Jadee Shea

Oct. 7, 2022

We all hate that regretful feeling after you procrastinate on an important project and get a big fat F, or when you tell yourself you are gonna exercise today and instead you spend your time watching cooking TikTok’s- even though you can not cook to save your life.

Even if you tell yourself you are going to stop falling into the trap of these harmful habits, it can be tough actually to do it.

How do we break those bad habits?

Tahoma high school journalism teacher Ms. Young says her first step to ditching a bad habit is recognizing that you have a problem. 

“My first step was recognizing that my screen time was way too high, and I started looking up ways to see what else I could be doing with my time.”  Ms. Young says.  

Young shared some valuable advice on how to move on from harmful habits. She stated that you have to understand how it is affecting you negatively.

 “Try to not cut it off cold turkey, but do smaller doses each day,” Young advised.

You should not immediately expect yourself to stop the habit and replace it within minutes, but know that it’s going to take time and patience to completely cut a bad habit off.

Ms. Young says one of the best things to do in order to drop a bad habit is to make sure you are in a good environment for yourself like for instance do not surround yourself with people who expect you to fail or who are not there to help you grow. 

“I surround myself with really motivated people, I try to keep my social life with friends and family with people who all have the same goals as me, I like being around people that are really driven to be the best versions of themselves and I think a lot of that has to do with how we are spending our time,” Young said.

To get insight from a teenage perspective, Tahoma high school student La’Riah Britt-Secord explains her troubles in dropping out of the procrastination habit that we all know too well.

 La’Riah realized she needed to make a change from this habit when her grades started slipping and more F’s were showing up on the papers.

“Last year, when I had mostly F’s in all classes, I realized if I wanted to be something bigger and better then I had to change,” Britt-Secord said.

She also says that her mom was a huge help in her motivation to pursue that change. 

Britt-Secord informs us that it does get easier as time goes on and the way she dealt with her procrastination is by developing a planner to keep track of important things she needed to get done and when they needed to be done. 

It is important that we all know the negative impacts that these unhealthy habits can have on us, not just speaking short-term but also long-term.