Do you ever find yourself cleaning your entire room instead of starting your homework that’s due at midnight? Or maybe you scroll through Tik Tok or watch Netflix for hours even though you have a big paper you haven’t started? Procrastination and anxiety around doing schoolwork is something every student has experienced at least once in their life, and if you haven’t, I’d say you’re lying.
I have been dealing with procrastination for most of my time as a student, but I only recently learned how to properly cope with it. Mel Robbins is a motivational speaker and author that I found on Instagram who talks about anxiety, relationships and practical ways to improve your life. She was the first person to explain to me what procrastination actually is and give me effective tools to help stop procrastinating my work.
The first thing you must understand is that procrastination has nothing to do with your work or whatever you’re avoiding — it’s just a form of stress relief. Procrastination allows us to alleviate our stress for a short amount of time by focusing our attention on something else rather than the thing stressing us out. People who do this all the time are often labeled as “procrastinators”, but the truth is that “you’re not a procrastinator; you have a habit of procrastinating” as Robbins says.
Thinking about procrastination as a habit rather than a personality trait allows us to take control of the situation and realize that habits can be broken. Robbins explains that all habits have three parts: the trigger, pattern, and reward. In the case of procrastination, the trigger is always stress, the pattern is avoiding doing something (like your homework), and the reward is a short period of stress relief. The only way to break this habit is NOT to deal with the trigger because you are always going to have stress in your life. Instead, you need to change your pattern of avoiding work. Robbins composed a short list of things to do the next time you feel like you’re procrastinating:
1. Acknowledge the stress – take a second to ask yourself what is stressing you out and causing you to procrastinate.
2. Count down “5, 4, 3, 2, 1” – this helps to interrupt your procrastination and wake your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that helps you set and achieve goals.
3. Work for 5 minutes – the problem isn’t working, it’s the habit of avoiding the work. To combat this, you just need to start the assignment and work for at least 5 minutes. Research shows that 80% of people who start will continue and complete their work.
I have noticed such an improvement with my procrastinating as soon as I started doing these steps. The most helpful thing for me has been forcing myself to work for those 5 minutes because starting something is usually my biggest problem. By telling myself I only have to work for 5 minutes that allows me the freedom to stop if I want to, making it feel less like I’m forcing myself to do the work but instead choosing to continue working. Hopefully the next time you find yourself procrastinating you will remember to try these steps and they can help you break that habit!
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