Rebetez et al. (2018): Impulsivity, Intrusive Thoughts and Procrastination
Rebetez and colleagues asked 141 people about procrastination, impulsivity and intrusive thoughts, then tested which explained which. Rumination, the brooding kind of intrusive thought, was linked to procrastination through urgency: the tendency to act rashly when you feel bad. Daydreaming was linked to procrastination through lack of perseverance: the tendency to abandon a task partway. The paper's point is that self-regulation failures travel in packs, and that the specific pairing matters for what might help.
| Citation | Rebetez, M. M. L., Rochat, L., Barsics, C., & Van der Linden, M. (2018). Procrastination as a self-regulation failure: The role of impulsivity and intrusive thoughts. Psychological Reports, 121(1), 26–41. |
|---|---|
| Study type | Cross-sectional questionnaire study with mediation analysis |
| Sample | 141 participants |
| Key finding | Urgency mediated the link between rumination and procrastination, and the reverse order did not hold; lack of perseverance and daydreaming each mediated the other's link to procrastination |
| What was measured | Procrastination, two impulsivity facets (urgency and lack of perseverance), and two kinds of intrusive thought (rumination and daydreaming) |
What the study found
Procrastination is often called the textbook case of self-regulation failure, so the authors asked which other self-regulation problems it travels with. Two answers came back. People who ruminate tend to procrastinate, and the statistical path ran through urgency, which is the disposition to act rashly in order to escape a bad feeling. Tested the other way round, rumination did not explain the urgency link, so the direction is informative rather than symmetrical. The second pairing was daydreaming and lack of perseverance, which each explained part of the other's relationship with procrastination, suggesting a loop: attention drifts off task, the task gets abandoned, which leaves more room for drifting.
Why it matters
It puts a mechanism under the emotion-regulation account of procrastination. Sirois and Pychyl argue that procrastination is short-term mood repair, and this study names the trait that does the repairing badly: urgency, acting now to get out of a feeling now. That reframes the brooding you do before a dreaded task as part of the delay rather than a preamble to it, and it suggests the useful intervention is not more planning but something that interrupts the brood-then-bolt sequence. Urge surfing, self-compassion and getting the loop out of your head and onto paper all target that moment, which is why they appear on this site next to the planning techniques rather than instead of them.
Caveats
This is 141 people filling in questionnaires at one point in time. Mediation analysis on cross-sectional data can show that a pattern is consistent with a causal story, but it cannot establish one, and the authors present it as a step towards mechanisms rather than proof of them. Everything here is self-report, including the procrastination measure, and the sample was not clinical. Read it as a map of which traits cluster together, and treat the arrows as hypotheses.
Peer-reviewed study in Psychological Reports, published online August 2017 and in print in the January 2018 issue. Sample size and findings taken from the published abstract, verified via Crossref and OpenAlex.
Related
Sirois & Pychyl on short-term mood repairSelf-regulationMood repairUrge surfingBrain dump
Frequently asked questions
Why do I procrastinate more when I am overthinking?
This study offers a specific answer: rumination predicted procrastination through urgency, the tendency to act rashly to escape a bad feeling. Brooding about a task makes you feel worse, and urgency turns feeling worse into doing something else immediately. If that is your pattern, the lever is the feeling in the moment rather than the plan for the week.
Is procrastination a form of impulsivity?
They are closely related but not the same. Impulsivity is acting without enough forethought; procrastination is not acting when you meant to. This study found two impulsivity facets doing the connecting work: urgency, which is acting rashly under distress, and lack of perseverance, which is quitting partway. Steel's meta-analysis likewise found impulsiveness among the strongest correlates of procrastination.
Does daydreaming cause procrastination?
Nobody has shown that. In this study daydreaming and the tendency to abandon tasks each explained part of the other's link to procrastination, in data collected at a single point in time, so the honest reading is that they occur together and may feed each other.