There are several areas where your life can be affected by procrastination.  It can affect you in your working life, both your mental and physical health and in your relationships with other people.

How It Affects You In Your Work

If you constantly procrastinate at work it can adversely affect your overall performance through missed deadlines or targets and have a detrimental effect on your productivity.  This may be due to your belief that you are incapable of completing a task or project, so you delay starting it, rather than start it at the right time and then fail to complete it. However, by not starting the task or project on time it will only increase your chances of failure rather than decrease them.

Procrastination is sometimes caused by self-handicapping and is used as a defense mechanism because it’s easier to blame your procrastination habit for the failure than blame your own abilities.

Consistently underperforming can ruin your chances of career advancement, and can even place you at risk of losing your job.

Higher levels of procrastination have been associated with areas where there are lower salaries, shorter periods of employment or a higher likelihood of redundancy.

When you wait until the last minute to make a decision, your decision-making will be poor since you will be under pressure to make the decision before time runs out. Your emotions can heavily influence the decisions that you make and as procrastination can increase your negative emotions this can result in the decisions that you have made not serving you well in the future.

Procrastination can also result in you missing out on future opportunities and slowing down your progress towards achieving your dreams or goals. You may even end up having your dreams dashed altogether.

It is often believed that procrastination is just laziness when in fact it is more complex than that and can be as a result of other underlying factors such as anxiety or fear of failure.

You may even experience feelings of guilt or regret caused by your procrastination or become discouraged when a colleague gets the promotion or salary raise that you wanted.  

In turn this can cause you to loose your self-esteem, self-confidence and motivation, which can lead to a vicious cycle of increased procrastination and decreased motivation.  When you suffer from low self-esteem it can make you doubt yourself and your abilities even more, and even begin to self-sabotage your possibilities for success because you feel that you are unworthy of attaining the success that you seek.

Studies have shown that people regret the things that they haven’t done far more than the things that they have done.

How It Can Affect Your Relationships

In your relationships with other people a partner can feel unimportant, undervalued and ignored if you constantly break any promises or agreements that you have made with them, or avoid having those discussions with them around how each of you are feeling. Your partner might not feel as if they are part of the team, if you are frequently putting them off, and a strong sense of teamwork is absolutely vital for a healthy relationship.

If unresolved this can put a strain on your relationship and over time will grow into an underlying issue in the relationship after being together for several years.  It may lead to lack of trust or even resentment from your partner if they have been continually let down because they feel that they can no longer rely on you.

When a relationship breaks down it can cause a decline in your motivation to change your behaviour, and make you feel discouraged believing that any action towards a reconciliation will be futile and irretrievable as far as your partner is concerned.

Your relationships with people at work or in the local community can also suffer.  When you fail to follow through with things you have promised to do, or worse end up not doing them at all, it can damage your reputation as no one likes to be the one on the receiving end of empty promises.

Eventually people will stop relying on you and in some cases they may even offer you fewer opportunities if they believe that you will procrastinate, and they will end up having to do it themselves.

Depression, low self-esteem and high anxiety levels can all affect how you interact with others, especially your closest ones.  You can lose quality time with your children when you procrastinate and you may inadvertently instill your procrastination habits on them if they see you putting things off and end up following your lead.

How It Can Affect Your Health

Procrastination can affect both your physical and mental health in many ways.

Putting off tasks and then rushing to complete them at the last minute can increase the cortisol levels in your body.  This is the hormone that is produced in your body at times of stress and is associated with your body’s fight or flight response, which can in turn increase your stress levels.

The presence of high levels of cortisol in your bloodstream, for extended periods of time, can cause hypertension, more commonly known as high blood pressure, and a blood sugar imbalance such as hyperglycemia.

It can also lead to your immune system being impaired and a slow down your body’s natural ability to heal itself.

Stress, anxiety or overwhelm can all contribute to disrupting your sleeping habits.  Your tendency to procrastinate may result in sleep insufficiency, which can lead to a cycle of procrastination and sleep deprivation.

Results of a study on Procrastination and ill-health have shown that Procrastinators are more likely to delay seeking support or treatment on health-related issues.  They are also less likely to engage in wellness activities such as regular exercise, mindfulness, or meditation, that could help to reduce their stress and anxiety levels.

Stress can make you more susceptible to becoming depressed if you put off doing something because it is too difficult.

If you then continue thinking about the task you have delayed, rather than dealing with it, your depression can get worse. 

When depressed, you may find it difficult to make plans because you might feel intimidated or overwhelmed by the task, and could worry that you may not be able to complete it when the time comes.