How often do you find yourself desperately struggling to finish an assignment the night before its due, or curse yourself for wasting time looking at cat videos instead of working, or crying out “If only I had started sooner, and not watched all those meme compilations, this wouldn’t have happened!” For many undergraduate students, the answer is “too often.” Well, the good news is you’re not alone (or is that bad news?). 80 to 95% of undergraduate students say they have issues with procrastination, and about half of those say they have even worse problems because of continuous procrastination. The other bad news is the fairly obvious relationship that procrastination has with academic failure.
Getting distracted is easy. In fact, your more likely to wait until the last minute to do something when its something you think is going to be unenjoyable or unpleasant. And let’s face it, who thinks its fun to study? Students don’t do it because they like it, they do it because they have to. Enter: cat videos. The internet is a boundless ocean of other stuff to do, and when you don’t want to be doing something that sucks, it's very easy to get lost at sea. Especially when there are sharks in those waters with teeth that were algorithmically sharpened to ensnare you.
For some people, possibly you, the problem goes deeper than the occasional dive into the Bay of Funny-Cat-Video-Collection-#14. In North America around 8% of us are severely addicted to the internet, and that number is only on the rise (Cheng & Li, 2014). Internet addiction has been linked to a myriad of behavioural and mental health problems: depression, loneliness, and social isolation, just to name a few. And for undergraduate students, it gets worse. Students with internet addiction report having more negative consequences from internet use, both in their daily and academic lives, than their non-addicted peers.
Here’s the thing: there is a strong body of research that demonstrates the negative impact internet addiction has on procrastination. The more addicted you are to the internet, the more likely you are to procrastinate. On top of that, those with more severe cases of internet addiction tend to have lower amounts of self-control and self-esteem. Which means they have a higher tendency of procrastination. More procrastination means less success in school, which means even lower self-esteem. It’s no mystery why internet addiction leads to so many mental health issues. It brings you down and keeps you down.
What can be done to break free of this? Well, the best solution right now is more research, especially in North America. Most of the information we get about internet addiction is from studies done in Asian countries like China, Taiwan, and South Korea. It’s good research, but the problem is we don’t really know if their results can apply to us. There's a big difference in culture, and not everything will translate. We need to know what works here. It’s possible that finding ways to boost self-control and self-esteem will diminish internet addiction symptoms, but there hasn’t been enough research done to say one way or another.
Having a better understanding of this problem can lead to helping those struggling with internet addiction. Less internet addiction means less procrastination, which will (hopefully) mean more successfully educated young adults. Those kids are the life-blood of society, so it's in our interest to help them excel. We can't stop youth from loving cat videos, but this isn't a problem we can leave until tomorrow.
Cheng, C., & Li, A. Y. (2014). Internet addiction prevalence and quality of (real) life: A meta-analysis of 31 nations across seven world regions. Cyberpsychology, behaviour and social networking, 17(12), 755-60.
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