I didn’t visit a dentist for years in my 20s. I periodically considered setting up an appointment but relocated so frequently that it never quite happened. When, after years of procrastination, I finally wound up in the dentist’s chair, I had racked up a small mountain of dental bills.
My teeth, and pocketbook, may never fully recover. But there’s good news for young adults prone to putting things off: Procrastination, defined as the tendency to delay an intended action despite expecting to be worse off for that delay, tends to decline with age, researchers report January 15 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Though procrastination can be