How to psych yourself for studying

Procrastination can only hurt you. Here, we offer a few tips on how you can beat the P-plague and tackle your tasks as the semester comes to a close.

Tick-tock…tick-tock… It’s exam time again. Whether this is your first final exam period or your last, how you approach the end of the term has consequences for your grades and for your health.

Maybe you’re sitting there thinking that you always wait until the last minute because that’s what a deadline is for. Or you might be of the philosophy that everything gets done at the last minute, that is one definition of the last minute. Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself that your best work is done with a pressing deadline.

Psychologists say you’re wrong.

They offer some compelling evidence. They say they’ve discovered some proven ways to keep you and your studying on track.

In two longitudinal studies, psychologists Dianne M. Tice and Roy F. Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University examined the performance, stress and health effects of procrastination on students and on the quality of students’ work.

They found that students who procrastinate reported lower stress levels and fewer illnesses as semesters began. But when papers came due and exams were scheduled toward the end of the semester, procrastinators reported higher stress levels and more illnesses indeed, they were physically sicker overall than students who didn’t procrastinate.

Procrastinators received lower grades on average than students who did not procrastinate on all assignments.

Although procrastinating yields some short-term benefits, it results in poorer health and, on average, lower grades.

It’s important to note that this research was conducted in a way that does not preclude other causal explanations. For example, students might have simply had poorer studying skills at the beginning of the term and lower grades as a result.

But one thing is clear: procrastination has some really negative associations. Best to avoid it, if it’s not too late.

So how can you avoid procrastinating or, even better, get ahead in your studies?

Professor Patricia Devine at the University of California at Los Angeles studied the relationship between visualization techniques and students’ ability to schedule their schoolwork hours.

The statistics are not impressive. Most students (between 50 and 75 percent) do not start their work “on time.” Even fewer finish “on time.” Devine put students in one of three situations:

   1. Worked as they normally would with no special instructions.
   2. Visualized the attainment of their goals beforehand, including starting and finishing on time.
   3. Visualized each and every step that they would take on the way to beginning and ending on time.

Can you guess which group performed best?

Based on national statistics, we already know that students who studied on their own didn’t start or finish when they hoped they would, and their work was of generally poor quality. So the first group is out.

In some cases students who visualized the attainment of their goals did better. But in other cases they did even worse than the group that had no instructions at all. Psychologists generally refer to such results as “inconclusive.”

But in the third group, members of which visualized their work step-by-step, people were about 20 percent more likely to start on time and twice as likely to finish on time � in fact, about 80 percent finished before their deadline.

The secret: When you visualize each step required to achieve an end result, you are forced to plan and you practically can’t help but get your work done in a timely manner.

Simply visualizing the end result can sometimes make the final goal seem easier to obtain than it really is, and this can lead to unrealistic expectations of the amount of work required to complete a task.

But with the step-by-step visualization method, you can see yourself achieving your goals and you get a solid idea of the effort required to get there. Even hazy, indeterminate visualization helps your brain get ready for the real thing. That kind of preparation can lead to academic success, and to reduced stress as well.

Previous research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (that is, wanting to do something as opposed to feeling that you should or are obligated to) shows that people with intrinsic goals tend to be more self-disciplined, more creative and more pleased with themselves than people with extrinsic goals.

I found that students are more satisfied with their lives when they frame their extrinsic goals (like studying for exams, which are generally extrinsic because they result in grades) as also partially intrinsic.

Here’s an example based on two different groups: The first is composed of students who said they studied for good grades so they could go to good graduate schools and please their parents. The second group also offered those motivations, but added that they were interested in the course material, felt better when they did well and felt better when they didn’t let themselves get stressed out by waiting until the last minute.

The second group academically performed much better.

Procrastination is bad. Final exams do not have to be.

With some positive mental “framing” and a little visualization of your tasks, broken down in a step-by-step manner, you might even breeze right through those pesky tests.

So sharpen your pencils. Refill your stapler. Buy a new ink cartridge. And get ready to study (right after this episode of “The Family Guy.”)

Dear visitor, if you enjoyed reading this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!