Acceptance-Based Therapy and Procrastination

Glick, D., & Orsillo, S. (2015). An investigation of the efficacy of acceptance-based behavioral therapy for academic procrastination. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(2), 400-409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000050

Procrastination, a problem associated with poorer performance and mental functioning, is widespread among college students. While this issue has persisted for decades, a "gold standard" treatment option has not yet been developed. In the present study, procrastination was viewed as a behavioral manifestation of a trait, rather than a trait characteristic itself. In addition, it was viewed as a discrepancy between the intended and the actual time frame for starting or completing work.

Previous studies have found time management strategies and the development of study skills to improve procrastination; but these studies are all inconsistent in their operationalisation of procrastination and methodology used. Time management strategies, while effective, may not sufficiently target other factors that play a causal or maintaining role in the behavior. For example, procrastination has been found to be associated with anxiety, fear of failure, and problems with emotional regulation.

Recently, it has been proposed that chronic procrastination may result from psychological inflexibility. Psychological inflexibility is defined by six key psychological processes (i.e., the “hexaflex” model: experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion, dominance of the conceptualized past or future, attachment to the conceptualized self, lack of values clarity, and unworkable action/inaction.)

Two studies directly examined the hypothesis that psychological inflexibility might partially account for the relationship between anxiety and procrastination. Their results suggest that attempts to avoid, suppress, or alter anxious thoughts and emotions decreased acceptance of internal experiences and reduced valuing of academic pursuits, which contribute to the prediction of academic procrastination over and above that predicted by anxiety alone. Thus, procrastination may result from one’s response to anxiety rather than to the anxiety itself.

The aim of acceptance-based behaviour therapies (ABBT) is to enhance psychological flexibility by decreasing experiential avoidance and encouraging engagement in valued activities, by using the following strategies:

• Psychoeducation: the function of emotions

• Mindfulness: observation of thoughts and feelings as transient experiences

• Values articulation: identification of the areas of life that are most personally meaningful

Individuals are encouraged to view their painful thoughts and emotions as natural, transient responses that can be observed and allowed instead of self-defining experiences that direct behavior. ABBT has been shown to be effective in the treatment of anxiety, addictive behaviours, chronic pain, and depression. Some examples in its application to procrastination include:

• Encouraging students to view their thoughts and feelings about academic performance as separate from their self-definition and identities

• Reminding students that change involves tolerating uncomfortable emotions

• Asking students to consider how a miracle would change their lives, to help individuals identify their values and become aware of the ways avoidance and procrastination interferes with quality of life

The results from these interventions suggest that there may be benefits to an ABBT-informed procrastination reduction program. To date, there is only one study on ABBT and procrastination, which offered two 90-minute workshops to study participants. Participants reported an increase in psychological flexibility and they indicated that the workshops were beneficial in helping to reduce their procrastination.

The goal of the present study was to develop and test the efficacy of an ABBT-based intervention aimed at reducing academic procrastination. This study compared a time management (TM) intervention to an ABBT intervention for procrastination. A TM program was selected as the comparison condition because it is one of the most frequently used interventions in the literature and is substantially different from the ABBT model.

At the beginning of the semester, students who volunteered for the study were randomly assigned to either the TM intervention or the ABBT intervention and completed an online survey for demographic information and baseline and manipulation checks. They were also provided with a date approximately two thirds of the way into the semester. This date was used to create a behavioral measure of procrastination. Participants were asked to consider their commitments for the semester and report the percentage of the reading that was assigned by the designated date that they should read. A “should" read score (Ideal) was derived by taking the midpoint of the percentage ranges. In order to assess behavioral procrastination, Ideal was divided by the percentage of the assigned reading that the students actually read (Actual;) higher scores reflected more procrastination. Participants then filled out post-intervention questionnaires.

The study had three hypotheses:

• Hypothesis 1: Students in the ABBT intervention condition engage in less self-reported behavioral procrastination than students in the TM condition.

• Hypothesis 2: Because ABBT aims to increase students’ willingness to engage in personally meaningful activities, the effects of the ABBT-intervention are moderated by the extent to which students value academics. Specifically, students in the ABBT condition who more strongly endorse academic values procrastinate less after the intervention than do those who more weakly endorse these values.

• Hypothesis 3: Because the ABBT intervention directly targets the processes thought to underlie anxiety, experiential avoidance, and diminished clarity of values, students in the ABBT intervention show a greater decrease in trait anxiety and experiential avoidance and a greater increase in academic values than do students in the TM intervention.

The results of this study indicate that the opposite of Hypothesis 1 is true, while tests for Hypotheses 2 and 3 did not reveal any statistically significant results.