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A college education is a life-changing experience, but nobody said it was easy.

On top of all the studying, you need to make sure you get enough sleep, figure out how to block distractions, and find ways to handle academic stress.

Even if you do all that, let’s face it, thinking is hard.

But if you ask college students about the challenges they face, one particular problem seems to overshadow all those other issues – and it’s an internal struggle that basically anybody can relate to.

In a new study in PLOS One, social scientist Itamar Shatz from the University of Cambridge analyzed survey responses from over 65,000 college students at almost 100 academic institutions across the US.

Students were asked whether they had experienced problems or challenges with various types of issues in the last 12 months, with the survey specifically questioning them about 36 different kinds of life-related and health-related issues.

The results showed a strong pattern.

Students indicated the biggest issue causing problems with their academic performance was procrastination, with 45.4 percent of the survey respondents saying procrastination affected their academic results, followed by stress (36.6 percent), anxiety (30.4 percent), sleep difficulties (22 percent), and depression (20 percent).

Procrastination was also identified as the most common cause of significant distress compared to other life issues, with the tendency affecting 45.7 percent of students, which was higher than academic issues (38.9 percent), personal appearance (31.8 percent), finances (30.8 percent), and career (29.6 percent).

Among all the 36 issues raised with students, procrastination was effectively tied with stress as the most prevalent issue overall, reported by 72.3 percent and 73.8 percent of respondents, respectively. Stress was marginally more common, but Shatz says the figures were close enough to be considered a functional tie.

While procrastination had the biggest impact across all students, Shatz notes that its top ranking partly reflects how common it is. When each issue was measured only among the students who had it, procrastination wasn’t always the one most likely to affect academic performance.

One exception was ADHD, which 12.9 percent of respondents overall reported as affecting their academic performance. Among students who experienced ADHD, 64.1 percent said it affected their academic performance, compared to 62.7 percent of students who experienced procrastination.

But ADHD ranked lower overall because far fewer students reported it (20.2 percent, compared with 72.3 percent for procrastination).

It’s also worth acknowledging that many of the issues students were asked about overlap with others, and may even feed one another.

“Stress, for instance, was a top issue, but procrastination was a top cause of distress, and procrastination itself can be caused or exacerbated by this and other issues, like anxiety and lack of sleep,” Shatz explains.

“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.”

On top of that, a survey like this can only give us a collection of people’s self-reported judgments, and it doesn’t actually measure or track how each problem affects students’ actual grades.

But despite the limitations of the study, there’s a very clear signal here that procrastination is the most widely reported obstacle to academic performance among college students, and that’s a signal we ought to pay attention to.

“It may be insufficient to simply think of procrastination as a big issue among students,” Shatz writes.

“Rather, it seems plausible that procrastination is the biggest issue on average, at least in terms of its impact on students’ academic performance.”

The effects of the problem may extend well after graduation, too, with research suggesting procrastination could ultimately have a marked effect on people’s careers and income levels.

A 2013 study on procrastination in the workplace found that each one-point increase on a five-point procrastination scale was linked to approximately US$15,000 less income on average, with researchers suggesting that procrastination could be the most important personality trait linked with income (though perhaps second to agreeableness).

“This, in turn, suggests that the harmful effects of procrastination persist after students finish their schooling,” Shatz explains, “whether because students’ academic struggles interfered with their ability to get certain roles in a competitive job market, because procrastination continues to interfere with graduates’ ability to advance in the workplace, or because of some other combination of mechanisms.”

The findings are reported in PLOS One.