Why Procrastination Is Bad For Students

Procrastination Is Bad For Students

What do you mean procrastination is bad for students, procrastination is bad for everyone, not just students, right?

If you think about why procrastination is bad for students for 3 seconds and decide it’s just like every other situation, I guess you aren’t exactly wrong.

But there is one problem with that way of thinking.

When someone procrastinates while doing a project, if they put all their energy into it a few days before the deadline, it will probably be presentable. On the other hand, while students have projects to do, their main “job” consists of studying.

And procrastinating on studying is far worse than on anything else (I suppose you could procrastinate on feeding yourself and die of starvation, so there is something worse).

While it is possible to study a few days before the exam and get decent results, what happens after the exam is over?

You will probably forget most of the material and won’t learn anything meaningful.

But why does that happen and what can we (mainly you) do about it?

There are plenty of things that can help you to beat procrastination. You just need to find the one that works best for you. But, before that let’s learn how our brains work and why procrastination is so bad for students.

Working memory

If you want to learn new material and remember it for a lifetime, the first thing you need to do is… well to learn the material. While you are studying the material, pieces of information you are studying go into your brain.

The first place the information passes through is your working memory.

But not everyone’s working memory is the same. Some people have a better working memory than others. The information that is going into your brain can be grouped. The neural connections in your brain are connecting pieces of information and making chunks of information.

Different people can hold different amounts of chunks of information in their working memory. Most people can hold 4 chunks of information, but there are exceptions. Some people can hold up to 5 chunks of information in their working memory. On the other hand, some people can hold only 3 chunks of information.

As you can probably guess the students with better working memory are often referred to as “good students”, while the ones with worse working memory get called “bad students”.

Which is actually not correct!

While it is true that students with better working memory learn the material faster, it doesn’t mean that they do it better. In fact, if a student with worse working memory puts in the work, they will be the ones who have the advantage.

But, I am getting ahead of myself (as per usual), first, let’s learn how we learn the material we are studying.

How we learn the material we are studying

When you are learning new material, the first place that the information you are learning is going to is in the working memory. From there the information goes into 2 other parts of your brain:

1. The hippocampus
2. and the neocortex

Both of them are extremely important when it comes to learning new material and are the reason why procrastination is so bad for students.

Let’s start with the hippocampus. Your hippocampus is tasked to help you with learning new material. Every time you study, it is your hippocampus that helps you to learn and remember the information you learn.

By now, you must be thinking about how the hippocampus is the one most responsible for all the things you learn. While that is true, there is just one minor (okay maybe not really minor) problem that the hippocampus has.

The information that is learned by the hippocampus doesn’t stay there for long.

That means that it is quickly forgotten (I really needed to explain that, didn’t I). If you were to rely just on the hippocampus, it would be like having a constant memory loss.

You studied really hard for a test and you hope that you do well? Good luck relying on the hippocampus to help you with that. Unless you study the same material every day to keep the information in the hippocampus, good luck on ever getting a good grade.

But fear not. There is another part of the brain that will help you to bypass the shortcomings of the hippocampus. I present you (cue the epic music) the neocortex.

The neocortex

You can say that the neocortex is the exact opposite of the hippocampus. In the hippocampus, the information is processed and learned really fast. To add to that the information is forgotten just as fast.

Contrary to that, in the neocortex, the information is learned really slowly, but to compensate for that it stays there for a long period of time (you don’t easily forget it). In this way, the hippocampus and the neocortex suit each other perfectly. One covers the weakness of the other, which makes for a pretty good learning system (good job Mother Nature).

But that is not the only way they complement each other!

When I said that the information in the neocortex is learned slowly, I meant really, really, really slowly. If the neocortex were to process the information by itself, it would never finish before new information comes in.

That is where the hippocampus comes in. While the working memory is relaying information to both the hippocampus and the neocortex, the hippocampus can’t do much, except process that information.

However, when you take a break from studying, your hippocampus doesn’t have all that much to do. So, rather than sit there and do nothing the hippocampus starts to relay the information it just learned to the neocortex.

With the help of the hippocampus, the neocortex has a much easier time processing and sorting the information you learned while you were studying.

But this process takes some time. The more time you have the better the results. That means that the less time you have the worse the results (groundbreaking, I know)

And, what is the main cause for that lack of time?

You guessed it right, it’s procrastination.

Working memory, hippocampus and neocortex

Hopefully, now, you have a better understanding of how your brain works and why procrastination is bad for students. To summarize the whole thing in the shortest time possible:

1. The working memory is the first place where the information you are learning goes to
2. The hippocampus is a place where your short-term memory is.
3. The neocortex is a place where your long-term memory is.
4. The information is sent to the hippocampus and the neocortex with the help of the working memory.
5. The hippocampus helps the neocortex to make long-term memories, but that whole process takes time.
6. The more a student procrastinates the less time is there for the hippocampus to help the neocortex to solidify the long-term memories.

When you look at this explanation, you might start to understand why some things happen the way they do. For example, how is it possible to do well on an exam, and then forget everything you learned a few weeks later?

That happens because you use the hippocampus to remember what you learned. Since the information was stuck in your short-term memory, it is not surprising you did well on an exam but forgot everything a couple of weeks later.

You never managed to store the information in your long-term memory.

Your hippocampus didn’t have enough time to help the neocortex. The hippocampus forgot what it learned and that is why it could no longer help the neocortex (it’s called short-term memory for a reason).

So how do we make sure that the hippocampus has enough time to help the neocortex?

Studying and procrastination

As you already know, the main thing that the hippocampus needs to help the neocortex is time (and that you learn the material, but I don’t have to mention that, do I). It’s important that you start to study early for your exams so that there is enough time for the neural connection to solidify in the neocortex.

That is why it is extremely (I can’t stress this enough) important that you start studying on time. If you procrastinate and start to study too late, the chunks of information you make will stay in your hippocampus and won’t get to the neocortex. That means that you will have to study the material again when you need it for the next time.

However, there are some ways in which you can speed up the process (lucky for us).

A friendly reminder: even though there is a way to speed up this process, if you procrastinate you are slowing down the whole process again, so you cancel out the benefits. If there is one thing you remember from this article, make sure to remember just how bad procrastination for students really is.

The Pomodoro technique

The first thing you can learn to help you is the Pomodoro technique. There are 5 steps to using the Pomodoro technique:

1. Pick a material you want to study
2. Set a timer to 25 minutes
3. Study until the timer hits zero
4. Take a 5-minute break
5. Repeat

After going through four cycles you can take a 15-minute break, and then start from the beginning again.

If it looks simple, that’s because it is. But, even though this technique might look simple, there are 2 important things that it does to help us speed up the learning process.

The first thing it does is that it breaks long study sessions into short 25-minute ones. And when you are struggling to start, it’s much easier to think that you have to study for only 25 minutes, rather than 2 hours.

Because of this, the Pomodoro technique is ideal when you are having trouble with procrastination (dealing with procrastination is the main job of the Pomodoro technique, after all).

But that is not the only thing it does.

The second benefit

For just $4.99 you can unlock the full power of the Pomodoro technique. But since I am so nice, I will share how to do it for free (no need to thank me). When I was talking about working memory, the hippocampus and the neocortex, I mentioned how the hippocampus helps the neocortex to make stronger neural connections, since working memory by itself isn’t enough.

I also mentioned that when the working memory relays information to the hippocampus, the hippocampus can’t help the neocortex. For that to happen the hippocampus needs to take a break.

Take a look at the 4th step of the Pomodoro technique.

That 5-minute break is enough for the hippocampus to relay the information to the neocortex. Even though it might seem like a small amount of time, it is enough to start the process. When you finish your study session, the hippocampus can continue to help from where it left off, which is much better than starting from zero.

So take note, and add breaks to your study sessions. You are not helping yourself by studying 5 hours straight without any breaks. If you want to learn more about the Pomodoro technique click here.

Active recall and spaced repetition

I feel like this is the thousandth time I am talking about active recall and spaced repetition (it just proves how useful these techniques are).

Active recall is a technique used to help you to learn the material faster. Most students study by reading and re-reading the material, which is really ineffective since it is a passive way of learning. That means that the neural connections in your brain are forming really slowly. If you want to speed that process up, you could do it by using active recall.

Rather than reading and re-reading the material, you can stop after every paragraph and recall what you just read using your own words, without looking at that paragraph. This way of learning is more active, which leads to faster forming of neural connections.

While it is true that you will be forming neural connections much faster, they will still mostly be stuck in your hippocampus (a.k.a short-term memory). To make sure that the neocortex gets the same neural connections, you need to rely on spaced repetition.

Spaced repetition makes sure that you make the same neural connections in your neocortex as those in your hippocampus. By scheduling precise times when you revise the material you learned (hopefully using active recall), your neocortex will have enough time to make strong neural connections.

And strong neural connections mean that the material is harder to forget. To learn more about active recall and spaced repetition and how to use them properly, click here.

Coming back to working memory

Now let’s go back to working memory and address one last thing I said at the beginning. I said that students with worse working memory can actually outperform the students with better working memory. To know how this happens, we need to talk about neural connections again.

When you are learning the material you are making neural connections. When you are just starting to learn, those neural connections are weak and your working memory needs a lot of space to fully understand the material.

That is why at the beginning the students whose working memory can hold 5 chunks of information do better. With more space to use, they learn the material faster.

As we now know, after working memory the information chunks go to the hippocampus and then with the help of the hippocampus to the neocortex.

Here is where the students with worse working memory have the advantage.

If the student with a good working memory doesn’t learn the material properly, they will send out 5 chunks of information in the neocortex.

So, what happens when you need to learn something extra to complement that material?

You now need more space in your working memory. But since you never learned the previous material properly, it now occupies all of your working memory, making it hard to learn something new. Now, if they want to understand the new material, they will have to learn the old material again, from the beginning.

Students with worse working memory

On the other hand, in the beginning, the students with worse working memory need to work extra hard to learn the information.

But, because of that, they make stronger neural connections.

So when they have to learn new material, they already have a stable foundation and can just add more pieces to it. They indeed have to work extra hard when they are just starting. But slowly, they can catch up to those with better working memory.

Naturally, this process takes time.

So, here is another reason why procrastination is bad for students. If you think that you are a slow learner, don’t panic. The only thing you have to do is make sure to stay consistent. After some time the result will come.

One way to stay consistent is to study every day. If you want to know more about how to study every day click here.

Final thoughts on procrastination for students

By now you probably realise how bad procrastination for students actually is. The longer you procrastinate the harder it is to form solid neural connections. And without strong neural connections, you will quickly forget what you learned.

Not to mention the other things that procrastination causes such as increased stress and lower self-esteem. Now that you (hopefully) understand all of that, you need to learn how to deal with it. If you want to learn more about that, you can click here.