after controlling for a number of other personality factors and so she demographic factors that might explain why somebody would have poor heart health. So that's one route to. Bad health from being a chronic cross nater the other has to do with stress we know that chronic across the nation is associate with higher levels of stress and we also know that stress puts people at greater risk especially when it's chronic for a number of problems question with dysregulation of the immune system in the inflammatory systems in the body and this can lead to greater vulnerability for illness it can exacerbate any preexisting inflammatory conditions with the individual and of course high levels of stress are related to poor sleep patterns and we've also shown this in some very research to that chronic across nadirs tend to have core quality X. So why do people put off these important health behaviors specially when we know that the good for our health I think the key comes down to why people put off any type of task what we know is that people procrastinate on tasks that they find unpleasant or aversive or challenging perhaps to theirs their sense of confidence or their self-esteem and so you can think about the effort that's involved in getting into regular exercise routine compared to just sitting back in the SO fired and watching television or watching Netflix so there's an immediate payoff for engaging in unhealthy behaviors and procrastinators are tend to be prone to be tempted by nice types of rewards that they can get immediately versus the rewards that you get after putting a lot of effort into healthy behaviors which you only see over a long period of time so I think that's one of the main reasons is that there's not an immediate reward for an gauging in these healthy behaviors but there is certainly some immediate rewards for not. On this week's precipice to return to get to the bottom of why be procrastinate even with the big stuff in life here's Christine Miller again. I think possibly this would just be like reset on the sense of being overly. You know this big mountain head of you and you think how on earth am I going to address this you know where am I even going to start so in a way often that's when people actually do the smaller tasks so there's almost the sort of displacement activities you know instead of getting started on this big work project you may be so you emails or you. You know start taping the office or. You know things that are easier to achieve in the short term so people are more likely to do them rather than perhaps the big project that they should be doing and you still feel like you do something so exactly not being exactly Yes and it is sort of that reinforcement that OK I can feel positive about myself because I am getting some tasks done despite the fact that you know the big task that you actually need to get done isn't thinking back to childhood. Or those of us that are paid and. Why do we leave homework until the last over the holidays Yes that is actually a common thing that comes off isn't it and I think partly like we've said is the fact that it's generally a pretty unpleasant task it's not something that we want to do there are so many other much more appealing things that we would rather be doing in our holidays but as well there is there is sort of the idea that sometimes if we leave things to the last minute it gives us that motivation and the need to do it you know all of a sudden you don't have any option but to do the task so I think some people almost need that motivation and that sort of. What should we say that impetus. You know you the adrenaline starts growing and you sort of it helps with that direct focus that you need to be able to just sit down and get on with the task so for some people that that actually works for them well I was thinking about that we were talking about it in the office and some people seem to almost enjoy the bars you might get from procrastinating or leaving things for last minute I'm thinking journalists broadcasters Yes So to what extent can it be a positive thing because you mentioned motivation there it's almost like pick up the Pixar you that's it to give you focus that say and I think. Funnily enough I do have quite a lot of students who say that as well you know they they almost you know you give them a task a week ahead and they always leave it to the last minute because that is the only way that they can get it done. Talking with students Pamela Daugherty from Edmund University recognises the problem some of them have with procrastination she's been telling Luke Aqualina about the work she's doing to help them get the job done the reason people are procrastinating is the task that they need to do is difficult mentally and it's common that students would rather the difficult task off in favor of something that's either more pleasurable or just easier so procrastination might not necessarily be surfing the web or social media or something might just be doing a lower priority task such as making a revision timetable or organize in your notes rather than doing the difficult task of learning something. One of the common suggestions I give to students is think about using an app or blocking software that you can take so you can concentrate and use your use your laptop for studying only with accessing the web for a certain amount of time one I'm a big fan of which I've used previously when I was studying Pomodoro Technique which is you set yourself a timer for 25 minutes and during that time you have to be completely on task and one of the 25 minutes are up 5 minutes break so get yourself a cup of tea surf the web but you must be completely focused on the task the 25 minutes and the time remind you that you can't get yourself distracted if the tires are concentrating when I used it for example I used the timer on my 14 ordinally And you know when you get distracted did you pick up your phone of the even thinking right but my the timer was still there that's OK I know I can. I get a check at the go before because the time Earth Dylan and is there any other techniques that you might suggest if you tend to be distracted from studying by doing your house work for example of your going to making yourself some snacks remove those possibilities so go and study somewhere else in the coffee shop or the library where you can't go and do your housework or if you destruction by making cups of tea too often get yourself a flask and get your tea ready before you sit down and start. So it was interesting you said that you could consider like creating a study timetable procrastinator Yeah because that's something I think a lot of people would consider being very prepared and being sort of on top of your you're studying and I find that really interesting is that something that's common Yes so that I would differentiate between things that are useful to do like organize yourself in order to be able to gnaw how to get your vision effective and then where the balances so at what stage does it become just a procrastination technique like going through in color coding or you're not for example is that helping you organize your thoughts better or is it just an avoidance tactic just becoming like coloring in. And have you ever had students that have come to you with the difficulties of procrastinating and it's become more of an issue then is almost dealable with for them yes that has happened in the past and at that stage it becomes a self worth thing almost it can lead to feelings of anxiety and so on when you think you think it's our innate h