School teachers experience enough drudgery in their jobs, from work outside the occupational setting to the tedious nature of non-teaching activities. All these tasks and stress experienced due to such workload leads to a sense of dissatisfaction among school teachers working in private sector, may get worse when these factors cause them to procrastinate on their health promoting behaviors such as exercising and taking healthy diet. The present study attempts to investigate health related procrastination among school teachers working in private sector, and how this tendency to delay health promoting behaviors mediates between the occupational stress experienced and their subjective wellbeing. In this study, 201 teachers working in private schools responded on the measures of health-related procrastination, occupational stress, satisfaction with life, and PANAS. The data were analyzed employing correlation analysis, stepwise regression and mediation were performed.
The results indicated that occupational stress was positively and significantly associated with exercise and healthy diet procrastination. It was also found to have positive correlation with negative affect and a negative correlation with positive affect. However, no significant relationship was found between occupational stress and life satisfaction. Similarly, neither exercise procrastination nor healthy diet procrastination were significantly correlated with satisfaction with life, but both of them were found to be associated negatively with positive affect and positively with negative affect. Further, in stepwise regression analysis the occupational stress was emerged as best predictor of positive and negative affectivity whereas, procrastinating on healthy diet consumption emerged as best predictor of negative affectivity. Finally, the exercise and healthy diet procrastination mediated the relationship between occupation stress and negative affect. Thus, the findings revealed that procrastinating on health behaviors can lead to poor positive affect and increased negative affect. However, it does not influence the satisfaction of life among school teacher working in private sectors.