How to Get Back on Track for School

hey everyone welcome back to the channel so if you're new here my name is ray and i'm in my third year doing physics here at cambridge and in this video i want to talk about falling behind and work and getting back on track so you may have just started like university gcses or a levels and after 10 or so you've already found yourself behind work so i want to talk briefly about like how you found yourself in this position and ways of getting back on track over the holidays or whatnot but before then i first want

to formalize the problem rather than jumping straight into solutions because i think it first helps to understand where the problem came from and how it arose so you can sort of avoid doing in the future so useful concepts i find for helping me understand why the situation rose is called og feels so there are a few links in the description about this but i will explain more or less all of it in the video so the idea essentially is that if someone receives constant negative conditioning through any unwelcoming thoughts about something in their life then they will develop or condition themselves to have some kind of psychological flinch mechanism to those that affords so i'm going to use an example outside of school to help us understand this better so let's say you're receiving some kind of utility bills or phone bill television bill whatever in the mail and the first time you see this bill like you say okay i'm gonna pay this and then you set it aside on your desk and you will like come back to your lady or something and say some kind of accident happens where say i don't know one of your parents cleaning your room or like uh takes the i don't know mail off your table thinking it was like kind of junk mail or something and then just throws it away and this could just be by accident or some kind of a kind of accident that can happen so now a few weeks passed and you basically forgot about it and then you remember that you had a bill to pay so then you log in and then you see you also have to make some kind of late payments for you now you're kind of annoyed that you have to make some kind of late payment fee as well or you got fined for making late payments now the next time we receive the bill you feel a little bit annoyed because you had to make a late payment fee and you wish that the utility company reminded you through text or email or something like that the day before it was due but they don't do that because they want to make money so you feel a little bit annoyed because of all of this and then to avoid this feeling of annoyance you put the mail to like the side again and then it goes missing in a set of papers so then you miss another payment and then next time the bill arrives you feel even more annoyed because like they didn't remind you and it was kind of by accident that you missed like you missed a payment and you had to pay a lame payment fee now this happens once twice more and the next time you receive the bill you're going to feel so annoyed looking at it that you basically developed a flinch which prevents you from taking any action so the action the most rational response in this situation would be to like go and go ahead and immediately pay the bill but this like flinch you have prevents you from doing so and it just says like okay i'm gonna set the side and like deal with this later because you want to avoid thinking about it because the flinch or the emotional hits to you is so painful that you just want to avoid it so what's essentially happening here is that you went from experiencing no flinch to slowly developing this kind of emotional burden when it comes to thinking about paying or paying this bill or taking any action towards a problem and rather than experiencing this emotional pain at the moment you realize that you have to make a light payment you end up feeling this emotional pain much earlier in the timeline of when you first see the stimulus which is the bill which arrives in the mail so because we're not all rational people and we have like lizard monkey brains whatever instead of paying the bill you just end up doing other things which make you feel better in the moment because you know the feeling of paying the bill is just gonna leave you annoyed for like five ten minutes just because of that emotional burden that has slowly built up so you end up procrastinating and then like you're missing another payment somehow and eventually it just goes in downward spiral and you found yourself in that org field when it comes to say paying your utility bills or phone bills so the key point here is that you feel this flinch between when seeing the stimulus and consciously think i'm taking any action towards this problem are you paying the bill in this case and this is a relative phenomenon neuroscience called temporal difference learning which you can read more about down below so let's use example when it comes to school work so say you have a homework and you have a deadline dream and because of something that goes on at home or whatever you end up missing the deadline so you get told by the teacher and you feel a little bit annoyed because of this so next time it comes to having to do the homework you feel some level of annoyance and you don't really want to make a start on it and because of this or because of something else that happens in your life and you end up missing that deadline too and then the following time you feel even more annoyed because they've been told off and by several teachers in that case or something and then slowly over time you just don't end up getting the homework done because the flinch or this emotional burden which you have on upon seeing the homework is so great that you just want to like throw it away and just not really think about it and this also happens when it comes to like say revision and then procrastinating from revision and then developing more of this flinch towards actually doing the revision and so on so by following along and understanding that you basically already made your first step in dealing with the problem because you understand the problem better and you can appreciate that many people go through it when it comes to like saying you're paying utility bills or just doing some other kind of general work in their life and even just giving this problem a name over og feels makes you more aware of this problem and helps you find or realize when you find yourself in this situation like damn i've just found myself in an og field of when it comes to say doing homework when it comes to like saying paying these bills or whatever and also i find it helpful to know that as an actual explanation for what's going on because of our lizard monkey brain and we're not always rational people in time um which makes me feel a lot better rather than saying oh i'm utterly hopeless i can just never get work done or something you can actually appreciate this a problem and you're able to overcome in some ways now

there are a few solutions towards dealing with this problem and the first solution i came across was visualizing what your life would look like if you avoided this flinch or you just did not have this bench so in the case of like paying bills you can like imagine that your life would be like pretty good because you wouldn't have to pay these late payment fees and the money you're spending on my payment fees you can probably spend an ice cream instead of something or when it comes to say doing work um you can imagine yourself like going to university once again studying the subject you want to but i wouldn't say spend too much time doing this because like you got to get the work done and i find that spending too much time on visualization exercises kind of makes you feel like you've already achieved the thing because you visualized it so much so i find it useful to only visualize like a little to actually get you going with the work and then stop visualizing from there as

for more concrete steps i found it useful to mix high and low priority tasks together so high priority tasks would be like topics which i really don't like doing and i just need to make a start on and low priority tasks would be like topics which i like doing or just some easier lighter work so often people recommend you start off with the topics you dislike the most and make progress on there first but because the flinch towards those topics is so great you'll have to overcome some like larger burden or larger amounts of activation energy to be able to actually get started on the tasks so what i find useful is instead of starting on the topic which you dislike the most do like a topic you like for about 10 to 15 minutes and then as you ease your ways into like actually getting work done and actually gaining some momentum then you can slowly transition into a topic you dislike more and then like you can eventually go into topic you dislike the most and then make progress on that for a few hours and then coming back to like topics which you like more so essentially to not experiences a lot of flinch when it comes to doing work trying to find topics which you like doing for about 5 10 15 minutes or so and then move on to topics which you dislike more as you build momentum so

something else i found useful is to break down large tasks in small tasks so robin saying revise this whole topic in physics which you're going to experience much of a more flinch in doing so because it's so over what overwhelming and big it's much better to break that down into sub tasks and the first subtask could be like watch a 5 10 minute video and the flinching like watching about this topic is much lower and then as you use yourself into this you build more momentum and then you can go through the other parts of the sub where you can go for the oversub tasks and then eventually you just basically revise the whole topic also something that i

started doing recently is scheduling breaks and not work so often people schedule work blocks on their calendar of like 1 to 4 p. m i'm going to be doing work whatever um but when you're behind work you got to like do more work than usual so i find it helpful to schedule the breaks in your day rather than working your day so usually i schedule like 6 to 8 pm to like have dinner and chat with friends twelve to two p. m to have lunch and like watch some youtube television shows and then like seven to eighteen to have breakfast or whatever and then like 10 p. m onwards like i don't know just relax and go to bed so one advantage of doing this is that you can see how many breaks you've limited yourself today which is like five hours of breaks and you can just see that on your calendar quite easily if you block out these times as breaks and secondly you can also you also feel less of a response or reluctance to doing work and because rather than saying like oh should i be doing work now should i not you just basically look at your calendar and if it's like a break time then you shouldn't be doing work and if it's uh not break time then you should be doing work so it's much easier in that sense than the other way around well at least i found in my experience and finally during these

non-break sessions of course you have to take mini breaks so something useful i find is using the pondero timer so i actually have a physical timer over here uh which like i can set to like i don't know 50 minutes so i usually go for 50 minutes or work and then 10 minute break 50 minutes of work time in break and so on and but you can also find apps online by just searching like pomodorapp oh it makes like a ringing noise when i'm done um so you can just search like your pomodoro apps online and just use them there are plenty of videos online which explain what publishers are so if you don't know then just search them online because i'm not going to explain in this

video but yeah that's basically for the video hopefully you found it useful and understood the idea of org fields and like how to combat them in some ways and understanding the problem better should also give you a chance to like think about your own solutions to tackling these oak fields so for some people that can be like having a rewards based system which i talked about in another video uh which should be linked up with someone right now i'm just assigning yourself points for getting work done and for people it could be entirely different situations uh so if you have any recommendations do leave them in comments down below but otherwise i guess i'll see you next time bye