With summer quickly approaching, many of us long to spend time outside in the sun rather than be trapped indoors finishing their work. School is nearly out, the sun is shining bright and the thought of being outside makes our day better. But if you're similar to me, then you tend to take in the time outdoors and forget about your responsibilities for just a couple of hours. Unfortunately, the longer I push things from my mind, the less time I have to complete my tasks, which can begin to take a toll on my mental health. For many people, procrastination is the act of postponing something but if you happen to chronically postpone something, you may end up developing some side effects.

You might ask yourself, what side effects will I develop if I continuously procrastinate? Stress, lack of sleep, increased anxiety are a couple I could name but beyond those side effects, the act of procrastination can actually damage your lifestyle. With time, you develop an unbreakable habit of putting tasks aside and make something that isn't a priority something necessary. We all are guilty of doing this.

Whenever you have to study for an exam, write an essay or actually put together a presentation for class and work, we tend to turn to media as an outlet for the "stress" but actually, we use media to create a distraction from the approaching deadline. The moment that we begin doing this, the habit develops and eventually we end up getting stuck in a never ending cycle. Eventually, we begin to work on our tasks, but we begin to stress about meeting our deadline and it may actually cause us to stay up until the task is complete.

Even though breaking the habit of procrastinating might be difficult, there are a couple of things we need to do to make sure the side effects don't damage our mental health, whether it be taking on smaller tasks to decrease the amount of stress or keep yourself away from the temptations of distractions to keep yourself from creating anxiety. Hopefully, with time, we all learn from our mistakes and the bad habits we developed will be broken. Until then, procrastinators unite!