Personality and Individual Differences

In our daily life, health-promoting behaviour, such as sporting activity, plays a crucial role for a healthy and happy life. While self-compassion might be an important supporting variable in order to be active, procrastination might hinder such positive behaviour. Yet, the relationship between these two variables and their possibly interacting impact on health-promoting behaviour has not been investigated to date. Therefore, our present study focusses on this relationship by surveying 255 participants about self-compassion, procrastination and their planned and actual sporting activity over 6 weeks. Overall, there was a higher discrepancy between planned and actual sporting activity in high procrastinators as opposed to low procrastinators. Interestingly, this effect was modulated by self-compassion. Participants with high self-compassion manage to realize their sport plans even if they indicate high sports procrastination. These results not only illustrate the negative impact of domain-specific procrastination on specific health behaviours, but also point to a solution in the sense of self-compassion. Thus, they represent an important contribution to underline the importance of interventions to increase self-compassion. • Procrastination has a negative impact on different life-domains such as health • Procrastinators plan fewer weekly sporting activities and implement their plans less • Self-compassion fosters the implementation of health-related intentions • Self-compassion helps to overcome procrastination and conduct planned activities

Self-compassion moderates the influence of procrastination on postponing sporting activity