It’s Sunday night— past the time you should be sleeping so you can wake up on time and refreshed for school the next morning. But you can’t go to sleep yet— you still have all of your homework left to do. You’ve had days to finish it, but you never found the time or you were always distracted or maybe you just did not want to do it.  All of your stress and anxiety is building up. Why? Because you waited until the last minute to complete your work.

Most students at one point or another in their lives have procrastinated, or put off doing their work until the last minute. A study from the Huffington Post shows that at about 85% of high school students procrastinate.

Procrastination may sometimes seem like the easy way out at the time because it’s easy to promise yourself to do it all the next day. But it all catches up to you in the end.

A professor at Ohio State, Bruce Tuckman held an experiment to see how procrastination affects college students. His studies proved that students who procrastinated more often get the lower grades and their averages dropped as low as a 2.9 out of 4.0.

Not only does procrastination negatively affect your grades, but it also hurts your health. Anybody who’s ever waited until the last minute to do all their work knows the stress and anxiety that comes along with it.

“Procrastination only increases your stress and not only the mental effects of anxiety, but it brings the physical consequences as well,” a psychology teacher in MHS, Ms. Catherine Citrano, said.

Sometimes it’s a conscious choice to put off work, but other times it’s just a careless mistake. Yet, the reason why doesn’t change how you’re affected by it.

“I have no self-control,” junior, Wendy Roque said. “…there’s tv shows and Netflix, and I tell myself ‘I’ll just do it later.’”

There are ways to turn yourself around. If you can learn to avoid procrastinating than you’ll be able to take some stress off yourself.

“Break up the task into smaller parts,” Ms. Citrano said. “Psychologic tests show that when you complete each small task at a time you motivate yourself more and retain more of the information.”

Students already stress over things that are out of their control; try to avoid doing the same for something you can change. The best thing you can do to avoid procrastination is to plan out some work to do each day. That way the workload doesn’t seem as heavy and it will get done on time for its due date!

5 Tips on how to avoid procrastination

1. Break down the work into smaller tasks
2. Isolate yourself from your phone, tv, computer, etc.
3. Make a to-do list of everything you need to do.
4. Set goals
5. Stop putting it off and just get it done!