Abstract:

Most people who access higher education feel very positively about having this opportunity, and this favourable evaluation may even contribute to their positive self-concept and well-being; nonetheless, people who have been successful in higher education will attest to the fact that it is an effortful pursuit. Furthermore, the fast-paced and highly competitive modern labour market has been putting pressure on learners, sometimes even beginning at an early age. Under these circumstances, learners might also encounter some experiences that are not entirely positive.

One problematic implication of mental health among students is that various of these can happen in sequences where one adverse mechanism reinforces another. One example is procrastination, one of the aspects that seems hurtful for the individual is that they would like to perform better, but irrationally fail at doing so. This shows that diverse mechanisms leading to well-being and ill-being can be generated or -inversely- can have an impact on the psychological make-up of the individual. It has been argued that stress can be an adaptive response, or that procrastination for some individuals could lead to the excitement of successfully performing in the last minute, however it makes sense to expect that well-being related constructs such as life satisfaction and vitality would form a coherent composite and that ill-being related variables such as depression, anxiety, stress, and procrastination would do something similar.

The present study aimed at describing the self-reported levels of well-being and ill-being of N = 666 students of higher education who reported their levels of satisfaction with life, vitality, procrastination, depression, anxiety, and stress through online self-report questionnaires. The instrument that was utilised included the vitality scale, the satisfaction with life scale, the depression, anxiety and stress scales (DASS-21), and the pure procrastination scale.

Results show that higher education students’ well-being and ill-being have different distributions: while the distribution of well-being variables is more statistically close to a normal curve with a right tail and potentially influenced by desirability, the distribution of depression and anxiety reports, as well as that of insomnia, is very much asymptotic with a high frequency of low values and relatively very little cases with high values, which signals reports of experiencing insomnia, depression and anxiety as closer to a potential clinical diagnosis than stress or procrastination, whose distributions are also closer to a normal curve.

Well-being and ill-being variables correlated in the expected direction in all cases (p < .001), with vitality and life satisfaction correlating > .70 hinting to a close connection between these constructs. Furthermore, depression, anxiety and stress correlated positively with procrastination and ill-being correlated negatively with life satisfaction and vitality.

The results suggest that diverse facets of ill-being that can happen at a psychological level may play parts in sequences in which ill-being is both consequence of ill-being oriented processes such as procrastination, and at the same time cause of ill-being dimensions such as depression. These findings urge educational institutions to design interventions that detect and address these ill-being threats in a timely manner, setting up a system to promote well-being.

Keywords:

Higher education, life satisfaction, vitality, depression, anxiety.