Well, here it is! Our latest mindmap on self control. In my last blog post I wrote about how psychological researchers have found self control to be a major factor that leads to academic and life success. In fact some scholars even claim it’s our number 1 success strategy.
Since there’s so much to this area, I’ll explain the mind map content over a series of 3 blog posts. Below I start by explaining the basic psychology of self control.
The inner debate
According to some neuroscientists we have two different people living inside our minds and it’s as if each person competes with each other in a debate.
The first person in your head just wants to live for the moment and seeks immediate gratification (“Chocolate cake? Sure! I’ll have some!” they say).
Whilst the second person is more sensible and can delay instant gratification so you can achieve your long term goals. They’re able to resist the chocolate cake and say “I’ll have a carrot instead”.
Each day we are faced with various willpower challenges: do we give in and feel instant pleasure (and the consequences that may come with it)? Or do we resist and obtain benefits later down the track?
Put your willpower where it matters
Psychology professor and author of the book “Willpower” Roy Baumeister found that each of us has a finite amount of willpower which can be easily depleted by stress and having to make decisions (Do I eat the chocolate or not? What do I have for dinner? What do I wear today?).
You want to make sure you conserve your willpower stocks for the areas of your life that are most important to you. In other words, do the things that are most important first.
How do you know if you’ve depleted your willpower reserves? When is it time to take a break and recharge your batteries?
There are subtle signs to look out for. Baumeister offers the following questions for us to think about-
“Do things seem to bother you more than they should? Has the volume somehow been turned up on our life so that things are felt more strongly than usual? Is it suddenly hard to make up your mind about even simple things? Are you more than usually reluctant to make a decision or exert yourself mentally or physically?”
One solution to depleted willpower reserves is to simply sleep on it. Baumeister states –
“The old advice that things will seem better in the morning has nothing to do with daylight, and everything to do with depletion. A rested will is a stronger will”.
Sometimes we can get so caught up with the immediate challenges of daily life that we lose sight of the big picture (i.e. what is most important to us). It can help to ask yourself the following questions –
Am I where I want to be?
What could be better in my life?
What can I do about it?
Reflecting on these questions several times a year can help put your life in perspective.
But don’t stop there. Set some goals for the week and month. A mind map or a list of your goals that you keep close by (e.g. in your pocket or wallet) and look over daily can act as good reminders. Start each day by taking action on your most important goal.
One final word on goals: don’t be put off by the word ‘goal’. A goal is just something you would like to do. It can be as big or small as you like.
If you have trouble thinking of goals, then Ali Hale (blogger for Dumb Little Man) suggests that you think about what you don’t want for your life and then simply turn that around. For example, if you don’t want to be messy and disorganised you could turn this into “I want to be organised and efficient”.
Can you set some goals for this week? What about the month? Spend 10 – 20 minutes writing down your goals and be sure to create goals for the key areas of your life (e.g. your studies, career, health, relationships, personal development and community).
Once you’ve got clear on the big picture (i.e. what’s most important to you), you’ll be ready to take on the next lot of willpower strengthening practices in part 2 of this blog series.
References
Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2011). Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength. Penguin Press.
McGonigal, K. (2011). The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can DoTo Get More of It. Avery.
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I understand this cringe factor.
In high school, goal setting felt forced. I’d think, “Why are they making me do this?” and “What’s the point?”.
However, once I got to university, I realised that goals are a helpful life strategy.
In this article, I want to share my perspective on goal setting and how this strategy has helped me to get things done.
I’m going to tell you:
• What goals are
• Why you’d want to have them
• How to stick at them
• Why you need to protect your goals from destructive outside forces
Let’s go!
Goals are things you want to do. Perhaps you want to write a book, jog around the block every morning, start a podcast, get a part-time job to save money or learn to play an instrument. These are goals.
• Goals give your life a sense of purpose
• Goals give your life meaning and a reason to get out of bed
• Goals help to focus your mind on what you want/need to do
• Goals help you to create a better, less boring life
As Giovanni Dienstmann explains in his book Mindful Self Discipline:
“We all need to aspire to something and feel that we are going somewhere. Otherwise, there is a sense of boredom in life. Our daily routine feels stale and unengaging. As a result, we seek relief through bad habits, and seek engagement through mindless entertainment, news, social media, games, etc.”
Have you ever set a goal, you felt excited, but then that excitement quickly dissipated, and you gave up on the goal?
Whenever this happens, it’s easy to think, “Goal setting doesn’t work!”.
However, the problem isn’t with goal setting as a strategy.
The problem is that motivation is completely unreliable (it comes and goes). Plus, you were probably never taught how to achieve your goals in the first place.
In other words, you were set up to fail.
There’s a lot of pretty average advice out there about goal setting. I’ve heard dozens of goal setting pep talks, and many can be summed up like this:
“Set a goal, make it SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), break it down, blah, blah, blah.”
Most students tune out when they hear these pep talks. You can feel the energy being sucked out of the room.
This advice doesn’t work for most people. And it’s incomplete.
I’ve found that the following simple ideas can make a big difference in helping you move from inaction to action when it comes to pursuing your goals:
Achieving big long-term goals requires consistently engaging in small behaviours over time. You need to chip away and develop habits to get there.
For instance, after taking a hiatus from writing books (because I felt stuck and overwhelmed by the idea), I finally started writing down my ideas.
By starting small.
I told myself all I had to do was open the Word document and write one sentence. And the sentence didn’t even have to be good! But I had to do this every single day.
If I wanted to write more than one sentence, I could. But one sentence was my absolute minimum. Most days, I wrote at least a paragraph. But when I didn’t feel great, I would show up and write one sentence.
Nine months later, I had a draft manuscript ready to send to my editor.
Many different behaviours can help you achieve your goal. The first step is to brainstorm all the possible behaviours that can help you move closer to it.
One way to do this is with BJ Fogg’s tool, Swarm of Behaviors (also known as Swarm of Bs).
Here’s what you do:
You write your goal/aspiration/outcome (whatever you want to achieve) in the middle of a sheet of paper. Then, you spend a few minutes listing all the behaviours that will help you achieve it.
Dr Fogg stresses:
“You are not making any decisions or commitments in this step. You are exploring your options. The more behaviors you list, the better.”
When I was brainstorming behaviours that could help me to write my next book, I came up with the following list:
1. Use an Internet blocker app and block myself from distracting websites
2. Carry a notepad and pen with me everywhere I go (to capture ideas)
3. Write one sentence every morning
4. Speak my ideas into a voice recorder when I go for a walk
5. Use the Write or Die app
6. Manage my inner critic (when it strikes, say to myself, “It can’t be all bad!”)
7. Give myself a pep talk each day (e.g., “Done is better than perfect!”)
8. Do Julia Cameron’s morning page activity (i.e., free writing)
9. Attend a writing retreat
10. Sign up for the ‘Turbocharge your writing’ course
11. Pick up a mind map, select an idea and use it as a writing prompt
Once you’ve finished brainstorming potential behaviours, go through your list and select just a few behaviours to get the ball rolling (I selected #1, #3, and #6).
It’s well worth spending a couple of minutes making each of these behaviours ‘crispy’ (i.e., specific). For instance, for Behaviour #1, I decided which websites I would block myself from using and at what times.
When we work towards big life goals, the process is never neat or linear. Showing up and doing whatever you need to do (even just writing one sentence) can feel like a daily grind. Mild discomfort usually infuses the whole process.
Accept that’s how it is. It will sometimes feel like a hard slog, but the rewards are worth it.
The long-term rewards of working on your goals far outweigh the superficial rewards of scrolling through social media, watching Netflix, etc.
Even if you don’t achieve what you initially set out to do, chances are you’ll still be better off than you were before. Why? Because you’ll have learnt a bunch of new skills and life lessons.
Be careful who you share your goals with. Some people delight in stamping all over your goals and crushing your hopes and dreams.
For example, when I was 10 years old, I started attending drama classes outside of school. These classes were a lot of fun and quickly became the highlight of my week.
I remember thinking, “When I grow up, I want to run a drama academy to help boost kids’ confidence”.
I felt inspired by this idea. Drama had helped me come out of my shell and I wanted this for other kids who were lacking confidence. So, I decided to be brave and share my plans with my primary school teacher at the time.
I was expecting Mr D to say, “Good for you, Jane!”. But instead, he said with a smirk, “How do you think you’re going to do that?”
And then he started grilling me with questions . . .
“Where will you get the money from to set this up?”
“Who is going to come to your classes?”
“Where do you plan on running these classes?”
On and on Mr D went.
Ugh. “Just stop Mr D!” I wanted to scream.
I was left feeling crushed.
So, take it from me: Be careful who you share your goals with. Because some people get a kick out of squashing stuff (e.g., your dreams).
But nowadays, there’s a more powerful (and often overlooked) force that can mess with your goals: social media
If you’re constantly checking social media and looking at what other people are doing, that’s time and energy you could have spent working towards your goals. But that’s only part of the story . . .
Social media exposes you to a hodgepodge of content: the best bits of people’s lives, advertising, conspiracy theories, and outrage-inducing influencers. All this noise messes with your goals by subtly shifting and changing your worldview, beliefs, attitudes, and what you view as important in life.
In his brilliant book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, ex-Google strategist and now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams shares his struggles with this. He states:
“. . . I felt that the attention-grabby techniques of technology design were playing a nontrivial role. I began to realise that my technologies were enabling habits in my life that led my actions over time to diverge from the identity and values by which I wanted to live. It wasn’t just that my life’s GPS was guiding me into the occasional wrong turn, but rather that it had programmed me a new destination in a far-off place that it did not behoove me to visit. It was a place that valued short-term over long-term rewards, simple over complex pleasures.”
He adds:
“…I found myself spending more and more time trying to come up with clever things to say in my social posts, not because I felt they were things worth saying but because I had come to value these attentional signals for their own sake. Social interaction had become a numbers game for me, and I was focused on “winning” – even though I had no idea what winning looked like. I just knew that the more of these rewarding little social validations I got, the more of them I wanted. I was hooked.
. . . I had lost the higher view of who I really was, or why I wanted to communicate with all these people in the first place.”
When you go on social media, you need to realise that there are thousands of highly intelligent people on the other side of the screen and it’s their job to figure out how to capture and exploit your attention.
In short, the values and goals of these big tech companies are not aligned with your values and goals. Facebook’s first research scientist Jeff Hammerbacher summed it up nicely when he said:
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads . . . and it sucks.”
Take a moment to think of the people who you admire. How would you feel if you saw them spending vast amounts of time distracted and obsessed with social media?
I’ll leave you with this powerful quote from author Adam Gnade:
“Would you respect them [your biggest hero] as much if you saw them hunched over their phone all day like a boring zombie? No, you want them out there in the world doing heroic things, writing that great novel/song/whatever, saving the planet, standing up for the disenfranchised, or whatever else it was that made you love them in the first place. Let’s try to be as good as our heroes.”
Whatever you want in life, work out what you need to do to get there (i.e., the concrete behaviours), and then roll up your sleeves and get started.
This means you need to prepare yourself mentally and physically for them.
You can work so hard to memorise large quantities of information for an exam, but if you’re not mentally and physically prepared, all that hard work can sadly go to waste.
When it comes time to take your exams, you have to relate to yourself as a professional athlete. Leading up to the day of the big performance (i.e. the exam), you need to eat nutritious food, be in the right frame of mind, manage your nerves, and allow your body to rest. These simple things can make all the difference to your exam performance.
You may be thinking “But isn’t this just common sense?”
It is! But creating healthy habits takes time and practice.
It’s one thing to intellectually know you should be eating well but it’s another thing altogether to incorporate healthy meals and snacks into your lifestyle.
I see a lot of students drinking energy drinks, getting very little sleep, and eating highly processed foods in the days leading up to exams. I have to admit, there was a time when I engaged in these behaviours too. I can tell you from personal experience, this is a recipe for mediocre grades and a miserable existence.
Here are my top 10 tips to prevent burnout and boost exam performance:
Sleep is critical to the learning process, exam performance, and wellbeing. Yet it’s usually the first thing students sacrifice to get more study done.
If you miss two hours of sleep each night for a week, the cognitive effects are as bad as going without sleep for two days straight!
Studies have also found that if you stay awake for 18 hours straight that’s like having a blood alcohol level of 0.05. In other words, it’s like being legally drunk. Your ability to focus, think, and learn will be seriously impaired.
You can’t adapt to getting less sleep. As adolescents, you need about 9-10 hours of sleep per night to be as alert as possible when you wake up.
If that feels unachievable, try to just get an extra 15 minutes of sleep tonight. Gradually increase this each night until you reach your target.
Often students stop exercising when they start preparing for exams. They think “I don’t have time to exercise!”. It’s as if they think they must spend every moment studying. Don’t fall into this trap.
Movement is your friend when it comes to studying for exams.
Research shows engaging in regular physical movement will help you to study more effectively. Firstly, it’s a great way to relieve stress and release feel good chemicals. Secondly, it gets the blood flowing more efficiently to your brain, which can give you a cognitive boost.
One study found students who engaged in 5 minute movement breaks every 17 minutes during a lecture retained more information and could focus better.
Every time you engage in a short movement break, you’re enhancing your study sessions.
Research has found that students who skip breakfast experience a decrease in cognitive performance and alertness compared to students who eat breakfast.
Eating a nutritious breakfast will give you a cognitive boost before an exam. It will also help you to feel fuller for longer, stabilise your mood, and give you plenty of energy to get through the exam.
Here are some healthy breakfast ideas:
Muesli or porridge with nuts and fresh fruit (e.g., berries) Wholemeal toast with a variety of toppings (e.g., baked beans, tomatoes, and avocado) and a piece of fruit A healthy homemade smoothie (click here for my brain boosting smoothie recipe)
Your brain requires adequate hydration to function properly. Drinking water ensures that your brain receives the necessary fluids to perform tasks efficiently, such as retaining information and problem-solving.
Take regular sips of water as you study. It’s a good idea to have a glass of water or a reusable drink bottle within arms reach.
You may even want to create a tiny habit to remind yourself to engage in this simple behaviour (e.g., “After I finish answering a practice exam question, I will take a sip of water”).
Many years ago, I started thinking that my teachers and lecturers were out to get me. I thought they would mark me down wherever they got the chance. As a result of this distorted thinking, I became too scared to write anything in one of my first tests at law school. After receiving a terrible grade (5%), my brother said to me:
“Remember sis, your teachers want you to do well. They will try to give you marks wherever they can. It’s in their best interest to do so.”
Don’t worry about writing a perfect answer. If you’re unsure, be brave and still write something down. Even if it’s just a few dot points, it’s better than nothing. You may not get any marks for it, but your teachers won’t take marks off.
Just remember, most of the time your teachers are on your side and they want you to succeed. When you do well, it makes them look good.
Chances are there will always be something that you could have studied more thoroughly come the day of your exam. But on the morning of an exam, you can’t do much about that, so there’s no point worrying. Worrying will just deplete your finite energy, which you need to conserve for the exam.
Instead of worrying, try saying this to yourself before each exam:
“I now know so much more than I did before. I’ll be able to answer many questions in this exam.”
Telling yourself this positive micro-thought will allow you to enter the exam in a calm and confident frame of mind.
It’s normal to feel a bit nervous before an exam. But there are certain things and people that can push your anxiety levels into dangerous territory and impair your exam performance.
For example, coffee and energy drinks will skyrocket your stress levels. Similarly, hanging out with people who have a lot of nervous energy and are venting about the exam (“I’m going to fail!” and “I hardly studied!”) are going to leave you feeling distracted and a little jangled.
Before the exam, do your best to isolate yourself from these people. If you’re worried about offending someone who is venting to you, you could say “I’m sorry but I really need to do some last minute cramming”. Then proceed to pull out your notes and pretend to read them.
How many times have you stayed back after an exam to talk to your friends about what you put for each question? Have you ever felt terrible after doing this?
It can be reassuring to know that you wrote the same answer as your friends. But if you find out that you wrote something completely different, you may start to second guess yourself. If you have another four or five exams to go, this may throw you off your game.
This is why I don’t recommend engaging in a postmortem of the exam until you get your results/exam paper back.
When you walk out of the exam room, tell yourself:
“That exam is over. There’s nothing I can do to change how I went. It’s time to move on!”.
You could imagine yourself locking the exam in a box and throwing it off a cliff or rolling it up and stuffing it in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. The point is you need to mentally disconnect from that exam and focus on studying for the next one.
If you come across a question that you’re not sure how to answer, stop for a moment and take a few deep breaths (in for the count of 4 and out for the count of 4).
A simple breath activity you can try is the Box Breathing Technique. This involves imagining yourself breathing along the sides of a box (breathing in for the count of four on one side, out for the count of four on the next side, etc). Repeat this 2-3 times. Then take a look at the question again.
If you are still unsure how to answer the question, move on to another question.
The worst thing you can do is panic (remember, stress impairs your ability to think and recall information).
By engaging in Box Breathing, you can help yourself to remain in a calm and stable state.
Many of us are familiar with writer’s cramp. This can be caused by gripping onto your pen too tightly. Try loosening your grip a little.
Alternatively, experiment with a range of different pens. Some biros require you to press down hard on the page to make a mark, but not gel pens. The ink just flows onto the page!
The reality is, even with a good gel pen, your elbow will start to hurt at some point if you’re taking a 3 hour exam. When it does start to hurt, have a rest for a few seconds (yes, you have time to do this). Stretch your arm out. Shake it a little.
Treat each exam like a mountain hike rather than a 100 metre sprint. Resting for a few moments here and there will be time well spent and will enhance your overall performance.
These simple strategies can help to elevate your exam performance. My advice is to start small. Even if your exams are several weeks away, select one or two of these ideas and start testing them out today. At first, the strategies will require a bit of mental effort. But like anything in life, if you persevere they’ll become second nature to you and they’ll just be things you do without even thinking.
Want to learn more exam strategies? Click here to download a free copy of 70 ways to ace your exams.
It’s around this time of year that many people set big goals for themselves.
“This year is going to be different. I’m going to be more organised. Eat Healthier. Exercise more . . .”
Does this sound familiar?
Up until recently, this was me. I used to be obsessed with setting goals at the beginning of the new year.
In fact, I was part of an international goal setting community of productivity enthusiasts (yes, there’s such a thing). At the beginning of every year, we would meet up online and work in pomodoros (i.e. 25 minute sprints), setting goals and creating plans for the year.
I’ll admit, I loved it.
Here I was hanging out with people that were just as obsessed with effective work habits and productivity as I was! I felt like I had found my people.
But I recently stopped attending the goal setting sessions.
Quite frankly, I’d had enough.
Now I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve turned into an unmotivated sloth. It’s not like I went from being a hardcore goal setter to anti-goal setting.
These days I’m just less obsessed about being super productive. I’m still setting goals (just different ones and not as many as before). For instance, this year one of my goals is to do more fun activities, such as drawing, drumming and hiking.
Ironically, what I’ve found is in not trying so hard to power through my to-do list, I’m actually getting more meaningful stuff done. Plus, I’m a bit more relaxed about life, which is a good thing.
In his brilliant book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals Oliver Burkeman argues that being too focused on the future can suck the joy out of life.
I saw a lot of myself in Burkeman’s story. To give you a little background, Burkeman is a reformed productivity geek. He used to write a column for a newspaper on productivity hacks. So he has experimented with dozens of time management and productivity techniques.
But interestingly, he found very few of these time management techniques actually worked. And the more he used them, the more stressed out and unhappy he became. The book Four Thousand Weeks is Burkeman’s attempt to try and make sense of things.
Four thousand weeks is the number of weeks you get if you make it to the ripe old age of 80.
The idea behind this book is simple: life is short. So what are you going to do with your 4,000 precious weeks?
Burkeman argues many time management books perpetuate myths and false ideas about time. Here are some of the myths:
If you just work harder and more efficiently, you’ll be able to do it all.
If you manage your time well, you’ll eventually get to a perfect place in the future where you are in control of time.
Burkeman says these ideas set up a rigged game. A game in which you try to do more and more to create a better future for yourself.
In trying to create this golden future where your life runs smoothly, you never feel satisfied in the present and you always feel like you’re running behind schedule. As a result, this stops you from enjoying what you’re doing right now. And when you think about it, that’s all we really have (this present moment).
Four Thousand Weeks is packed full of great insights and practical advice. Here are seven ideas from the book that really resonated with me:
It’s an illusion that you’ll be able to crank through all the things on your to-do list to finally clear the decks. Accept that there will always be more to do and your to-list will continue to grow. If you can be okay with that, life becomes a lot less overwhelming.
Burkeman suggests creating two to-do lists:
1) An open to-do list: containing everything you need to do but you’ll never get through.
2) A closed to-do list: containing a fixed number of entries (no more than 10 tasks).
When you complete a task on your closed list, only then can you add another item from your open list.
Burkeman suggests channelling your energy and attention on a handful of things that really matter to you. Don’t take on too many projects.
If you have lots of projects on the go, it’s too easy to not finish any of them. Why? Whenever one project gets a little uncomfortable or difficult, you switch over to another project.
All this bouncing around from one project to another means you end up with a lot of unfinished projects. Burkeman recommends focusing on one big work project at a time.
Any project that is important to you will bring up some discomfort and/or fear. “What if I’m not able to do it?” is a thought I frequently have whenever I start a new project. Since we don’t like experiencing these uncomfortable feelings, there’s always this urge to distract ourselves with digital technologies.
Burkeman suggests we get familiar with this discomfort. If you are able to tolerate the discomfort and get started on an important piece of work, it’s like a superpower. What you’ll find is you’ll be able to complete more important and meaningful tasks, which will motivate you to keep going.
It’s easy to fantasise about the future. I know I’m not the only person to have imagined running a marathon, publishing a best selling book and/or opening up a plant-based café.
In our minds, it’s so easy to see ourselves doing these things perfectly and with total ease and control. But what we usually find is when we attempt to do these things, reality is often out of sync with the fantasy in our heads.
You go for a run and your leg hurts. And by choosing to go for a run, you’re saying no to many other things you could potentially be doing.
Here’s my take on all of this: if given the choice between living in reality or fantasy land, choose reality every time. Sure, it’s messy. It’s imperfect. But it’s the real deal.
Since you only get one shot at this life, you might as well have a go at that thing you’ve always wanted to do (even if it makes you feel clumsy and awkward).
Not everything we do needs to bring us some financial, material or academic gain in the future. Some activities bring us pure enjoyment in the here and now.
Hiking is a perfect example of this. Burkeman says there’s no real purpose to hiking but you do it because it’s an inherently enjoyable experience.
Burkeman argues that an hour spent on social media is not just one hour wasted. That time bleeds into the rest of your day, impacting the way you feel, how you view the world and what you value.
To capture your attention, social media’s algorithms feed you the most sensational, outrageous and conspiratorial content. If you spend hours of your day on these platforms, there’s no question that this will distort your perception of reality.
What I took from this is if you want to think more clearly, get off social media.
Although Burkeman doesn’t go as far as saying this, he does suggest we make our devices as boring as possible. How do we do this?
By removing social media from them and changing the colour to grey scale. This way our devices appear more like tools than toys. It’s also makes it much harder for us to escape the discomfort (see point 3).
JOMO is the opposite of FOMO (Fear of missing out) – it’s the joy of missing out. Rather than feeling stressed out about not being able to go to every social event, celebrate the fact that you can’t possibly do it all nor would you want to!
The irony is the more social events you go to, the more you realise you’re missing out on. You’ll never win this game of trying to do it all, so don’t even bother trying to play. Burkeman continuously comes back to this powerful idea of choosing a few things you want to do from the menu of life.
I love this idea of treating life like a menu. When you go to a restaurant you don’t feel the pressure to try every dish on offer. You just pick the dish that appeals to you in that moment and then you forget the rest.
I think this is a great approach to life. You can’t do everything but you can do a few things with your 4,000 weeks. So pick the things that interests you the most and then dive right in and enjoy!
Dr Jane Genovese delivers interactive sessions on learning to learn, combating procrastination, exam preparation, how to focus in the age of distraction, habit formation and much, much more!
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