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Universidad CEU San Pablo receives our new international students
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Aula You First, CEU’s commitment to employability
3 February, 2023
Universidad CEU San Pablo receives our new international students
10 February, 2023

Procrastinating; a practice detrimental to the health of graduates

Procrastinating means voluntarily delaying something that has to be done even knowing that later it will be worse due to the delay and guilt. This phenomenon is more common in young people especially in university students because they have high levels of freedom and low organizational structure which imposes high demands to their self-regulation capacity falling in procrastination in multiple occasions.

A study carried out by mental health experts of the University of Sophiahemmet in Sweden had as main objective the assessment of the connection between procrastination and subsequent health results among university students in Sweden. They wanted to verify whether procrastination was related to depression, anxiety and stress as well as with loneliness and reduction of life satisfaction or general problems of physical health.

This research published in the science magazine ‘JAMA Network Open‘, has studied procrastination in a sample of 3,500 students at three different times in order to assess whether such act was related to worse health results.

Researchers chose the participating sample from data of the study Sustainable University Life which carried out a one-year follow-up of Swedish university students through online surveys. This recent study chose a set of participants from different disciplines although it was limited to Swedish universities.

After reference tests students were surveyed at three different times including the ninth month which represented a full academic year. Researchers considered that such period was “appropriate for procrastination to express its potential associations with different health results”.

During the research scientists discovered that although feeble, there were links between procrastination and poor mental, physical and financial health. Although intervention could not largely impact on general results of the health of students, researchers declare that it could alleviate “small associations”.