Procrastination, stress, and sleep in tertiary students

The current study aimed to investigate the relationships between procrastination, sleep and stress using a variety of state, trait and pseudo-behavioural measures across multiple time points. Fifty-four tertiary students at a New Zealand university answered several questionnaires pertaining to their experiences of perceived stress, overall sleep quality and procrastination before downloading the Sleep and Procrastination Application (SPA), recording their habits for two weeks and finally retaking the initial questionnaires. Results showed associations across different measurement methods for all three constructs with cross-method measures of stress being the most reliable and cross-method measures of sleep having the fewest number of intra-associations. Additionally, the self-reported state procrastination measure proved to be the procrastination measurement method with the greatest number of cross-concept correlations. Finally, mediation analyses revealed that perceived stress at Time 2 significantly mediates the relationship between trait procrastination and Time 2 overall sleep quality. However, several other procrastination, sleep and stress mediation models were also shown to be significant. The relationship between procrastination, stress and sleep appears complicated but the results of this study add to the extant literature and provide direction for future research