Studying is arguably the most important skill to have in college. Your ability to study textbooks and written notes after classes and before exams determines how well you perform as a college student. Although every single one of us has attended nearly twelve years of schooling before college, most of us never developed great study habits. This blog post will follow my own person struggles through college, how I’ve managed to improve myself and my studying habits and offer advice and inspiration to those of you who also might also be struggling.
If you’re anything like me, you rarely studied in high school, if you even studied at all. For many of us, studying didn’t have as much of an impact on our high school career as we like to think. We breezed through school, leaving us with inadequate study skills, poor stress management, no self-discipline, and generally feeling lost as a college student. My goals for this semester were to identify what exactly my problem was, to improve my study habits and learn how to motivate myself to get my work done.
I’ve recently read Kelly McGonigal’s book The Willpower Instinct, which was described by USA Today as “the solution for the chronically slothful”. I procrastinate to the extreme and I am a very lazy person, so “chronically slothful” is very fitting. It’s not something I’m proud of and it’s not an attractive personality trait. I have a difficult time starting an assignment or starting to study because I know it takes a lot of effort and energy that I’m too lazy to muster up. I usually avoid all of my work until the very last possible minute. Obviously, this is a bad habit, I don’t learn anything, and I end up with horrible grades. So, why am I like this? Why do I procrastinate knowing it always ends up hurting me?
In McGonigal’s book, she introduces the idea of a “discount rate” of future rewards. A “low discount rate” indicates someone’s ability to keep the big long-term reward in mind and not give in to immediate temptations. Other people, admittedly like myself, have a very high discount rate. This means people have a very difficult time resisting immediate gratification. A real-life example of these discount rates is shown in Walter Mischel’s 1960’s experiment where four-year-old kids were given the option of having one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in fifteen minutes if they waited. The kids who failed to wait patiently were the ones who sat and stared at the marshmallow the entire time. The kids who succeeded in waiting fifteen minutes were the ones who stopped looking at it and stopped thinking about it as an instant reward.
What exactly does this mean and how does it relate to us as college students? In short, this was a test to see how well someone can handle temporary discomfort to accomplish a long-term goal. How much do you value your happiness today over your happiness tomorrow?
You’re not alone if you think your happiness right now is more important than your happiness tomorrow. We all think that at times, and we all push off certain tasks until tomorrow because we want to be comfortable right now.
I am guilty of wanting to be comfortable right now, relax today and putting everything off until tomorrow. However, the bigger arises when tomorrow comes and the cycle repeats. I still don’t feel like it, I’ll just start on it tomorrow. Why would I want to start a paper when I could shop online or watch Netflix? Both of those sound way more interesting than homework. In order to stop this cycle of putting off my work, I decided to find a website, like Stickk.com, that forced me to pay charities or anti-charities every time I fail to accomplish my set goals.
In the beginning, I chose to only donate one dollar to an anti charity, an organization I don’t support, every time I fail to study. This made me want to accomplish my goals so much more than usual and I felt very successful and proud when I did study. As time passed and I began to feel unmotivated and lazy again, I increased the dollar amount of my donations to double my motivation. Nobody wants to lose money, fail their goals, and give their money to an organization they don’t even support. So far, this has been a complete success, maybe because I don’t have that much money in the first place and I need money to eat and live, so I am completely focused on saving my money.
If betting money against yourself doesn’t sound like something that would be effective for you, or just not something you are willing to do, you can improve your study habits and increase your motivation in many other ways.
If the cycle of putting off your work until tomorrow is a cycle you’ve found yourself caught in, here’s something to remember: just because you’re tired today, doesn’t mean you’ll have the energy to do it all tomorrow. In fact, the more work you put off for “tomorrow”, the less likely you are to start it. A flaw in this rationalization of putting it off until tomorrow is thinking that we will have more energy, more time, more motivation than we do right now. We are all guilty of treating our future selves as a complete stranger. The future version of you always has more energy, more time, more motivation, and therefore we decide this future version of us will always be the better option to do our work. As someone who really struggled with this, I had no idea how to stop until I read McGonigal’s book. A strategy that might help is to sit down and write a letter to your future self.
Writing a letter to myself seemed to make me realize and come to terms with who I was becoming as a person and where I was going. For me, this strategy was successful because it made me realize that I really am ashamed of myself for letting my grades drop so low and being a disappointment to myself and my parents. When I receive a letter from myself in a year, I believe there will be a major difference in my behavior and overall character. This action helped me realize I was torturing myself by putting everything off. I was isolating myself from my friends, from the gym, from having any fun at all. I would isolate myself for entire days and nights trying to get work done that I had pushed off and avoided until the very last minute, effectively sabotaging my mood, my friendships and my overall health.
For my entire first and second years in college, I was isolating myself. I didn’t have any friends and I was stagnant in my academic career. I didn’t know how to study, where to study, what to study. I was enrolled in the University Exploration program for the entire allotted time of five semesters and still wasn’t ready to make a decision on a major until recently. I was defeated, I was alone, and I wasn’t even sure I belonged in college anymore- or if I even wanted to be here anymore.
It’s safe to say my life was taking a very dark turn that I know I would have regretted in the future. The most important and the most successful study strategy I have come across this semester was introduced to me through The Willpower Instinct. In chapter eight, McGonigal states that willpower is infectious, and goals are contagious. Humans are meant to interact and connect with other humans. By using the terms “infectious” and “contagious”, McGonigal simply means that thinking about how other people are persevering, or being in a social group, will inspire you to act upon your goals more effectively than you would have acted upon them when you were alone. Find a study partner, find someone with a similar goal to you and work together to motivate each other. McGonigal used research to prove how you can “catch” another person’s goals in a way that changes your behavior. Social influence affects your motivation and I highly recommend finding someone to hold you accountable or to help encourage you to get your work done. In my case, I asked a classmate to email me every once in a while and ask me if I had accomplished the goals that I had planned for the week.
I chose to do this because I realized being alone and only depending on myself to get my work don’t obviously isn’t working. Because the human brain is hardwired to find social interaction extremely important, the fact that someone else knew that my goals were and would probably be disappointed in me if they found out I hadn’t done anything, was unbearable. I really enjoyed having someone check in on my progress because it held me accountable and made me proud of talking about the work I’ve done.
Of course, there will always be obstacles in the way. Making an account on some website is not going to automatically make you want to study for three hours every day. I know from personal experience how difficult it is to overcome the overwhelmed feeling that makes you want lay in bed and watch television all day. The biggest piece of advice I can give is this: you are not alone. You are not the only person struggling. I highly recommend finding someone to study with. When you are tempted to stop working, take a step back, take a deep breath and remember what your long-term goal is. The insights I have gained from this book that will continue to be important is how important and necessary it is to engage in social interaction with people who have similar goals and aspiration as you. I highly recommend joining clubs, to meet people and find friends or study partners.