The negative emotions and emotion regulation procrastination cycles
Emotions such as anxiety, fear, and doubt are procrastination cycles. In most cases, this type of cycle can occur when you are scared of performing badly on a task, so they delay getting started, which makes them do badly in reality. It makes you afraid of doing badly on similar tasks, which increases the chances that you will procrastinate again on similar tasks for the same reason in the future.
Similarly, this type of cycle can happen when you postpone working on a task, which causes you to feel negative emotions such as shame or guilt, which makes them likely to keep postponing the task because they are bothered that engaging with it will make them feel worse when they discover how much time they’ve wasted.
This type of cycle can be triggered by emotions such as:
- Depression [1]
- Anxiety [2]
- Stress [3]
- Fear of failure or negative evaluation
- Perfectionism
- Pessimism
- Self-doubt
- Self-criticism
- Self-blame
- Low self-compassion
- Low self-efficacy
- Low self-confidence
- Task aversion.