Procrastination emerges as top threat to student academic success, study finds

When Itamar Shatz set out to survey more than 65,000 American university students about what was holding back their academic work, he expected procrastination to rank high on the list of obstacles. What surprised him was how thoroughly it dominated. Nearly half of the students named procrastination as the primary force damaging their ability to study and complete assignments—a proportion more than double those who cited depression, and larger still than those pointing to anxiety, ADHD, financial strain, family pressure, or bullying.

The findings, published in the journal Plos One, reveal procrastination not as a minor character flaw or a time-management quirk but as a major structural problem in student life. The same proportion of students who identified procrastination as their biggest academic threat also reported it as their most significant source of distress—outweighing other stressors that universities typically focus on when discussing student wellbeing.

Shatz, an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge, explained the mechanism plainly: procrastination is not universal in its impact. Most people delay tasks occasionally without serious consequence. But for those it does affect, the damage runs deep and wide. "It's not just something we occasionally run into," he said, "but it can be a major obstacle. It's an obstacle that can interfere with academic success, with success in the workplace, it can cause issues in relationships, it can cause stress, it can cause health issues and stop us reaching out for help."

The study identifies what researchers call a vicious cycle: a student puts off an assignment, which triggers stress. That stress disrupts their sleep. Poor sleep makes them more likely to procrastinate further on the same task. The loop tightens. What begins as delay becomes a compounding problem that feeds into itself, generating the very conditions that make work harder to start.

Fuschia Sirois, a psychology professor at Durham University and co-editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Health Psychology, noted that procrastination research has accumulated for nearly three decades, with early studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s already documenting its toll on health and wellbeing. Yet a persistent myth endures: that procrastination is simply laziness, a character flaw that reflects motivation or discipline. Sirois pushed back against this framing. People procrastinate, she explained, not because they lack drive but because they're trying to escape the difficult emotions a task triggers. Delaying provides short-term mood relief. But that relief is temporary. The guilt, shame, and stress that accumulate afterward exact a longer and heavier price on mental and physical health.

Shatz emphasized that procrastination should not be confused with laziness because procrastinators are often highly motivated—they simply get derailed by other forces: perfectionism, burnout, competing distractions. The distinction matters because it changes how universities should respond. If procrastination were merely a time-management problem, a flyer or a workshop on scheduling would suffice. But if it's a deeper behavioral and emotional pattern affecting nearly half of students, it demands something more substantial.

Shatz called on universities to recognize procrastination as one of the biggest obstacles their students face and to invest in targeted interventions designed to address it. The encouraging news, he noted, is that research demonstrates such interventions can work. The challenge now is whether institutions will treat procrastination with the seriousness the data suggests it deserves.