Our ‘Spotlight on’ feature showcases the work of our world-leading academics. Professor Fuschia Sirois, in our Department of Psychology, is pioneering a more compassionate approach to understanding the risk and resilience factors that shape health and wellbeing.
Fuschia investigates why some habits undermine health and happiness, and which strengths help people to thrive.
She studies risk factors such as procrastination, perfectionism, loneliness and coping styles, alongside resilience factors including self-compassion, gratitude and a constructive ‘future focus’.
Her research treats physical and mental health as fundamentally connected, asking how improving emotional regulation and self-regulation can benefit both.
One of Fuschia’s most defining contributions to the field of psychology has been reframing understanding of procrastination.
Since procrastination is irrational, Fuschia reasoned that it must be driven by a need to avoid negative emotions associated with a task.
In an influential paper in 2013 with colleague Timothy Pychyl, Fuschia argued that procrastination is not a time-management failure but a means of managing short-term negative feelings.
It was an insight that has gone on to shape wider research, practice and public understanding of procrastination.
The research also had practical consequences – offering new insight to help guide solutions for procrastination.
Fuschia is committed to developing effective, compassionate solutions. She has established evidence-based tools that emphasise kindness over self-criticism, helping people focus on achievable steps forward.
As well as a self-help book published in 2022, Fuschia has created the TEMPO Toolkit – which stands for ‘Taming Emotions to Manage Procrastination Open-heartedly’.
TEMPO integrates proven strategies for emotional regulation and future-focused thinking. The free toolkit focuses on compassion and helps anyone who struggles with procrastination find effective ways to manage the shame and other negative emotions that drive procrastination and recognise they are not alone.
Despite now being a leading psychologist, Fuschia began her career studying biochemistry and nutrition in Canada. This initial grounding in how the body works continues to inform Fuschia’s research on health behaviours and wellbeing.
Fuschia went on to advanced study and research in psychology and served as a Canada Research Chair in Health and Wellbeing before joining Durham in 2022.
Throughout this time, Fuschia has been passionate about communicating her work. For her, there is a responsibility to share her findings in a way that can help others.
From community courses in psychology to media interviews and podcasts, Fuschia is skilled at sharing her ‘positive psychology’ approach to enhancing health and well-being.
An article in the UK newspaper The Guardian in October 2025 featuring her work generated thousands of responses from people eager to learn more and use the TEMPO toolkit.
Launching the TEMPO toolkit is an exciting focus for Fuschia in 2026. Currently TEMPO is being translated to Dutch to help distance learners in the Netherlands. She is also looking at developing a TEMPO version focusing on financial procrastination - helping people tackle everything from managing subscriptions to long-term financial planning.
She is also exploring procrastination’s physiological dimensions through collaborations using virtualreality scenarios and physiological measures.
The aim is to understand whether people who struggle with chronic procrastination experience stress responses differently. If so, could this make challenging situations more aversive and drive avoidance behaviours further? This insight could inform more precise, personalised support.
Fuschia embodies Durham’s ethos of encouraging curiosity, interdisciplinarity and research with real-world impact.
Her work brings bold ideas and helps reframe widely held assumptions.
She is shifting the narrative of procrastination from “laziness” to an understandable emotional difficulty.
Her research demonstrates that procrastination is not a character flaw but a coping mechanism that emerges when emotional resources are depleted.
Importantly, Fuschia’s work offers hope to anyone who is struggling, to achieve their aspirations through tools that empower people to make meaningful, healthy changes.
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