Winter vacation, say "bye bye" to procrastination

In the morning, when our mother calls us to get up, we will cover our heads with the quilt, sleep for another 10 minutes, then another 10 minutes... We may even need our mother to come and lift the quilt before we get up reluctantly, then wash up nervously, eat breakfast reluctantly, and wait until the last minute before picking up our schoolbags and rushing out the door.

During the winter and summer vacations, the usual rules were put aside. We stayed in bed, put off doing our homework, and played however we wanted. When school was about to start, we looked at our new empty homework books, feeling extremely anxious and powerless, and began to rush to finish our homework "day and night", either plagiarizing or patching together, just to get it done.

The leisurely winter vacation is here again. Have these things hit your soft spot again?

01 Procrastination is not a trivial matter

People clearly know their tasks and deadlines but are reluctant to act. In the short period of procrastination, they seem to get the pleasure of escaping punishment, but they also have the pain of having to face reality. The two are intertwined repeatedly, resulting in always being a step behind in life and study. This psychological state is called "procrastination psychology". Procrastination psychology not only reduces our learning efficiency, but also makes us develop the bad habit of procrastination.

Although procrastination is a very common psychological phenomenon, it can form a vicious cycle. Its existence may cause psychological problems of varying degrees. The milder ones may lead to self-blame, guilt, lack of self-confidence, etc. The more serious ones may lead to anxiety, depression, and even negative ideas such as self-harm. Therefore, it poses a great potential threat to our physical and mental health.

When we see that other students are never late for school, always complete their homework on time, and their academic performance is steadily improving, but we are far behind them, this requires us to reflect strongly and face up to our own procrastination.

02 The psychological factors behind procrastination

Students, have you ever wondered why some students can complete their learning tasks on time, while some students always procrastinate?

American writer SJ Scott conducted a relevant analysis in his book "The Psychology of Procrastination". He believes that there are eight major reasons for procrastination:

1. Pursuit of perfection. Because of the fear of not being able to meet the perfect standard or thinking that you are not fully prepared, you dare not start easily, which leads to procrastination, but in fact it is impossible to have a perfect start.

2. Fear of the unknown. Because of the fear that unknown tasks may have negative results, they dare not face them.

3. Promises easily. Without fully considering one's own abilities and the difficulty of the task, one casually agrees to other people's requests, or because of one's easy-going personality, one accepts all offers and makes promises to multiple people, only to find that the task is not so easy to complete after starting.

4. Focus only on simple tasks. Usually you stay in your comfort zone, always doing simple, repetitive tasks, and always procrastinate on challenging tasks.

5. Lack of motivation. They think that the reward for completing the task is not great and not worth the effort, so they adopt an indifferent attitude.

6. Don’t know where to start. When faced with a task that needs to be completed, you don’t know how to break it down and complete it step by step.

7. Often distracted and easily influenced by external environment.

8. Not having enough time to complete tasks.

03 Overcome procrastination and start with action

First, determine your own goals. Each stage of life has different goals, and the main goals of the middle school stage are to actively exercise, study hard, maintain psychological balance, develop your own strengths and advantages, and lay a good foundation for future career development and life happiness.

When we are in middle school, we are at the age of flowers and our life has just begun. We should fasten the first button of our life to provide the right direction for the other "buttons".

In addition to the overall goals in middle school, we should also break down the goals into semesters, months, weeks, and days. The key is to learn to say no to matters outside of the goals. For example, if your homework has not been finished yet and your classmates invite you to go to a movie, you should refuse and arrange everything else after you finish your homework.

Second, learn to rest and release stress in time. When you are very hungry, you should eat; when your eyelids are fighting because you studied too late, you should go to sleep; when the surrounding environment makes you unable to calm down, you should move to a place suitable for studying... If you are sick or mentally unbalanced, it is difficult to study at ease and achieve ideal learning results. Therefore, when we arrange our daily schedule, we cannot ignore physiological and psychological needs.

When we are not at school with our parents, we should learn to be independent and take care of ourselves. We should ensure that we have balanced nutrition for three meals a day, go to bed early and get up early, and do at least 30 minutes of physical exercise every day. If we are sick, we should seek treatment in time; if we are under great pressure, we should adjust ourselves in time. We should know that a healthy body and mind are the important guarantee for academic progress.

The third is to complete quick tasks immediately. What are quick tasks? They are necessary tasks that can be completed immediately within a few minutes. For example, when washing dishes, sometimes you don’t want to wash dishes after a meal, so you let the dirty dishes soak in the sink for a day, and finally you have to spend more time and energy to clean the dishes and the sink. If you spend a few minutes washing them immediately after a meal, you can quickly complete a necessary task without affecting the planning of other tasks.

In addition, students can also review the achievement of daily, weekly, monthly, and semester goals to see what has not been completed or needs to be readjusted, so as to better achieve their goals through review. In addition, after completing the target task, it is also important to reward yourself reasonably, such as watching a long-awaited movie.

"Tomorrow and tomorrow, how many tomorrows there are. I wait for tomorrow, and everything is wasted." Summer vacation is here again, how are you going to plan? Are you still thinking "there is still tomorrow", "study tomorrow", "work harder tomorrow"? If you leave your plans to "tomorrow", then the "tomorrow" you want will never come. Students, start from now on, say "no" to procrastination, don't wait any longer, it will really be too late if you wait any longer.