Sirois & Pychyl (2013): Short-Term Mood Regulation
Sirois and Pychyl's review argues that procrastination is fundamentally a failure of emotion regulation, not time management: we delay tasks to escape the negative feelings they trigger, prioritising present mood over the future self who inherits the task. The review pulls together experience sampling, self-forgiveness and mood experiment evidence showing that avoidance is driven by short-term mood repair, and that people treat their future self almost like a stranger. It is the theoretical basis for compassion- and emotion-focused approaches to procrastination.
| Citation | Sirois, F. M., & Pychyl, T. A. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. |
|---|---|
| Study type | Theoretical review synthesising experimental, survey and experience sampling evidence |
| Key claim | Procrastination gives priority to short-term mood repair over the future self's interests |
| Supporting evidence | Mood-manipulation experiments, Pychyl et al. (2000) experience sampling, self-forgiveness findings |
What the review argues
The authors assemble converging lines of evidence: bad moods increase task avoidance when people believe avoiding will improve their mood, procrastination in the moment co-occurs with task aversiveness and guilt, and reducing negative emotion, through self-forgiveness for instance, reduces subsequent procrastination. Their synthesis is that delay is the emotion regulation strategy of choice when a task feels bad: the mind trades a real problem later for relief now. Neuroimaging and priming work on the future self suggests we process that later person much like we process other people, making the trade easy.
Why it matters
If procrastination were a time management problem, better calendars would fix it, and they mostly do not. The mood repair framing predicts what actually works: lowering a task's emotional cost, shrinking the first step, forgiving slips instead of adding shame, and closing the gap with the future self through vivid concrete plans. It also explains why deadlines help, they raise the emotional cost of continued delay above the cost of starting.
Caveats
This is a narrative review rather than a meta-analysis, so it organises evidence supporting its thesis rather than pooling effect sizes, and much of the underlying data is correlational and self-reported. The mood-manipulation experiments it leans on used small lab samples. The framing is now widely adopted, but it is best read as a complement to, not a refutation of, motivational accounts like temporal motivation theory: aversiveness sets the emotional cost, discounting sets the arithmetic.
Peer-reviewed review in Social and Personality Psychology Compass; Sirois and Pychyl extended the argument in a 2016 edited volume, Procrastination, Health, and Well-Being.
Related
Pychyl et al. (2000) experience samplingSirois (2013) on self-compassion
Frequently asked questions
Is procrastination a time management problem or an emotional problem?
This review's answer, now the mainstream view, is emotional: people delay to escape how a task makes them feel, which is why scheduling tools alone rarely fix chronic procrastination. Time structure still helps, but mainly by changing the task's emotional profile, not by teaching people what time it is.