Mindfulness can Reduce Procrastinating While Working from Home

Practicing mindfulness, or the conscious awareness of emotions and sensations can lower rates of procrastination and distress, reports a new study. The findings of the study are published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice.// “The sudden and drastic change in the style of working from home may necessitate the use of new work-management strategies, such as the increased practice of mindfulness, to effectively mitigate the problem of loss of productivity due to unwanted procrastination,” said Ashwin Gautam, a graduate research scholar at Binghamton’s Laboratory of Consciousness, Cognition, & Psychopathology.

“Mindfulness can decrease procrastination by lowering the anxiety associated with completing a daunting task,” Gautam said. “By being aware of our anxiety and understanding its effect on triggering unwanted procrastination, one can limit one’s habitual and automatic tendency to procrastinate.”

Gautam, along with Craig Polizzi and Richard E. Mattson, scaled undergraduate students’ levels of anxiety in different scenarios of procrastination. They found a positive correlation between anxiety and procrastination.

“Our findings also implied that anxiety plays a key role in treating procrastination,” Gautam said. “Even being aware of one’s own tendency to put things off until the last minute consistently is enough to lower chronic procrastination to some degree.”

The researchers clarified that mindfulness could be practiced throughout the day. It is merely a matter of being aware of our actions.

“To be mindful is to be consciously aware of two key aspects of the moment – what’s happening in the environment outside and what’s happening within our body and mind,” Gautam said. “We can practice mindfulness at any time by bringing gentle and non-judgmental awareness of our present thoughts, emotions, and action tendencies.”

Source-Newswise