Mindfulness, Procrastination, and Anxiety: Assessing Their Interrelationships

Procrastination is a commonly occurring phenomenon that can significantly impact a person's well-being and physical health. A significant need exists to identify variables that confer risk or hold potential to treat procrastination. Thus, we aimed to (a) investigate the web of relations among procrastination, anxiety, and mindfulness and (b) explore the contribution of candidate variables of potential relevance beyond anxiety in predicting procrastination. To address our primary aim, we performed a structural equation model (SEM) analysis in a college sample (N = 801; male = 550, female = 246, other = 5) to investigate whether five facets of mindfulness (i.e., nonreactivity, nonjudging, observing, describing, and acting with awareness) attenuate procrastination via decreasing anxiety. Regarding indirect effects, anxiety mediated the relation between procrastination and all facets of mindfulness, except for observing. In terms of direct effects, greater acting with awareness and observing were most closely associated with lower procrastination. To explore our secondary aim, we used forward stepwise regression to investigate the unique contribution of variables of potential relevance beyond mindfulness and anxiety in predicting procrastination. This analysis revealed that anxiety, conscientiousness, behavioral avoidance, social desirability, neuroticism, and mindfulness significantly accounted for variance in procrastination while controlling for a variety of other variables (i.e., emotion dysregulation, depression, negative affect, and acceptance). Finally, we discuss (a) the implications of our findings for procrastination treatment, (b) the limitations of our study, and (c) future research directions.