Top 5 Study Traps that are worse than procrastination

The human brain, no doubt, works like a wonder but not every person is motivated all day long to use it to win a Nobel prize. We all have the potential to win one but not the motivation to keep on studying like one.

Another degrading factor that devoids us from achieving our goals is the lack of a good habit of Self-Studying.

With a surge in technological advancements, we are more addicted to gadgets instead to our books. So, this article will help as a Self-Help Guide in which I am going to talk about the biggest self-studying traps that people fall into and myself as well (Sigh!)

Well, as we all have experienced that we really don’t think about self-study until we get to a point generally in our adult life when we decide that we actually want to learn something again. Moreover, it becomes necessary because of our poor knowledge of basic concepts.

But as an adult when you start studying things by yourself at that time you realize that you’re completely by yourself, so what ends up happening is that you start falling into these traps because I mean it’s not your fault right like you’ve never actually deeply understood the concepts and even for small words you end up searching the internet.

And not only that you start thinking about things like how will you design what the material is going to be like what’s supposed to be on the syllabus? How do you assess yourself?

How do you even know you’re studying the right thing?

So, In order to overcome these dilemmas here are Five of the biggest self-study traps that I’ve noticed both in myself and the people around me.

Breadth vs Depth

The number one trap that I have noticed people fall into is the Breadth versus Depth Trap(I did not give the name but I sure did my research on it).

For example, you’re like oh yes I would like to study the Basics of Cells so you do some research and realize that Cell is composed of many cell organelles.

What may be the natural thing to do is that you’re like okay I need to learn the basics first but then you realize that if you don’t even know the functions of organelles then what is the use?

Then you start studying the concept and then in between comes another term but you feel like you just over-read the others and then need to take a full-on introduction of just Mitochondria by then you run into something else like say membranes and remember that Chloroplast also has a double membrane and you’re like hmm I know they are in plants but I don’t exactly understand why they are present in only them and not others. So, you start searching for it and eventually you forget about the main topic and are now more interested in deep knowledge.

So I think this was the point (I hope I was able to convey). This is called a Depth-First Approach to learning.

It’s about starting with one thing and then drilling it down really really deeply trying to understand exactly everything about this topic.

And the issue with doing something like this is not necessarily that it’s bad, it’s the fact that you end up getting into a rabbit hole super deep to the point where you’re like 10 layers deep and you forgot what your original goal was which was to learn only the BASICS and on top of this I feel like it’s also much easier to give up because you feel overwhelmed by all these different things that you don’t know about.

In contrast to this, the Breadth-First approach to learning science would look like assuming you don’t know anything.

You would start off with learning the basics of every organelle and you might hit something like the layers we talked about which you kind of understand but you don’t exactly understand why they have those layers but you’re okay with this.

Then you learn some structures and functions of organelles and you learn some introductory things that you might end up coming across the topic that you don’t understand exactly how that works but except that you understand a high level of what you learned and now are perfectly capable of answering the question regarding the Basics of Cell.

You have enough skills to complete that question if asked in an exam and after you do that then you’re like okay maybe I want to dive deeper into topics that I don’t know.

You want to look more into the difference between Plant and Animal Cells and learn more about that and then after you do that maybe you can answer advanced-level questions that have a little bit more to do with the difference of it but now it’s a lot less overwhelming.

A lot less anxiety causing and you get to use the skills that you learn without trying to like exactly understand every single thing let me know in the comments if you fall into this trap before becasue from my experience this is like the biggest trap.

Self-learning

Being obsessed with finding the best resources for things. Yes, we struggle a lot. But sometimes people don’t even start because they are so obsessed with just making a study plan to find the best resources out there in order to learn the thing.

For example, if say you’re going to learn Data science you might do some research Eg- I can just Google the best resources to learn data science and I’ll probably come across a variety of them ranging from E-books to YouTube courses.

It’s an overwhelming selection of resources so you might be spending a lot of time just trying to figure out like which one is the best course for this.

Which one suits me the best?

How can I like get this course and combine it with another course but then also like supplement it with this book?

This ends up taking so much time and you fall into the Paradox of choice where it’s like so many things that you don’t know which one is the best which again causes a lot of anxiety and then maybe you just don’t even bother doing it in the first place, not to mention that it’s a huge waste of money.

Self-studying is just the discipline and the habit of studying by ourselves. When you’re self-studying, it has to come from you and the best way of doing that is by designing habits into your life in order to keep pursuing studying. And for that, we need positive reinforcements from our surroundings with a positive attitude.

Be a resilient person because after that there will be a lot fewer fluctuations in your life. I think building up resilience it’s going to be something that’s going to help a lot in the long run so try to establish habits that will make you a more resilient person, it’s all about small steps that lead to big and long-lasting changes.

So the first question you should ask yourself is what is the best way for you to learn like very generally for me,

I learn the best through video courses

But for you it may be through text courses and for other people, it might be reading a book and then within that learning style you should just choose one of the top-ranked resources out there and it is highly recommended to just choose one resource. As a beginner, you don’t know enough to exactly tell how certain things will mesh together with each other, and also it’s not really necessary.

Usually, things like resources are well-ranked for a reason so you should just trust the fact that they are well-ranked by other people and realize that it doesn’t need to be perfect.

You’re just getting into this right, if you hit a point in that resource where you don’t feel like it’s telling you that much anymore you can just find another resource if you have fallen into this trap before Good job it means you don’t have commitment issues but in this situation, it’s really okay. You know to do something you feel like it doesn’t work, just try something else and don’t stress out so much about it.

The third self-study trap that is holding you back is having

Unrealistic Expectations

Say you’re working a full-time job or studying for another exam then you’re like I’m also going to study 30 hours a week for my paper and I am going to do this because I’m going to stop doing self-care stuff.

I’m going to not cook anymore, I’m going to go home from work and then work until 1 am every single day yeah you can probably like manage this for a week or maybe two or three weeks.

But life is gonna happen you can’t just cut out all your self-care stuff, cut out all your hobbies, cut out everything and then just like study until 3 am every day that just seems like a Recipe for Burnout and this is actually a really common thing to the point that there’s a term for it in Psychology called Planning Fallacy and that’s when people underestimate the amount of time for you to complete a task.

So what’s the solution for this?

So in a book, one of the techniques that they recommend is to you know if you think that you’re going to have a certain amount of time, for example, you’re gonna be like I’m gonna do this Exam thing and I’m gonna commit like 50 hours a week right. Well, the book recommends that you cut that in half and make that into your goal.

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

Then if you overachieve in this case then that’s amazing, all you have to do is just increase your time for the next week right!

But if you underachieve then you start falling behind so not only is this bad because that means you have to readjust things.

It also makes you feel worse when you underachieve and Over Compensating that leads to the next trap that people fall into when they self-study which is-

Overcompensating

This one goes hand in hand with unrealistic expectations.

Let me explain- Say you dedicate 20 hours per week but life happens- there was a family emergency that happened this week and you had to like dedicate 10 hours a day for the next three days and over the weekends you just didn’t have time to commit to 20 hours that week and you end up only doing 10 hours per week.

Now because you fell behind you feel bad about yourself and the week afterward you’re like I gotta make up for that 10 hours so next week I’m gonna do 30 hours per week and this is actually bad like you can’t just expect that life is not going to happen next week and that you’re magically gonna have like way more free time.

So yeah you’re driven by guilt when you’re unable to meet your goals and then you start overcompensating.

It is when you burn yourself out and oftentimes you would just give up and feel terrible about yourself. You can probably see why that goes hand in hand with unrealistic expectations right?

Because if you already have unrealistic expectations and do too many hours just combine that together with over compensating it’s just like a recipe for Focusing on the Wrong Metric disaster.

Wrong Metric Index

When something is hard you feel like you’re turning in so much effort and so much energy but it’s super frustrating because it feels like you’re not making any progress and oftentimes that’s when the sneaky feelings of self-doubt start creeping into thoughts. Thoughts popping up like maybe I’m just too stupid to do this stuff. If you’re having these thoughts that’s a good indication that you’re focusing on the Raw metric.

I want to tell you guys about input-based metrics versus output based metrics.

Input-based metrics is something that you have full control over. For example, if you’re trying to write an essay the input-based metric is the amount of time that you’re spending in writing that essay while the output-based metric is more like the completion of a paragraph.

And our natural inclination is usually to measure ourselves by this Output-based metric but this is a trap because you don’t have full control over your output of something while you do have full control over the input of something and in most cases, the input-based metric of time is extremely good because you have full control over the amount of time that you spend on it.

So, you should be instead focusing on just putting in the effort into your work, putting the time into it even if you feel like you’re not making progress, just trust the process and trust your brain cells because eventually, everything will fall into its place.

Alright, so I hope it was beneficial as this article required a lot of research and was specially designed to sort out the dilemma of students.

Also, let me know in the comments below if you fall into any of these traps before and if there are any other traps that you feel should be listed here.