Now that everyone is trudging home from spring break, we're finding it hard to acclimatize back to the boring reality of work and school. Here are 5 tips to help you adjust to normal life and become a functioning member of society again.

1. Hang out with your friends

A lot of times you come back from break feeling a little depressed, sad that the week of fun is over. The best way to cure it is to hang out with your friends, or go out and do things. That’ll alleviate the feeling of grayness you get when you have to go back to your normal routine. Talking to other people is always an excellent distraction, as it requires you to be mentally engaged in order to keep up. So go out, catch up with people you know, ask them how their break went. Your relationships will be better for it too.

2. Do your homework

Its really easy to just ignore your work until the last moment because you don’t feel like doing it, especially when you’re trapped in the cycle of post-break procrastination, but I promise you’ll thank yourself when you don’t have to finish that essay at 2 in the morning. The week after spring break is always kind of like an extremely concentrated form of senioritis, and if you’re not careful you’ll find yourself slipping faster than you can catch back up.

3. Don't sleep too much

This one might seem a bit weird, but I promise it’ll help. If you’re anything like me, the longer you sleep in, the less you’ll want to get up. It’s important to get back on a healthy sleeping schedule, because it really does impact both your performance in school and your emotional state. If you keep to a weird sleeping schedule, its highly likely that you’ll end up being wide awake really late at night and then crashing mid-day, which obviously isn’t good when attending classes.

4. Don't skip class

You’ll want to, and it’ll be hard to resist the temptation of just staying in bed, but you have to make yourself get up and go. Otherwise you’ll just end up putting more work on yourself in the future when you have to make up assignments you missed. You’ll end up being even more stressed out, and it could affect how you do the rest of the semester, especially if you miss lessons that are important for you to be in class for.

5. Do things that make you happy

Like I said before, hang out with friends, go out and do things, be active. It might be worth it to go sit in the sun with a good book and just bask, or go shopping. Whatever usually cures your blues with work just fine on your post-break depression. Distraction is key, but an important thing to remember is that you can't be happy all the time, and if you try to be continuously happy you'll only end up disappointed. Happiness is not a constant state, wholeness is, and it is whole that you should strive to be. Happiness will always follow.