As a teenager, I was a champion procrastinator. My parents tried nagging and prodding, but it made little difference to my sense of urgency. Did I submit that financial aid form yet? Fill up my near-empty gas tank? Get started on that senior paper? Nope, I haven’t done any of that, I’d reply with a shrug; there’s plenty of time. My mom and dad probably figured they’d still need to remind me of deadlines and due dates well into my 40s. But lo and behold, I have since become a functional adult, paying my bills on time and registering my kids for summer camp in February. I quit procrastinating and started getting things done somewhere along the line.
But despite my miraculous turn-around, the legacy of adolescent procrastination lives on. Leaving things until the last minute is a common concern identified by the teen clients and caregivers who seek out coaching services. For those teens who tend to put things off due to anxiety, perfectionism, or difficulties with self-regulation, this concern is reasonable; teens benefit from developing coping strategies and learning to work through their discomfort to stop avoiding the unavoidable.
But for some teens, procrastination is not a problem; it’s a SOLUTION. These teens are the ones who profess to “just work better under pressure” and have the grades to back it up, who scramble at the last minute but “always manage to get it done,” who often turn things in after the due date, but ONLY when the teacher allows full credit for late assignments.
Procrastination works for these teens because it causes them to experience the stress needed to act. While we tend to perceive stress as a negative, it is essential to our survival; we need to experience some level of stress to accomplish pretty much anything. Without stress, we have no motivation to act, so we don’t. But too much stress is overwhelming and causes us to panic or shut down. Each of us has an optimal stress level at which we can perform our best, and that level changes depending on the complexity of what we’re trying to do. With easier tasks, we can handle more added pressure. For harder tasks, we struggle to manage additional stressors that might arise.
The teens who benefit from procrastination don’t feel enough stress to be motivated into action by typical circumstances. Maybe they’ve never experienced any significant consequences for late work, have performed historically well on tests without extensive studying, or get decent grades on projects without putting in much time or effort. As a result, they start from comparatively low levels of stress, and they require some alternative means of increasing their stress level to a point of action. Procrastination is one of those alternatives.
Take the case of Adi, who is taking a science class required for graduation. She is deeply interested in the subject and understands the concepts easily. But while she has aced all of the class exams, Adi hasn’t even picked a topic for her research project, which is due in less than two weeks. Her teacher has told Adi she will fail the class if she doesn’t do the project, but Adi still feels little stress or motivation to get started because it seems easy to her. Adi waits until three days before the project is due, at which point she finally starts to feel a sense of urgency because she is now appropriately crunched for time. By procrastinating, Adi has raised her stress level to the optimal point. With a newfound motivation to act, Adi completes the assignment with ease and achieves her desired grade.
But let’s say Adi waits until the last night before the project is due to get started. As Adi gets to work, she realizes she has misread the instructions and doesn’t have the materials she needs. In addition, Adi has been tasked with watching her younger brother while her mom goes to work. With only one night to complete the assignment, these setbacks, and added responsibility caused Adi to move BEYOND her optimal stress level. She struggles to think coherently, and her brother keeps interrupting her work. As a result, Adi is forced to turn the project in half-completed, and she receives a poor grade. Adi is infuriated with herself, knowing she was fully capable of better work.
So how can we as caregivers help our procrastinating teens avoid a fate like Adi’s?
First, we need to identify the reason the teen procrastinates. If they are doing so out of anxiety or perfectionism, or if they have attention- or learning-related difficulties, procrastinating will only make things harder for them. For these teens, the underlying challenges causing them to procrastinate should be addressed.
But for those teens who use procrastination to reach their optimal stress level and get motivated, we can try the following:
- Embrace procrastination. If your teen is generally achieving their goals and seems to be thriving, that means procrastination is working for them. They may experience moments of heightened stress that seem avoidable to you, but that is likely their way of reaching optimal arousal.
- Avoid rescuing them. If we swoop in to help when the teen’s stress level is rising, we ease the pressure they need to perform and bring them back to a suboptimal stress level. In addition, we prevent them from learning to manage and use stress to accomplish tasks in the future.
- When your teen seems bored or unmotivated, help them seek new experiences and opportunities to increase difficulty or responsibility. Bored teens are at increased risk of getting into trouble at school, while appropriately engaged and challenged teens are more likely to thrive.
- When your teen’s stress level appears to be well-managed, reflect on that with them and help to identify what’s working.
- If your teen’s procrastination leads to repeated failure or chronic stress beyond the optimal level, help them identify a healthy timeline for completing tasks, allowing them to feel an optimal level of stress without overdoing it. It’s important to ensure that our teens are not subjecting themselves to extreme or prolonged heightened anxiety levels, which can be severely detrimental to mental and physical health.
Sources:
Shuai Xu. Academic Procrastination in Adolescents: A Brief Review of the Literature. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences. Vol. 10, No. 6, 2021, pp. 198-208.
Human response to stress curve (*according to Nixon P: Practitioner 1979, Yerkes RM, Dodson JD).
Pekrun, R., Hall, N. C., Goetz, T., & Perry, R. P. (2014). Boredom and academic achievement: Testing a model of reciprocal causation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(3), 696–710.
Angie McIntyre, Clear Trails Youth Coaching Angie is a Certified Youth Resilience Coach and Licensed School Psychologist based in the Twin Cities Metro Area. Angie provides virtual and in-person life coaching services to young people ages 13-25, and family coaching to caregivers of children ages 10-13. You can learn more at www.ClearTrails.net email her at angie@ClearTrails.net
