Stress and Giving Up

If you're a student studying in high school and reading this, then it's very likely that sometime during the last couple of months, weeks or even days you have had the mountains of homework and associated stress that comes along with it. Schooling and education takes up a major part of our student lives, and the amount of pressure that many of us may feel can sometimes take its toll on all aspects of our life, from our health, wealth and relationships, and at times we can feel like giving it all up.

Not to start sounding like the 'Student Wellbeing' section of your school newsletter or anything, but I thought I might document my thoughts on student stress and motivation. As students, we're told to study, but never how to study. Some rudimentary advice may be offered from our educational institutions, such as 'study x amount of hours a day', or 'organize your study schedule in a manner similar to the one shown in table 2.5', etc, but this advice is often incredibly basic and many do not get much practical benefit from it. Life as a student may seem incredibly chaotic, as we attempt to balance all the factors influencing how we spend our time - our motivation, the workload, the stresses, the pressures, our short-term and long-term goals, and so on, by ourselves. With so little official advice, how do most of us ever survive?

The simple answer is most likely this: we don't. An ideal reality would likely have most students follow a very mechanical, business-like notion that if we improve our time-management skills drastically, we can become incredible productivity machines. Productivity machines that could get home at a set time, work on one subject or another for a set time, take a __ minute break, then go straight back to work, before finishing with _ minutes of leisure. Ideally, study would be effective if we were to arrive home, and then work solidly for however long, have our leisure and sleep at an appropriate time. And I have no doubt that some people do achieve this, but I'm not one of them, and neither are many of the people I know.

Instead, many of us may arrive at our homes with the perfectly legitimate intention of following a meticulously thought out schedule, just to realize that you haven't done a thing and it's 11pm. Or we realize that there's some project or assessment task that's due in a couple of days, and that we've got time from now until then, and that it would make a great deal of logical sense to complete it in the next couple of days.... but the moment you try to begin, there's a sinking feeling in your stomach, a sensation of dread shivers up your body, and we realize that we just don't want to do the work. In cases like these, where we have the desire and intention to have the work completed, but can't seem to get into the right state of mind to actually get it done, I think that there's more to 'it' than the logical considerations that we take - in only mechanically considering our workload, we're neglecting the emotional, physical and mental aspects that coincide with any task we set ourselves to do.

Stephen Covey talks about how tasks can be separated into urgent and non urgent, and important and unimportant. He notes that the tasks we always seem to occupy ourselves with are the urgent tasks (both important and unimportant), whilst the tasks that we should be doing, but never get around to are the important, but not urgent ones. An assessment task that's due in a couple of days is important, but not urgent enough to provoke an adrenaline response that forces us into action. Instead, many of us sometimes linger about, with a level of longing that makes us want the work to be done, but not enough to motivate us to actually sit down and start. Or if we do start, we're disliking the work. This study is important enough for us to want to do it, but it isn't urgent for us to have to do it. "We still have time", we can still procrastinate...

A Time Management book that I read once stated that there are three main reasons to procrastination: You don't know enough about the task at hand, there's not enough interest in the task as it is is boring/unimportant, or you don't know where to begin. Addressing the first issue, the book suggests that we attempt to learn about the task bit-by-bit, by breaking the larger project into small, manageable chunks. It suggests that if we find a task boring or unimportant, we attempt to see how it relates to the larger scheme of things, and asks us to identify what value the particular project can bring to us, or to drop the task entirely if it is of no objective value at all; and when we don't know where to begin, we should just jump straight in and correct our mistakes afterwards. It's far easier to go back and edit something, than to sit around thinking of the perfect first sentence.

I've tried that advice, and some of it worked for me, and some of it didn't. Advice always seems to sound good on paper (or on your computer screen, in this case), but sometimes when you're sitting there with a blank document open, the logicality of advice can conflict with the emotions that you feel against working. When you get down to it, procrastination and student stress is an emotional phenomenon. We don't sit down and think "hey, I think lack sufficient knowledge of Trotsky's vision of the Russian Revolution to successfully write a 3,000 word essay describing my thoughts on it, so I'll just sit here, and in my intense fear of being judged negatively for the sub-par work I might do, I have officially decided to procrastinate and Facebook chat that cute girl I met last week". Instead, we get this sinking feeling in our bodies that 'stops' us from starting what we wish was completed.

So what can we do to change this? I imagine that a life without stress would be very desirable to many people, and the main way that I personally attempt to attack the tendency to procrastinate my work is through ... sleep and exercise. Yup. Uh huh. Let me explain my non-scientific, non-psychological and unproven technique to battle procrastination. Stress, motivation and the tendency to procrastinate are all emotions. You feel stressed. You feel motivated. You feel anxious. Generally speaking, our actions as human beings are guided by our emotions - if we feel anxious, stressed and procrastinate-y, we're not likely going to begin to start our work. But on the flip side, if we feel wonderful, motivated and happy, then getting through work may very well be a breeze. I personally find that a 30 minute power-nap before starting study, and some exercise during the day really helps fight off any negative emotions I might be feeling towards the workload I have - and for me, this works.

The real key is to find out what works for you - what sort of environment do you work best in? Some people can't work with mess, some prefer the intimacy of a messy workplace. Are there any idiosyncrasies that you have to entertain in order to keep yourself happy? (personally, I hate when my keyboard is sticky) But the main point is to see what puts you in the mood to work, and then from there what tools and techniques you can use to get your work done. If sleep and exercise work for you, then go ahead and use it. If breaking a task into small chunks work for you, then use that.

Here's a tip though: I'd encourage you to write down what you're trying before you try it, and then afterwards go back and see whether it worked. If not, then try something else, and before long, when you find something that works, you could be writing long, wonderful rambling pieces of prose like the one you're reading right now.

Take Care,
Eric