A study of more than 65,000 young people has concluded that procrastination is the single biggest threat to university students' academic performance, beating out ADHD, anxiety and financial worries for the top spot. Nearly half of those surveyed named procrastination as the thing damaging their ability to do academic work - more than twice the number who named depression - while the same proportion said it caused them significant distress above any other problem, including family pressures or bullying.

Itamar Shatz, the study's author and an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge, said he expected the survey of US students to show some harm from procrastination, but was surprised by just how strongly it hit them. "Pretty much all of us procrastinate but it's not a huge impediment for all of us," he said. "For the people that it is, it can be huge." He noted it isn't just an occasional nuisance but "a major obstacle" that can interfere with academic success and workplace success, cause issues in relationships, cause stress, cause health issues, and stop people reaching out for help.

The study, published in the journal Plos One, also suggests procrastination can fuel a "vicious cycle" that causes or exaggerates other issues such as stress. "An example of such a feedback loop is a student procrastinating on a task, which causes them to feel stressed, which interferes with their sleep, which causes them to procrastinate on the task further," the study said - a sentence that will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone reading this instead of doing their actual work.

Fuschia Sirois, a psychology professor at Durham University and co-editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Health Psychology, who was not involved in the study, said the topic has been researched for almost 30 years, with the first studies on procrastination's impact on health and wellbeing conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s. "So this is an issue for which there is an established evidence base that clearly highlights the negative impact of procrastination on students' lives," she said. She called the new paper a useful descriptive study with a large sample that offers additional insight into the relative impact of procrastination's range of harms - but cautioned it is "just a snapshot, so limits the conclusions we can draw."

Sirois added that myths about procrastination "being a character flaw" have persisted despite the existing research. "People procrastinate to avoid the difficult emotions associated with a task, which affords them short-term mood repair. But in the long run the feelings of guilt, shame and stress from procrastinating catch up to them and take a toll on health and wellbeing," she said.

Shatz, who has recently published a guide to overcoming procrastination, said procrastination should not be confused with laziness, because procrastinators can often be highly motivated to tackle a task only to be derailed by other distractions such as perfectionism or burn-out. He added that universities should be aware many of their students are likely to be hampered by procrastination. "They should understand that procrastination isn't just a time management flaw that they can fix with a flyer, but it is one of the biggest obstacles that students face and needs to be treated with positive interventions," he said. "The good thing is that research shows that interventions can help."