Notes

If you'll remember we procrastinate about things that make us a little bit uncomfortable. You think about something you don't particularly like and the pain centers of your brain light up so you shift and narrow your focus of attention to something more enjoyable. This causes you to feel better. At least temporarily but sadly the long term effects of habitual avoidance can be nasty. When you put off your studies it can become even more painful to think about studying it. You can choke on tests because you haven't laid the firm neural foundations you need. To feel comfortable with the material. Procrastination can be a single monumentally important keystone bad habit, a habit in other words that influences many important areas of your life. If you improve your abilities in this area many other positive changes will gradually begin to unfold. Procrastination shares features with addiction. It offers temporary excitement and relief from sometimes boring reality. It's easy to fool yourself for example into thinking that the best use of any given moment is. Surfing the web for information instead of actually reading the textbook or doing the assigned problems. You start to tell yourself stories. For example you might tell yourself that organic chemistry requires spacial reasoning, your weakness, so of course you're doing very poorly at it. You devise irrational excuses that sound superficially reasonable like if I study too far ahead of the test I'll forget the material. If you're troubled by procrastination you may even start telling yourself that procrastination is an innate unchangeable characteristic. After all if procrastination were easily fixable wouldn't you have fixed it by now? The higher you go in your studies however the more important it is to take control of procrastination. Habits that worked in earlier years can turn around and bite you. What I'll show you in these next few videos is how you can become. The master of your habit. You should be making the decisions not your well-meaning but unthinking zombies, your habits. As you'll see the strategies for dealing with procrastination are simple. It's just that sometimes they aren't intuitively obvious. So let's return to that story that began this video. The arsenic eaters started with tiny doses of arsenic. In tiny doses, arsenic doesn't seem harmful. You can even build up an immunity to its effects. This can allow you to take larger doses and look healthy, even as the poison is slowly increasing your risk of cancer and ravaging your organs. In a similar way procrastinators put off just that one little thing. They do it again and again gradually growing used to it. They can even look healthy but the long term effects? Not so good. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning how to learn.